The Dust Bowl was a result of incorrect farming methods on a fragile enviroment, but the West has also suffered from the effects of poorly thought outand often very expensive irrigation schemes.
Cadillac Desert is now a rather old book, but the problems have continued. If you set out to take water from a major river, and then over allocate it to as many users as possible, often at little rational economic cost, then problems
emerge. Some years after reading Cadillac Desert I remember flying over the desert to San Diego from DFW, and seeing huge circles. They were alfafa 'fields', round because the mechanical irrigators rotated around a central point, using river water or possible even fossil aquifer water to grow animal feed, and effectively subsided by the US taxpayer, often heavily. Thats nothing
new, with many projects and rights going back to the thirties and forties. The damning of rivers often had a devastating effect on wildlife.
Its not all
bad, but its not
good either. Deserts and arid areas exist for a reason, and climate change means thats only going to become more likely - so the problem will become worse. The fires in California are now a sadly common event, and droughts are pushing that trend. And its not just California.
And whilst conservation at last is becoming an important tool, humans still like to build themselves out of trouble. Which tends not to work, as even the ancient Mesopotamians learn the hard way, when salinity became a recurring problem with their irrigation projects.
I was
shocked to find out that one almond uses perhaps a gallon of water to actually grow it, and 5 to produce a walnut. You can eat a nut or drink water, but Californians might not be in a position to do both at some point.
