The Water Wars of Arizona

[Ptah]

Attracted by lax regulations, industrial agriculture has descended on a remote valley, depleting its aquifer — leaving many residents with no water at all.

Early one morning in July 2014, Lori Paup awoke in her new home in the Sulphur Springs Valley of Arizona and began unpacking boxes of clothes, hanging photographs and prepping the day’s home-schooling lessons for her two teenage children. Paup, who until a few days earlier had never been to Arizona, was exhilarated to have finally arrived at the house on East Hopi Drive — a blue two-bedroom trailer on two acres of land — but also exhausted. The move from Fallentimber, Pa., where the family lived for 15 years, required a cross-country trip in the semi-truck that Lori’s husband, Craig, drove for work, and now a long list of chores awaited. Outside, the day was already north of 80 degrees. Lori was just beginning to fill a glass of water when she noticed the stream from the faucet was cloudy and brown. “The water looked like the desert surrounding the house,” she said. “The same color.” Running her hand under the stream, she found what appeared to be small grains of sand.

A small woman with a tight smile and a bright orange streak in her hair, Lori was immediately unnerved by the sight. Like all homes in the valley, where there are no reservoirs or rivers, the Paups’ house drew its water from a private well drilled into the underlying aquifer. According to the real estate listing, the well reached a depth of more than 300 feet. Lori, who is 51 and a mother of five, reminded herself of this when, a few moments later, the sand appeared to clear and the water again looked normal. Busy with other projects, she scribbled a note to call the previous owners, figuring there was dirt clogged in the kitchen pipes. Soon enough, she forgot about it.

A few days later, Lori and her daughter Amy were doing laundry when the washing machine stopped filling with water. Then, a few hours later, the dishwasher conked out, too. Craig, who had serviced his own diesel truck for some 20 years, inspected both machines but couldn’t find anything wrong with either. It was the pipes feeding them that seemed to be the issue; they merely trickled, then sputtered out sand. Having lived in the rural mountains of Pennsylvania, Craig and Lori were both familiar with wells; they picked the house on East Hopi for its sweeping views eastward to the Chiricahua Mountains but also for the solitude that came with owning a remote piece of property, which was only possible so long as they had their own source of water. But as worrisome as the incidents seemed, they didn’t yet form any recognizable pattern. One evening sometime later, Lori drew a bath and left the room. When she returned a while later, she found the tub stood only half full, the water murky with silt. She watched, over the next few moments, as a thin layer of sand settled along the bottom.

Image
The Paup family — from left, Craig, Lori, Amy and David — outside their second home in the Sulphur Springs Valley of Arizona after the well at their first home went dry.CreditLucas Foglia for The New York Times
A local driller arrived for an inspection a short while later. Visible from most rooms in the house, the well consisted of a five-horsepower pump, an eight-inch-wide borehole and a screen that filtered dirt and rock from the aquifer’s water. Although the well was somewhat old, it appeared to be in good working order, the driller explained, capable of pumping 25 gallons a minute, enough to supply a home many times larger than the Paups’. The stoppages and intrusions of sand, he went on, in all likelihood signaled that the water level had begun dipping below the mouth of the pipe, causing the pump to act as a vacuum for sand. The problem wasn’t the well, in other words; it was the aquifer, which had retreated below where the well could reach it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/magazine/the-water-wars-of-arizona.html

[JayhawkSD]

1. This problem existed when I left Arizona twenty years ago, too.

It is not a simple problem of "evil corporations." For one thing, non-evil people eat the food that is produced by those farms. If corporations cannot make a profit growing it, then they will not do so, and then the non-evil people living in cities will find grocery stores empty when they go to buy food.

Cotton farming is big in the Tucson area, which is in Pima County. Has been for decades. I'm sure you've heard of Pima cotton. Your underwear is probably made from it, unless you wear cheap underwear. Most people like to wear nice soft cotton clothing, and Pima cotton grows only in Pima County AZ. Consumers, people who wear cotton clothing, buy every ounce of cotton that is grown in Arizona.

I had a close friend who owned a plant nursery. He had to deepen his well in Tucson in 1989 and again in 1994 as the water table dropped.

The Paups are painted here as innocent victims, but they came to the desert in 2014 and began using water that was in short supply. The water shortness was no secret. All that had to do was look at the landscape around them to know that water supply was terribly short. But they assumed that their house would have plenty of water. Why would they make such an assumption? Had they done even the most basic research, they would have known that people in Southern Arizona had been having to deepen their wells for more than a decade when they moved to the location.

[Ptah]

2. American Pima accounts for less than 5% of the U.S.A. cotton production.

American Pima accounts for less than 5% of the U.S.A. cotton production. It is grown chiefly in California, with small acreages in West Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossypium_barbadense#The_United_States_of_America_agricultural_policy

[Kali]

4. wrong.

https://www.cottonandcare.com/blogs/news/what-is-pima-cotton

Pima cotton originated in Peru, but earned its name from the Pima tribe of American Indians who pioneered the cultivation of this superior strain of cotton in the south-west United States. Today, Pima is grown in Peru, Australia, and the United States. Pima cotton will only grow in mild, warm, and dry climates, so US farming is isolated to California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Only about 3% of the cotton grown in the United States is Pima cotton, making it rare and far more expensive than standard cotton.

these are large corporate farms buying up land and growing high water use nuts for export to China/Asia. there was enough of water for small farms and pilgrims like the Paups (and while I do agree with your point about new arrivals and their attitudes about water in an arid environment, this is not the same situation at all)

[DesertRat]

3. Saudi alfalfa. California nuts. Developers. Sucking the state dry.

Why?

“What the smart money is doing is looking around and saying, ‘Where else can we go where there is no regulation?’  Arizona.”

[Fla Dem]

5. Read whole article. Very scary.

Commercial farming will suck the aquifers dry. The ground is already sinking in areas due to the all the water being pumped out of the aquifers. In 2014 Saudis bought 10,000 acres in Arizona for commercial farming after they drained the aquifers in the Middle East. There are virtually no regulations on water consumption in Arizona. They reap what they sow. In this case, lack of regulated water use will result in no water.

Arizona was particularly attractive to Middle Eastern farmers. A policy of unregulated pumping on the Arabian Peninsula had, in 40 years, drained aquifers that had taken 20,000 years to form, leaving thousands of acres fallow and forcing Saudi Arabia and others to outsource much of their agricultural production. In 2014, a Saudi Arabian-owned company, the Almarai Corporation, bought 10,000 acres in the town of Vicksburg, northwest of Sulphur Springs Valley, planting alfalfa to ship halfway around the world to feed Saudi cattle. Then, a United Arab Emirates farming corporation, Al Dahra, bought several thousand-acre farms along both sides of the Arizona-California border.

Given my age I probably won't be around in 20-30 years, but my heart aches for the generations after me,. We have destroyed their planet.

Should be cross posted in GD so it'll get more exposure. This is important.

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. Back in the early 1970s I learned some phrases that instantly made total sense for the future.

Population Bomb. book by Paul Ehrlich.

Carrying Capacity.

and Rule of 72, which usually is applied to grow of an investment but also is applicable to the growth of population.

Example: a population growth rate of 2% takes 36 years to double
vs 3% which only takes only takes 24 years.

Good news is current population rate is around 1.5%

Bad news is the upper 10% of people who control most of the money can buy and profit from the important non-renewable resources, like water, land, etc. and are evidently buying OUR country's resources.

They will figure out how to make us pay for the air, one of these days, just as they figured out how to profit from the airwaves of phones and tv, which no one could imagine back in the Golden Age of television.







There were a lot of warnings back then by Paul Ehrlich, he wrote The Population Bomb in 1968.

[Fla Dem]

7. I always thought those apocalyptic books and movies were just so much SyFy.

Now not so sure. I fear for the future.

[dixiegrrrrl]

8. There is an important difference between fiction and non-fiction.

sadly, the non-fiction is read by fewer people than the fiction, altho, good sci-fi writers like Kim Stanley Robinson base their stories on facts.
Robinson wrote The Day After Tomorrow, which was made into a movie in 2004. The movie played around with important details of fact, so the book was better.

I'm with you, I fear for the future also. I know there are lots of people who cling to the "science will save us" dogma
but all we have to do is look at how fast our country is headed towards oligarchy or whatever term or set of terms currently is applicable to our political situation. Money and greed will continue to dictate the outcomes.