The American West is enduring its driest stretch in more than 1,200 years. The reservoirs that made the modern West possible are emptying — and the rules written for a wetter century no longer fit the one we are in.
The white band of bare rock around the reservoir has a nickname: the bathtub ring. It marks where the water used to be. On the largest reservoirs in the American West, that ring is now tall enough to swallow a twenty-storey building.
Scientists who reconstruct the climate from tree rings have concluded that the past two decades are the driest the region has seen since the year 800. This is not a drought in the ordinary sense — a bad year, a dry spell. It is a megadrought, and it is changing the arithmetic of life in the West.
The great reservoirs of the West were filled in the twentieth century on an assumption: that the rivers feeding them would deliver, on average, the flows measured in the wet decades when the dams were designed. That assumption is now known to have been optimistic — and the gap between the paper river and the real one is widening every year.
As the reservoirs drop, they expose not just rock but consequences. Hydroelectric turbines lose their head of water. Intakes that supply cities inch closer to the surface. And the sheer margin of safety that abundance once provided — the buffer that let the West argue about water politely — has evaporated.
The first thing to go is the margin — the small reservoirs and wetlands that used to absorb a dry year. When they empty, there is nothing between a bad winter and a crisis. The land dries, and the dryness feeds on itself.
Agriculture uses the overwhelming majority of the West's water, so agriculture is where the cuts land hardest. Fields are fallowed, orchards torn out, and century-old water rights — once considered untouchable — are being bought, leased, and litigated as never before.
At the bottom of the system is the river that made everything else possible. Its flow has fallen roughly a third from the twentieth-century average, and the hotter it gets, the more of what does fall is lost to evaporation and thirsty soil before it ever reaches a tap.
The states that share the river have spent years locked in negotiations that grow tenser as the water falls. Every proposed cut is somebody's farm, somebody's city, somebody's legally guaranteed allocation — and the law, written in a wetter age, promises more water than the river now carries.
For the moment, the crisis is being managed by a series of temporary deals: pay farmers to fallow fields, hold a little more water behind the dams, trade cuts for cash. They buy time. None of them makes it rain.
“We built a civilisation on the wettest century in a thousand years, and then we assumed it was normal. It was not normal. It was a loan.— A water-district manager in the Southwest
There is a version of the future in which the West adapts — reuses its water, prices it honestly, tears out the thirstiest crops and the ornamental lawns, and learns to run a dry-country economy on a dry-country budget. The tools exist. What is scarce is agreement.
The megadrought may or may not end in this generation; the tree rings say these dry spells can run for decades. Either way, the century of easy abundance is over. The West's next great engineering project will not be a dam. It will be learning to live within its means.
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