By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT Executive Editor
Nearly a century ago, the people who built Hoover Dam on the Colorado River were “inspired by a vision of lonely lands made fruitful,” as the inscription at the base of the flagpole on the Nevada side puts it. They could not know they were living in what would prove to be the wettest century of the past millennium in the American West.
We sure know that now. The “megadrought” that began right at the turn of the 21st century is still going on, and this year is shaping up to be a bad one, in part due to climate change, Alejandra Borunda writes for Nat Geo.
Most of California was declared under drought emergency Monday, mainly because the snowpack that Californians depend on to help tide them through summer is at 15 percent of its average for this time of year (pictured above, Lake Oroville, at 42 percent capacity in late April). Most of the Colorado River Basin is in a state of “exceptional” drought. Lake Mead, the reservoir behind Hoover, has fallen more than 130 feet since 2000. It’s nearing the level at which water managers would have to declare an official shortage for the first time—and start limiting releases from the lake.
When I visited Hoover for a 2008 Nat Geo feature—the drought was already worrisome then—I met a man named Terry Fulp, who managed releases from Lake Mead for the federal Bureau of Reclamation. We talked about how the water had been too cheap for too long. “Our job was to entice people to move to the West, and we did a darn good job,” Fulp said. When we spoke, though, he was focused on a different job—negotiating the shortage rules that may soon kick in, depending on how the summer goes. They could cause Arizona, for example, to receive about 166 billion gallons less of Colorado River water next year.
Judging from tree rings, today’s megadrought is the second worst in 1,200 years, Borunda writes. It’s worse than the one that, in the 13th century, led Ancestral Pueblo people to abandon the famous cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde. There’s no mass flight out of the West so far: In most Colorado River Basin states, the population is growing faster than the national average, according to the latest census figures.
Accommodating all those folks in an era of climate change is going to take major adjustments, but we have tools today that weren’t available to the Ancestral Puebloans. People are already taking steps to adapt (see box below). We need the same kind of optimistic self-confidence as the builders of Hoover Dam, but a different vision: a vision of arid lands kept livable.
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