Flood irrigation in the Sonoran Desert—seen on a bike ride through the region in late-March, 2011. Photo: Alex Wilson
To understand how federal policies that support the woefully unsustainable cotton farming in the Arizona desert, take a look at this ProPublica article, Holy Crop: How Federal Dollars are Financing the Water Crisis in the West, by Abrahm Lustgarten and Naveena Sadasivam. Four years ago, when I took a sabbatical from BuildingGreen to focus on launching the Resilient Design Institute, I started that sabbatical with a six-week bicycle trip through the Southwest—from San Diego to Houston. (I posted blogs from that trip on my personal website.)
One goal of the bike trip was to spend time reflecting on our various vulnerabilities; I figured that traversing the Southwest would be a good way to wrap my mind around water as a critical resource. I rode past hundreds of miles of flood-irrigated cotton fields in the Sonoran Desert of California and Arizona. Seeing first-hand the profligate water use (the annual water use on cotton in this part of the country equals a column of water up to four feet deep in a climate that receives—in a good year—just eight inches of rain) was mind-boggling.
This ProPublica article explains the myriad federal incentives that perpetuate this unsustainable practice. It’s a long article, but well worth the read. Water is a key aspect of resilience. As the article notes, lingering drought not only threatens our unsustainable agricultural practices (not a bad thing), but it also threatens to dramatically increase the cost of electricity or even cause blackouts in the months or years ahead.
I’m not sure about the best way to share your experience & this story with others… I have been using the “we are **all** users of the water” as well as the “buy local, instead” in re: the California drought. But I feel like attacking the money’s flow is maybe most effective, but I don’t know how. OPEN TO SUGGESTIONS! (now I’m off to the propublica site, and thence to the PRI “Marketplace” editorial page, or the like…
Excellent article, Alex. I spent some time in AZ as Planning Director for Coshise County in the far SE Corner of the state…in addition to the Federal subsidies that foster unsustainable water use, the state of AZ exempts Agriculture from zoning restrictions, (mining, too) so that locating an Ag enterprise in an unsustainable area is not regulated. This results in locations that endanger fragile or threatened species, draw down water tables, and perhaps most importantly, allows the owners to use water at will, no matter what the effect on others. Many “oldtimers” talked about the drying up of their long term productive wells when a large commercial growing operation was initiated next to their land. The San Pedro river, the last free flowing river in the Southwest, supports 50% of the avian flyway species that migrate from Mexico to the US. Although the development of housing in the county was highly restricted (and in fact, Cochise County has some of the most advanced water development regulations for housin in the state), Agriculture was off limits. This exemption was granted in the 1880s, and has lived on to in the age of huge farm factories. Mining is a whole other issue, and is an industry that has long used and polluted water without regard for sustainablity or even common sense.