In The Deserts Of The American West, It's Soon Coming Down To Cities Or Agriculture. By Gregory McNamee WATER FLOWS INDIFFERENTLY east or west, says the Chinese philosopher Mencius. It does not flow indifferently up or down. In the arid American West, Mencius' axiom has a corollary: Indifferent or not, water can be made to flow uphill toward money. Money brought pharaonic civil-engineering programs like the Central Arizona Project and the All-American Canal to the desert; money brought the water that has made boomtowns of Phoenix and Las Vegas, now among the fastest-growing metropolises in the United States. And that money, once broadly distributed among farms, ranches, mines, and towns, is now increasingly concentrated in the cities of the West, lending the decades-long struggle over water rights a new dimension: the metropolis versus the countryside. Nowhere is this division more acute than Southern California, a lush land reclaimed from the Mojave Desert by the liberal application of both money and water. That reclamation was the work of boosters like Joseph B. Lippincott, a developer who lobbied Theodore Roosevelt to create the National Reclamation Act, and Frederick Eaton, a failed politician who had previously been a failed farmer in Owens Valley, 200 miles north of Los Angeles. Eaton may not have been especially adept at business or politics, but he had a clear view of the future. Southern California, he argued, could not grow without a steady supply of water. That water was to be found in Owens Valley, he said, in quantities "adequate for any requirement Los Angeles may ever have." Water czar William Mulholland concurred, and in 1903 he sent Eaton north to Owens Valley to buy up vacant properties in order to acquire water rights and secure territory for a great gravity canal. Ten years later, Owens Valley water was spilling down the new Los Angeles Aqueduct to the city. Yet Owens Valley was not enough "for any requirement Los Angeles may ever have." In 1941 the aqueduct was extended to hauntingly beautiful Mono Lake, a destructive act that John Hart chronicles in his new book Storm Over Mono (University of California Press, 1996). Mono Lake's water fueled Los Angeles' growth for a while, but it, too, was not enough, and Los Angeles sued its neighbors for ever greater shares of the Colorado River. That water was not forthcoming, Arizona and New Mexico having successfully combined to keep 2.8 million acre feet of water out of the Southland's reach. In recent years the thirsty metropolis has turned its attention closer to home, buying up the farmlands of central California for water. The consequent decline of agriculture, which uses 80 percent of the available water throughout the arid West, will enable Southern California to grow by scarcely imaginable leaps as fields are put out of production. Within 10 years, state planners project, California's population will reach 45 million. If present trends of growth continue, by 2090 the number may be a staggering 300 million. Without agriculture the state has sufficient water to fuel such growth; California's is a mere problem of trading fresh lettuce and avocados for an endless strip mall stretching from Blythe to Seal Beach, from Eureka to El Centro. A similar pattern holds for the rest of the arid West: Futurists predict, for instance, that Arizona, now with about 4 million residents, can grow to a population of 25 million if agricultural water can be reallocated to municipal use. Cities like El Paso and Albuquerque, Sierra Vista and Elko are booming, and as what Wallace Stegner called the "oasis civilization" of the West becomes increasingly urbanized, the battle over water rights will increasingly favor the cities, where political power resides. There is no level playing field in that struggle. A new federal practice called "negotiated settlement," an attempt at establishing parity, requires that all contending interests come together to bargain with the government for water rights. In the case of the Truckee River of Nevada, whose water is now in bitter contest, those parties include the states of Nevada and California, the cities of Reno and Sparks, utilities, environmentalists, and dozens of federal agencies and private interests. And farmers, too, although the farmers of the Fallon irrigation district, now but one voice among many, are finding that their influence has diminished--and that their allocation of the Truckee's water has decreased. "Now I know how the Indians felt," one farmer told Nevada environmental journalist Brad Summerhill. "But the Indians' own government didn't do it to them." Will the desert be farmland, or will it be metropolis? In that question, which defines the current debate, there is no allowance for the desert as it is. Critics believe the time has come to see the desert not as a thing to be remade but as a fragile landscape that should exist on its own terms. "Because we're humans, it's logical to look at nature for food, for cures," writes Ann Zwinger in a recent Audubon article. "But we must also recognize there are less easily identifiable values that lie in another dimension, a worth that is more, much more, than what is obvious." The North American desert's intangible worth is obvious to those who live here, but even that recognition will likely not soon resolve the fierce water wars that rage within its fiercely arid confines.

		© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth