Strange Sounds – December 26, 2021
The next disaster coming to the Great Plains is currently playing. Acute scarcity drives the search for water underground. But the West’s major aquifers are in trouble, too.
A century after the Dust Bowl, another environmental catastrophe is coming to the High Plains of western Kansas. The signs are subtle but unequivocal: dry riverbeds, fields of sand, the sound of irrigation motors straining to pump from dwindling aquifers.
“We face a fundamental choice,” Connie Owen, the director of the Kansas Water Office, said to a group of state legislators, lobbyists, groundwater managers, and experts who assembled here last summer to debate the future of the region’s groundwater, now in steep decline due to overuse by industrial agriculture. “What hangs in the balance is even more than the loss of livelihoods, communities, or an entire region’s economy—it is the character of who we want to be as a people.”
Similar conversations are under way across the American West, as an unprecedented water crisis comes into sharp focus. It is no secret that one of the worst droughts in 1,000 years is intensifying heat waves and megafires; that historic drops in surface-water levels coincide with historic spikes in demand as the region grows hotter, drier, and more populated; or that conflicts are escalating over who gets to use how much of what remains. Acute scarcity drives the search for water underground. But the West’s major aquifers are in trouble, too.
Aquifers are essential resources for human survival. Groundwater provides the only source of drinking water for one-third of the world’s people and supports nearly half of the planet’s irrigated agriculture. Yet far more groundwater is being pumped out than can be naturally replenished. Most dry-area aquifers are vanishing.