The basic idea is to take water from the Mississippi River, pump it a thousand miles west, and dump it into the overtaxed Colorado River, which provides water for millions of Arizona residents but has reached historically low levels as its reservoirs dry up. The hypothetical Mississippi River pipeline, which gained new life last year amid devastating drought conditions, is a case in point. These realities haven’t stopped the West’s would-be water barons from dreaming. Additionally, building large infrastructure projects in general has become more difficult, in part thanks to reforms like the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires that detailed environmental impact statements be produced and evaluated for large new infrastructure projects. For one, there’s no longer enough unclaimed water to make most pipeline projects cost-effective.
It’s easy to understand why politicians want to throw their weight behind similar present-day projects, Fort told Grist, but projects of this size just aren’t practical anymore. “States have been very successful in getting the federal government to pay for wasteful, unsustainable, large water projects,” said Denise Fort, a professor emerita at the University of New Mexico who has studied water infrastructure. Either way, most of these projects stand little chance of becoming reality - they’re ideas from a bygone era, one that has more in common with the world of Chinatown than the parched west of the present. Their detractors counter that, in an era of permanent aridification driven by climate change, the only sustainable solution is not to bring in more water, but to consume less of it. Proponents of these projects argue that they could stabilize western cities for decades to come, connecting populations with unclaimed water rights. Arizona lawmakers want to build a pipeline from the Mississippi River more than a thousand miles away, a Colorado rancher wants to pipe water 300 miles across the Rockies, and Utah wants to pump even more water out of the already-depleted Lake Powell. There are at least half a dozen major water pipeline projects under consideration throughout the region, ranging from ambitious to outlandish. If you don’t have enough of it, go find more.Īs politicians across the West confront the consequences of the climate-fueled Millennium Drought, many of them are heeding the words of Chinatown and trying to bring in outside water through massive capital projects. to the water.” Nearly a hundred years have elapsed since the events the film dramatizes, but much of the West still approaches water the same way.
The California water wars of the early twentieth century are summed up in a famous line from the 1974 film Chinatown: “Either you bring the water to L.A., or you bring L.A. This story is part of the Grist series Parched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
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