Click the link to read the column on the Esquire website (Charles P. Pierce). Here’s an excerpt:
A lot of people are going to be unhappy as a dwindling Colorado River reshapes the U.S.
There is a very large portion of the 48 contiguous United States in which non-nomadic human beings were not meant to live. The reason for this is that there’s not enough water for them, and human beings need water to live. According to some estimates, 40 million human beings live there at the moment, and a lot of effort has been made over the centuries to bring water to them so that they can drink it, water 5 million acres of crops with it, and basically continue to live. Central to this has been the Colorado River. And now, due to extended drought, overuse, and the climate crisis, the Colorado River is dying, and if something isn’t done quickly, it’s going to have a lot of company…
The strange and violent political moment through which we are presently living does not fill me with optimism about the federal government’s ability to get seven states to agree on a breakfast menu, let alone agree to a cooperative strategy that might cause millions of suburban lawns to go brown. In fact, it could be argued that our current strange and violent political moment was born in the western deserts. For 40 years or so, that part of the nation has been central to all kinds of anti-government environmental activism, including actions that come very close to violating the sedition statutes. The “Wise Use Movement,” founded in Nevada in 1988, became an umbrella organization for anti-regulatory activities, many of them financed by corporate money derived from the extraction industries. A great deal of the twisted “freedom” rhetoric we heard from the Capitol steps on January 6, 2021, was beta-tested in what is now the increasingly thirsty West…
One of the most poignant parts of this crisis is that the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea. It peters out in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico. According to the U.S. Geological Survey:
“The river comes to an end just south of the multicolored patchwork of farmlands in the northwestern corner of the image and then fans out at the base of the Sierra de Juarez Mountains. Only about 10 percent of all the water that flows into the Colorado River makes it into Mexico and most of that is used by the Mexican people for farming.”
This is the way so many things die.
