Word: snaked
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...counties, setting off a water war that could be repeated across the parched but popular Southwest. Let the Las Vegans have their way, other Nevadans warn, and you could upset a complex web of aquifers that run as far away as California's Death Valley and western Utah, where Snake Valley partly lies. That could do irreversible damage to plant, wildlife and human populations all sipping from the same limited supply. For every desert population center, there is a similarly limited supply of water and a similar potential for political warfare...
...harm comes to light. But in the desert there's not a lot of margin for error, and a chronic water imbalance can be environmentally devastating. Robert Hershler, a taxonomist at the Smithsonian Institution, has combed through the biota of hundreds of springs in the Great Basin region, including Snake Valley, and has discovered more than 100 new species of spring snails, some of which are confined to a single location. "If their spring dries up, these snails are gone for good," he observes. "They can never come back...
Even if Las Vegas had not come calling, Great Basin water holes would be in trouble. Across the region, drought, agricultural diversions and overgrazing have done measurable damage, and there are examples in Snake Valley. "We're worried about southern Nevada because we know what we're doing to ourselves," says rancher Dean Baker. "And that's just a drop in the bucket compared to what they're talking about...
...River, clear across the Continental Divide, and Los Angeles to consider exploiting a groundwater field in the Mojave Desert. These and other communities will thus be watching Las Vegas closely, as will environmentalists who question, among other things, how much water, if any, the city can take out of Snake Valley without doing harm...
...more accurately they can model potential effects, and the more confidence the public in that state and elsewhere will have in the decisions the government agencies make. "When the water is gone, the future is gone," observes rancher Dean Baker. That's true not only for ranching families in Snake Valley but for families in the Las Vegas Valley as well...