Word: watered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...skirmishes and shortages are already evident across the West. In the San Francisco area, once lush gardens are withering under strict water limits. Lake Tahoe has retreated 5 ft. down its banks, leaving popular beaches high and dry, while parched Reno threatens to pump the lake still lower. In Arizona water scouts from the booming cities are roaming the landscape with checkbooks ready, buying farmland 90 miles distant just to get the groundwater rights. The vast Ogallala Aquifer, an underground lake that stretches from South Dakota to Texas, is being overdrawn by wells at a rate...
Westerners have not so much adapted to their environment as they have defied it and remade it. This has required the region's Senators and Governors to sink deep wells into the federal treasury and draw forth sprawling, multibillion-dollar water-moving and -storage schemes (notwithstanding the popular image of Westerners as self-reliant and suspicious of meddlesome Government). Thus in the midst of the current nationwide drought, the 74 golf courses around Palm Springs, Calif., have plenty of cheap federal water to keep their sprinklers hissing, while Arizona farmers can afford to grow water- intensive crops like alfalfa...
...wasteful effect of these subsidies is not widely understood. Many outsiders, as well as most locals surveyed by the Western Governors' Association, falsely believe the region would have sufficient water if only profligate cities like Newport Beach, Calif., and Scottsdale, Ariz., made do with fewer swimming pools and car washes. Rather than match supply to demand by steeply raising water rates, most political leaders merely exhort residents to take shorter showers and flush toilets less often. Los Angeles will soon spend $600,000 broadcasting such bromides...
Public-spirited campaigns have been far more effective in Arizona, where the forward-looking 1980 Groundwater Management Act restricts depletion of aquifers and effectively raises water costs statewide. Tucson, which had suffered an alarming 120-ft. drop in its water table, imposed a scaled billing system, charging more per gallon as water use increased. The city's per capita water consumption dropped from a high of 205 gal. a day in 1974 to 161 now. California could use similar conservation laws; in Palm Springs, where household water costs 46 cents for 100 cu. ft. (vs. $1.16 in Tucson), per capita...
...while residential conservation is desirable, it cannot accommodate the West's urban growth. To save enough water for their projected 33% population leap over the next two decades, Californians would have to cut per-person consumption by one-third, an unprecedented feat of discipline by U.S. standards...