Word: watered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...democracy or Communism. As a homogeneous island people who were long cut off from other nations, the Japanese have an almost tribal sense of their own identity. "Japan has never had a foreign policy," observes John David Morley, an expert on Japan and author of Pictures from the Water Trade. "It has had wars, it has colonized parts of Asia, but apart from that its experience in dealing with other nations is still very primitive." Nor have many older Japanese been free of an attitude -- some claim an almost racist conviction -- that Japan's uniqueness makes it impossible for others...
When God created the American West, to paraphrase Mark Twain, he provided plenty of whiskey to drink and just enough water to fight over. In Twain's day, the Forty-Niners feuded with fists and pistols over who could divert which Sierra streams to separate gold from gravel. In the teens and Roaring Twenties, thirsty young Los Angeles brashly laid claim to a snow-fed mountain river, piped it 230 miles south to the city and dispatched armed guards to protect the aqueduct from outraged locals wielding dynamite...
...things seem more placid today, that is only because the hired guns are lawyers and lobbyists camouflaged in pinstripes. High-stakes hydrobattles are brewing throughout the West as it runs out of new water sources. This arid region -- stretching from the 100th meridian to the Pacific -- now finds itself unable to accommodate both its rapid urban growth and a powerful agribusiness that guzzles 85% of all water at heavily subsidized prices that offer little incentive for conservation...
...these conflicts, but it did not cause them, nor will its end resolve them. In the Midwest and Southeast, farmers watching their crops wither this summer are simply victims of lack of rain, a circumstance that should improve next year if not next month. But in the West the water shortage is not just a freak of nature. Los Angeles receives 9 in. of rainfall a year and Phoenix only 8, vs. 40 in. of precipitation for Chicago. Almost all the U.S. flatlands west of the 100th meridian, which runs from Texas to North Dakota, consistently receive too little precipitation...
...region's thirst will only grow: California's population is expected to climb from 27 million to 36 million over the next two decades. That will require an increase in water use of 1.3 million acre-feet a year.* To meet this daunting future demand, the California department of waterworks has proposed $700 million worth of new dams, aqueducts and other works. That plan, however, is widely dismissed as unaffordable and unnecessary: one study calculates that it could deliver water only at a cost of over $500 an acre- foot, twice the present price for Southern California's coastal cities...