Review by Virginia McConnell Simmons
Water – April 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America’s Fresh Waters
by Robert Glennon
Published in 2002 (paper, 2004) by Island Press
ISBN I-55963-223-2
AUTHOR ROBERT GLENNON quotes Herbert Hoover as saying in 1926, “True conservation of water is not the prevention of its use. Every drop of water that runs to the sea without yielding its full commercial return is an economic waste.” In the nearly four score years since Hoover’s statement, America has found so many uses for surface water that far fewer drops run unimpeded to the sea, while groundwater has become an increasingly overused, dwindling commodity, as Glennon demonstrates. This volume will serve as a wake-up call for anyone who has incorrectly thought of groundwater as an infinite resource — if we think about it at all before wells began to run dry and sources of surface water suffer.
For openers, the author, a professor of water law and public policy at the University of Arizona, offers some statistics. He points out, for instance, that 25 percent of the nation’s water supply is groundwater, of which our domestic usage increased from 8 billion gallons a day in 1965 to 18.5 gallons in 1995. Two thirds is used for agriculture. He also warns that one fourth of the world’s people depends on groundwater for drinking water and that the present total population of 6 billion is projected to increase to 8 billion by 2025. Already, he notes, groundwater pumping has caused “rivers, springs, lakes, and wetlands to dry up, the ground beneath us to collapse, and fish, birds, wildlife, trees, and shrubs to die.” With diagrams explaining hydrology that even a lay reader can easily understand, the interconnectedness of water systems and the impact of groundwater usage are made clear.
In several chapters Glennon offers several case studies of groundwater usage and its disastrous impacts in various places in the United States. These effects range from sinkholes and dried-up lakes in Florida where there is abundant precipitation, and dead fish in Massachusetts’s Ipswich River, to the Santa Cruz’s dried-up riverbed and ecosystem in arid Arizona, the decline of Chinook salmon in California’s Cosumnes River, the decline of Atlantic salmon in Maine, the reason why tourists in San Antonio today visit a river walk along a stream consisting of effluent, and many other examples. The bottled water industry was pumping 415 million gallons in 1978 but 5.4 billion gallons a quarter century later, as Glennon notes with consternation. These enterprises pay nothing for the commodity, no tax, no costs for environmental degradation such as occurs where springs feed streams.
Readers in Colorado will regret Glennon’s omission of any case studies from our state, but the examples from elsewhere dramatically show how, throughout the country groundwater has become a commodity which is being exploited with profound environmental, economic, and social effects. We residents of Central Colorado could cite the ever-increasing number of wells that provide water for communities, rural homeowners, and agriculture.
The San Luis Valley’s underground water — chiefly, the Closed Basin’s Unconfined Aquifer and the huge underlying Confined Aquifer — has been in headlines over the years as a result of schemes to mine water for the purpose of piping it to the Front Range, much like T. Boone Picken’s plan to sell water from the shrinking Agallala Aquifer in the Texas Panhandle to San Antonio. We can be grateful that groundwater from the southern end of the San Luis Valley did not end up in a coal slurry pipeline to Texas, like the slurry piped from Hopiland to Laughlin, Nevada, which Glennon describes. Our state could provide many additional case histories, like the Front Range’s burgeoning population and the complex system of aquifers in the Denver Basin, agriculture and the shrinking Ogallala Aquifer underlying eastern Colorado, mines that have pumped groundwater and contaminated surface water, or the Lower Arkansas River conflict.
With a chapter discussing eight proposals for states and local governments, Water Follies most likely will lose readers who resist regulations and environmentalists in general. Glennon has made the case, though, that controls are necessary, especially in view of the absence of any in some states. Colorado does have regulations about senior and junior permits, augmentation, water quality, and so on, but they clearly have not been sufficient to prevent the drilling of more and deeper wells, the drying up of wells, the draw-down of aquifers and diminished surface water, or attempts to move water from basin to basin without protections for the area of origination.
To summarize his recommendations briefly, Glennon argues that states should set conservation standards, minimum stream flows, and groundwater pumping regulations. He advocates a tax on water pumped within a certain distance of a river, spring, or lake. There should be new pumper offsets. Mitigation for the environment is needed, and some water should be dedicated for the environment when water rights are transferred. He wants water bills to include a charge for the water itself along with the costs of services by states and local governments. Recognizing realistically the need for support from the opposition, Glennon does offer protection of senior water rights.
The usefulness of this book is increased with an appendix containing a selected list of organizations, with their addresses, to connect readers to programs involved in the protection of the environment from the adverse effects of groundwater pumping. There are a 50-page bibliography, a glossary, and an index.
Island Press, a publisher of books related to the environment, is to be commended for bringing to readers this thought-provoking, sometimes downright scary volume, which belongs in every concerned Central Coloradan’s library.
— Virginia McConnell Simmons