Massive irrigation efforts account for a great deal of the arid West’s water usage—especially for crops like alfalfa. Photo © George Wuerthner
What do Albuquerque and Atlanta have in common? Las Vegas and San Antonio? Water woes. Dire water woes. And their increasing thirst, directly tied to each city’s population boom and sprawling size, will not be easily slaked. That’s because they, and their metropolitan cousins in the West and the South, have been the beneficiaries (for lack of a better word) of a massive migration since 1970, and as a consequence are quickly outstripping aquifer and groundwater resources. To make matters worse, our intensifying need for water comes at exactly the same time that endangered riparian species require vigilant protection and droughts are frequent. This collision of demography and ecology is exacerbated as urban sprawl rolls over wildlands and disconnects us from the sustaining natural world, a recipe for disaster.
Water, in short, is going to be the driving issue of this new century, a matter of tremendous significance to the national forest system. Not only is the integrity of its lands imperiled by the outward thrust of urban populations into valley and foothill, but the quantity and quality of water flowing off its 192 million acres are compromised. These public lands are home to an estimated 3400 municipal watersheds serving approximately 60 million Americans, making their preservation all the more vital and tricky.
Managing water in the West has always been troublesome, which is why Congress, when it passed the Organic Act of the U.S. Forest Service in 1897, made water a higher priority than timber production. The act’s opening remarks reflected this: “No public forest reservation shall be established, except to improve and protect the forest within the reservation.” Improvement and protection would preserve these lands’ capacity to secure “favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.”
And to what ends might this streamflow be put? All “waters on such reservations may be used for domestic, mining, milling or irrigation purposes, under the laws of the State wherein such forest reservations are situated, or under the laws of the United States and the rules and regulations established thereunder.” That Congress split sovereignty between the national and state governments testifies to water’s importance in the contemporary political calculus, a shared responsibility that ever since has sparked tension and turmoil.
Years earlier, John Wesley Powell of the U.S. Geological Survey had predicted that the politics of western water would be contentious. In his 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, he predicted that resource scarcity west of the 98th meridian would dominate social structures and developmental possibilities. To avoid some of these problems, he proposed “the entire arid region be organized into natural hydrographic districts,” rather than within the usual state, county and town boundaries. His proposal was ignored, and the West was carved up in what historian John Opie calls “the grid of survey and section.” Powell correctly predicted the difficulties that would arise when government tried to manage a fluid resource within rigid political lines.
Built into a politicized landscape that often bore little relation to realities on the ground, the Forest Service confronted myriad problems upon its creation in 1905. Charged with watershed protection, yet lacking rudimentary understanding of regional climate and weather patterns, the agency inaugurated scientific monitoring of temperature and rainfall, water quantity and quality. This information proved crucial to early research and developed into a hotly debated topic—the relationship between forests and streamflow. “There is perhaps no other problem facing the American people today which demands such care in scientific accuracy of its data and conclusions,” stressed the Office of Silvics’ Raphael Zon, than “the relation between forests and water.”
To test the notion that a wooded watershed might moderate downstream flooding, forester Carlos Bates launched a longitudinal study in Colorado’s Wagon Wheel Gap, comparing a clear–cut portion of the drainage with an uncut segment. By the late 1920s, researchers had detected a modest uptick in water yield off the denuded land and an eight–fold increase in erosion. This corroborated other findings that healthy forest cover and intact soil structures lessened flooding in response to even moderate storms (but not violent downpours). The hydrological sciences, in short, could help the Forest Service meet its obligation under the Organic Act to secure “favorable conditions of water flows.”
But only if budgets and politics allowed, and often they did not. The Great Depression was a case in point: the nation’s economic collapse meant severely constrained financial outlays that coincided with choking dust–bowl winds and rampaging floods. Enter the Civilian Conservation Corps. Its funding pumped up the Forest Service’s capacity to research and repair landscapes, restore cut–over terrain and rebuild riparian ecosystems from headwater to delta.
That restorative energy was deflected in the post–war rush to “get out the cut.” Accelerated timber harvests in the 1950s prompted the construction of roads slicing through national forests—compromising watershed integrity, endangering flora and fauna and diminishing water quality. Budgets and workloads were framed around harvesting regimes.
But a surge of environmental regulations, from the 1964 Wilderness Act to the 1976 National Forest Management Act, revived an interest in hydrology and forests. Suddenly, water and the people who studied it were hot; geologists, hydrologists and soil experts, among other scientists, seemed best equipped to shape land–management decisions in response to public outcry and judicial challenge.
The need for those with environmental expertise and sensitivity has escalated since then, and with good reason. No issue is more important to a swelling urban populace yearning to drink deep. No issue is more complex, warns fisheries biologist and former Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck. He has pressed us to “see the forest for the watershed,” arguing that only a heightened consciousness of the reciprocal flow between forest and faucet will allow urbanites to reengage with rural nature. With reinvigorated commitment to stewardship, Dombeck argues, human society will be strengthened. In such cautious optimism lies the genesis of a more organic and well–watered future.