Water out west: Them's fightin' words

The ghost of William Mulholland and water robbers everywhere must have gagged on their drinks.

In early March, when most of the U.S. anticipated the lush greenery of spring, a Nevada state judge quietly issued a stunning decision that promised profound ripple effects for water policy in the nation’s driest places.

Judge Robert Estes rejected the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s controversial campaign to build a 300-mile-long pipeline to move groundwater from beneath vast rangelands to help sustain runaway urban sprawl in glitzy Las Vegas.

Southern Nevada water officials decided not to appeal the verdict, dealing a final death blow to the $15.5-billion-dollar project, which would have pumped 58 billion gallons a year — the largest transfer of aquifers in U.S. history.

The verdict gave legitimacy to a grassroots coalition of rural farmers, ranchers and Native Americans who withstood the sweep of a powerful, corporately sword to keep their groundwater right where it has been since the last Ice Age.

Yet as close readers of American history know, that’s not how things normally get done out here in the nation’s wild-and-thirsty western reaches, where the term “water rights” are considered fighting words and government entities wield a big stick.

A century ago, to sate the thirst of another restless urban metropolis, engineer William Mullholland oversaw the building of a 338-mile concrete aqueduct that essentially drained the once-lush Owns Valley in Northern California.

As water grabs go, this one was epic. The scheme, which saw LA agents secretly pose as ranchers and farmers to buy land and secure water rights, immediately became a colorful chapter of California history and the subject of the classic 1974 film “Chinatown.”

A banner front-page headline in the Nov. 6, 1913 edition of the Los Angeles Times screamed “Glorious Mountain River Now Flows to Los Angeles’ Gates.”

Angelenos got their liquid lifeline they needed to irrigate runaway growth and eventually pave the way for their endless suburbs and ubiquitous car culture.

But what did the Owens Valley get? 

Politically-underrepresented ranchers and growers soon struggled to make a living as their oasis dried up and became the scene of dust storms, plummeting air quality and subsequent farm foreclosures. Tribes lost the lifeblood that imbued their spiritual and cultural practices at springs, lakes and seeps. 

LA’s strong-arm water tactics sparked decades of hatred and mistrust that persist to this day in the Eastern Sierra.

The lesson: when it comes to water politics Out West, this precious resource has flowed from weak to strong, poor to rich, countryside to city.

That’s why rural Nevada’s grassroots water victory is all the more remarkable.

For three decades, since the Nevada pipeline was first proposed in 1989, groups traditionally at loggerheads worked as one. 

Farmers and ranchers teamed up with urban environmentalists, rural county governments locked arms with tribal officials, church groups worked side by side with scientists, protecting water that, once taken, was never coming back.

They’d read up on their western history. Unlike in California, there would be no dust storms here in Nevada, no farm and ranch foreclosures, no desecration of tribal sites, not loss of plant and animal life.

“The words of our war song were simple: Remember Owens Valley,” said Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, the coalition that litigated to stop the Vegas project in state and federal court. 

For now, Las Vegas will have to look somewhere else for its water as the bathtub ring around Lake Mead grows taller – the salient sign of the drought that’s gripped the southwest since 2000. 

The Southern Nevada Water Authority will now be doubling down on conservation practices like encouraging turf removal, restricting watering schedules, and partnering with California on large-scale Colorado River infrastructure projects. 

Still, there are other water battles being waged Out West. In Colorado, there are more than a dozen proposals to take water out of the state’s eponymous river and its tributaries. 

In Utah, legislators have proposed yet another expensive water pipeline that will help drain Lake Powell and the Colorado River — all over fears that water shortages will stifle the rapid growth in emerging Washington and Kane counties. 

And in the Owens Valley, officials have launched eminent domain proceedings to retake property acquired by Los Angeles in the early 1900s, as California taxpayers shell out millions of dollars each year to mitigate a Mason-Dixon like civil war.

With climate change and unchecked growth, the future looks bleak: more people and less water. The sustainable solution, however, seems simple: continue conservation, study measures such as desalinization, and limit runaway growth. 

After all, swimming pools, shopping malls, golf courses and green lawns in the desert are not an oasis, but a water-guzzling mirage of the good life.

As impracticable as swaying palm trees on the Washington Mall.