The Opinion Pages | OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The Southwestern Water Wars

How Drought Is Producing Tensions in Texas

By RICHARD PARKERMARCH 13, 2015

This story is included with an NYT Opinion subscription.
Learn more »

WIMBERLEY, Tex. — “WE don’t want you here,” warned the county commissioner, pointing an accusatory finger at the drilling company executives as 600 local residents rose to their feet. “We want you to leave Hays County.”

Normally, my small town is a placid place nestled in the Texas Hill Country, far from controversy, a peaceful hour’s drive west of Austin. Pop. 2,582, Wimberley was founded as a mill town on a creek. Today it’s part artist colony, part cowboy town known for its natural beauty and its cool, clear springs and rivers that wind through soaring cypress trees.

But these are not normal times. The suburbs of Austin close in every year. Recently, the suburb of Buda and developers enlisted a company from faraway Houston to drain part of the Trinity Aquifer, the source of the Hill Country’s water. An old-fashioned, Western-style water war has erupted.

Across Texas and the Southwest, the scene is repeated in the face of a triple threat: booming population, looming drought and the worsening effects of climate change.

And it is a story that has played out before. It was in the Southwest that complex human cultures in the United States first arose. Around A.D. 800, the people called the “Ancient Ones” — the Mimbres, Mogollon, Chaco and other Native American cultures — flourished in what was then a green, if not lush, region. They channeled water into fields and built cities on the mesas and into the cliffs, fashioning societies, rituals and art.

Then around 1200 they all disappeared. Or so the legend goes. In reality, these cultures were slowly and painfully extinguished. The rivers dried. The fields died. The cities were unsustainable as drought stretched from years to decades, becoming what scientists today call a megadrought. Parts of these cultures were absorbed by the Pueblo and Navajo people; parts were simply stamped out.

By the time the Spanish arrived in the 16th century, so had, finally, the rain. The American, German and Polish settlers who came to Texas in the 19th century found a rich landscape, flush with water. “I must say as to what I have seen of Texas,” wrote Davy Crockett, “it is the garden spot of the world.” And so it remained, punctuated by only two long droughts.

One, at the dawn of the 20th century, wreaked ecological havoc on the overgrazed Hill Country. The second stretched from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and is still known as the drought of record. When it released its grip, a new era of feverish dam and canal building ensued in Texas, just as it already had in much of the Southwest. A dearth of rainfall, after all, is a fact in the cycle of life here. Rains come when the equatorial current of El Niño appears, and they stay stubbornly away when its twin, La Niña, reverses the course. Those grand dams and canals seemed likely to suffice.

But again, these are not normal times. Arizonans are in their 10th year of drought, despite an uptick in rainfall during last year’s monsoon season because of a single storm on a single day. And while it has been a cool, damp winter here, the clear waters of the Blanco River still look low. Officially, more than half of Texas’ 269,000 square miles are plagued by drought. Conservatively, this would make for the fifth consecutive year of drought in Texas. Meanwhile, today, the average American uses 100 gallons of water a day.

So the race to engineer a new solution is underway, and Wimberley finds itself squarely in the path. The drilling here would rely on a few landowners, whose land is beyond any water conservation district. Exploiting this gap in the patchwork of Texas water laws, the Houston company would pump five million gallons a day out of the Trinity Aquifer to the Austin suburbs of Buda and Kyle.

Other cities are following suit. San Antonio has begun a controversial and costly initiative to pump water from beneath exurban Burleson County, 42 miles away. Over the objections of rural Texans and the concern of city dwellers facing a nearly 20 percent water-bill hike, this solution will cost $3.4 billion. It is being managed by San Antonio Water Systems, which everyone calls by its acronym, SAWS.

As a result of such plans, ranchers, farmers and rural people face the prospect of running dry. Politically and financially weaker, small towns are no match for big cities and corporations. Yet aquifers have many who rely on them; the Trinity stretches from San Antonio to Dallas. Rare species of darters and salamanders live above it, and blind catfish inside its caverns.

Then there is the Southwest’s never-ending population boom. Texas is home to four of the 10 fastest-growing cities in the United States. Expanding cities like Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas are exhausting Lake Meade — and eyeballing aquifers and pipelines from other states. Californians are preparing that most expensive solution of all: desalinating water from the Pacific Ocean.

Maybe engineering will, indeed, save us. But can we overcome a megadrought? Scientists believe the megadroughts of the Medieval Era are likely to return to the South Plains and the Southwest soon — in this century, according to a recent NASA study. This time, though, the natural drought will be compounded by climate change — a hotter, drier atmosphere that evaporates rain before a drop strikes the ground.

This phenomenon is known as virga, and like drought itself it is cruel. Majestic thunderheads still arise on the distant horizon, but when they arrive they bring only dry lightning and thunder. No rain. Perhaps the great cultures of the American Southwest will survive when the virga comes this time, but most assuredly, the last ones did not.