The Big Thirst, page 24
It’s hard to overstate how dramatic and how sudden the falloff has been. The first year he got zero water, 2006–2007, wasn’t just the first time of no water for him, it was the first time his water supplier, Murray Irrigation, had provided no water in seventy years of operation.8
Humans have short memories in all kinds of ways, but the withering of the Murray River has made what is really a water-based economy look not just wacky or foolish but positively profligate. When it isn’t raining, when the Murray isn’t flowing, the whole lifestyle seems to defy common sense.
“When I go to Adelaide for meetings,” says Arthur, “I hear tales of the evil rice and cotton growers. What we do seems like a crazy thing to those people.”
Partly that’s because Adelaide is in direct competition with the farmers for water, and water scarcity makes it quite easy to see others’ intemperance. But it’s also because there is a huge distance between urban Australia and rural Australia. Just one out of 125 Australians is a farmer, and even well-educated Australians often can’t get their minds around the basics.9
An editorial in the Age, Melbourne’s major broadsheet daily newspaper, said rice and cotton farming in the Murray River’s basin “should never have been encouraged,” and that such water-intensive crops “promise no more than a slow and lingering death” for farmers and farm communities. In support of its argument, the Age said that the rice industry used the astonishing, unsustainable quantity of 1.7 billion liters of water a year.10
“The question,” says Arthur, “was, do we write them and tell them they made a mistake? I mean, they were off by a factor of a thousand.”
Laurie Arthur himself—just one rice farmer—uses far more than 1.7 billion liters of water a year. “We [rice farmers] use 1.7 trillion liters of water. Should I write and tell them how stupid they are? Nah.
“And the Australian”—Australia’s major national daily—“did the same thing,” says Arthur. “They said it takes 22,000 liters of water to grow one kilogram of rice. Well, I use 1,100 liters of water to grow one kilogram of rice. They’re only off by a factor of twenty. But who’s counting?”
In fact, though, the wildly erroneous numbers don’t really matter. Water scarcity causes some people to tell other people how to behave, and the numbers were really decorative, not substantive. They simply illustrate the sense among urban Australians that those Murray Valley farmers— while growing enough food to feed the whole country—simply don’t have any idea how to use water.
“Thirty years ago, we were greening the land,” says Arthur. “Now some people think if the water crisis doesn’t kill rice growing, it has failed.”
Water, of course, is a natural resource, a basic material, a commodity like petroleum or copper, lumber or wheat. But even with something as vital and contentious as oil, we rarely experience oil envy. The reason is price. We let price sort out scarcity—in some roughly satisfactory way, the oil goes to the uses that make economic sense. When the price goes up, people drive less and heat their homes less, the airlines park their less efficient jets, building owners switch to LED lighting. Water envy, though, is aggravated by the fact that water has no real price attached to it that has any market meaning. During periods of water scarcity, we don’t have a good way of sorting out the best uses of water in economic terms, because water isn’t priced according to supply and demand, even in local areas. And we’d all agree that some uses of water that have no immediate economic value are indispensable anyway.
Water envy isn’t a problem when there’s more than enough clean, cheap water. But when there suddenly isn’t enough water to support the lifestyle that has been created, water envy is more than just a matter of resentment or social friction. It stands in the way of making good choices during a pressing crisis, and it can prevent a state or a country from remaking its water rules, its water infrastructure, its water economy, in a way that fairly adjusts to a future of less water, or more expensive water, or both.
In that sense, Australia’s problems are a gift to the rest of the developed world. They are a warning how quickly and perilously water availability can change; they serve notice that the rules we have for giving out abundant water won’t serve us well when there is no water to give out.
The city of Adelaide, 1.2 million people at the western edge of the Murray basin, requires 200 gigaliters a year of water; metropolitan Melbourne, 4 million people at the southern edge of the Murray basin, requires 400 gigaliters a year. The 39,680 farmers of the Murray basin use at least 7,000 gigaliters each year—the 39,680 irrigators use ten times the water that 5.2 million city dwellers require.11
No wonder there’s a water shortage.
THE RIVER MURRAY has been flowing across southeast Australia for 40 million years, and it has created landscapes startling for both their beauty and their variety. At the Murray’s mouth, where the river meets the ocean at the town of Goolwa, the coast is estuarine, with barrier islands, the smell of the sea, and white sand dunes reminiscent of the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
You can stand on the beach, looking south directly across the mouth of the Murray. The river comes in from the right, the sand dunes part, and the Mighty Murray meets the Indian Ocean. In the opening are huge windswept breakers. Looking south through the gap in the dunes made by the river, there is no land between you and the coast of Antarctica—just 2,500 miles of cold, unruly ocean. You can hear the waves, and it seems like a perfect place for Australia’s greatest river to meet the ocean, wild and beautiful.
In fact, though, the Murray’s water at Goolwa is absolutely still—a flat pond that only Australia’s classic black swans seem to find inviting. The Murray River has been so low because of the Big Dry that it hasn’t actually flowed into the Indian Ocean for four years. There hasn’t been enough water to make a current.
As the river makes that final turn toward the sea, there is a dam across its width, almost half a mile. The dam is low and utilitarian, with a lock in the middle to allow boat traffic. You can walk out across the top of the dam, and here you discover something remarkable that you can’t see from shore. Looking down on the Murray River, you can see that the water on the ocean side of the dam is higher than the water on the river side. If the dam were to suddenly disappear, or even if the navigation lock were to be opened, the Indian Ocean would pour upstream, overwhelming the Murray. The mouth of the Murray isn’t a river mouth these days—it’s an ocean inlet, with the fresh-water river itself protected from the sea by a wall. It is as if the Mississippi—or the Thames or the Yangtze—had run out of water.
You can follow the Murray by car from where it meets the ocean toward Laurie Arthur’s farm—five hundred miles upstream—and about three hours’ drive from the mouth, the Murray’s personality changes dramatically. The river drifts in and out of view on the west side of the road headed north. Then, all of a sudden, the land to the west drops away, and the Murray reappears at the base of curving cliffs that run for miles and soar three hundred feet tall. The cliffs of the Murray River sit on the eastern bank—they face west. In the setting sun, the limestone walls glow terra cotta, salmon, and ivory, as if lit from within. Before it was tamed with dams and reservoirs and irrigation canals, the Murray had enough spirit to carve a stunning half-canyon that looks like something from the red-rock region of Utah. Nothing here betrays to the casual traveler a river in desperation, as is so clear in Goolwa. This stretch of river looks so different than the Murray you find at the ocean that it’s hard to believe it’s the same river.
The Murray River was once both free and wild. Australians tamed it to protect themselves against its occasional dramatic floods, and to harness its water to feed the country. For most of the last eighty years, this domestication has worked brilliantly—the vast productivity of the Murray Valley comes directly from being able to use the Murray itself as one vast, meandering irrigation pond. But as happens in other arenas, water abundance has camouflaged a serious problem. The half-century from the end of World War II to 2000 was uncharacteristically wet for the Murray River. During that time, farmers and cities grew to regard the abundance as typical.
“Every drop of water in the river is owned by someone,” says Robyn McLeod, commissioner for water security for the state of South Australia. “It isn’t a free-flowing river at all, and the environment usually gets what’s left last.” Her job is to be a watchdog of water security for the state—to look at the big-picture policy issues and to lobby state government to make the best long-term decisions so South Australians have the water they need and the Murray River does too.
“Until a few years ago, Adelaide and South Australia thought we had the most secure water supply in all of Australia,” says McLeod. “We didn’t have dams, we had the great, mighty river. And it had been a great, mighty river. Until the last few years.”
It might seem that nothing could more starkly illustrate the state of the river Murray than Laurie Arthur, and hundreds of fellow farmers, receiving literally no water to grow food in two out of the last three years.
But it’s worth stepping back to understand the Murray River’s water intake as a whole, to appreciate how quickly and dramatically change has swept down on the Australians—because their sense of water security in 2000 was no less than our own.
In the water year 2008–2009, the Murray River received only 1,860 gigaliters of water inflow total. The farmers alone typically take 7,000 giga-liters. The river itself needs 600 gigaliters just for what is called conveyance water—the water necessary to keep the water itself moving through the locks and dams.
The whole purpose of the Murray River’s reservoirs is to act as a cushion—a water savings account—for precisely those years when the rain doesn’t fall. But at the end of that same 2009 water year when the river only got 1,860 gigaliters, the reservoirs were in their ninth year of below-average rainfall. The main water storages held just 980 gigaliters total. The Big Dry had all but evaporated the Murray River’s emergency water savings.12
Indeed, if you take from that 1,860 gigaliters the bare minimum for the river—600 gigaliters—and take another 300 gigaliters for the critical water needs of Adelaide, you’re left with just 900 gigaliters, for the whole river, and all its dependents, for the whole year.
So it’s not just that, as Robyn McLeod says, “every drop of water in the river is owned by someone.” Accounting for Adelaide, for the smaller cities along the river’s length, for the irrigators, for water evaporating and seeping into the riverbed itself and being lost from irrigation canals, it’s much worse than that. There aren’t enough drops for every person with a claim on the river. Every drop is owned, and some drops are owned by two different people. “Welcome to my problem,” says McLeod. “It is an absolute catastrophe.”
Or, as Laurie Arthur puts it, with characteristic reserve, “The river is overallocated.”
It is hardly a problem peculiar to Australia. Indeed, it’s fairly common—it’s just that most of the time there’s enough water to camouflage the shortage. The Colorado River, which supplies both the fertile farm fields of California’s Imperial Valley and the gaming tables of the Las Vegas Strip, is overallocated. The Chattahoochee River, which supplies both the city of Atlanta and the oysters of Apalachicola Bay 435 miles downstream, is overallocated. The Tigris and the Euphrates, shared by Turkey and Iraq, are so overallocated that some scientists predict that the Fertile Crescent, the valley framed by those two rivers where farming was born ten thousand years ago, will dry up.13
The question the Big Dry has revealed for the Murray is starkly different from the water scarcity question that faced Toowoomba. Toowoomba was simply arguing about how to restore its water supply. The question from the Snowy Mountains, where the Murray River begins, past both Laurie Arthur’s farm and the city of Adelaide, to the Indian Ocean, is what happens if the last hundred years have been unusually wet for the Murray, and the weather pattern in place the last nine years is really the normal pattern?
“Drought” implies a devastating water-related event, like “flood” or “blizzard,” but also one that comes to an end. Robyn McLeod is one of the people whose job is to take a long-term view of how best to think about the Murray River. “I don’t use the word ‘drought,’” she says.
IN SEPTEMBER 1996, Mundaring Weir, Perth’s oldest reservoir, drew thousands of visitors to the quiet eucalyptus forest around the lake the dam creates, to watch an unusual spectacle. Visitors could stand on a walkway across the top of the 1,000-foot-wide dam as 16 million gallons of water a minute cascaded across the top, just below their feet, and waterfalled down the face of the 130-foot-high dam. The dam hadn’t overflowed in more than a decade.14
Perth sits all the way across the continent from the Murray River, and for Australia, Perth has served the role that Australia is serving for the rest of us. Climate change and water scarcity hit Perth hard, and came to the city five years before the problems became clear back east.
It was hard to be worried about Perth’s water supply as the water was pouring over Mundaring dam, but the rains and the runoff of 1996 didn’t distract one man. Jim Gill was looking at the bigger picture, and losing sleep. Gill had taken over the water system of the state of Western Australia just the year before, at age forty-nine, chosen for all kinds of good reasons, with one startling exception. “I knew nothing about water,” he says.
The Water Corporation, as Western Australia’s water utility is called, had plenty of people who knew water. Gill was an engineer, manager, and government technocrat who designed bridges, then built roads in Western Australia’s deadly dry deserts (“It was very, very remote—you never saw a boss out there”), and at age forty-one had been handed the state’s tangled railroads to run.
On the phone, Gill conveys the impression of a tough, muscular, no-nonsense Aussie engineer—a guy who could wrangle outback construction workers and lay down a ribbon of macadam to a nickel mine, who could make sense of a railroad system that in 1988 still stubbornly maintained track widths different from the railroads it connected to.
In person, Gill looks like a character from a Woody Allen movie— short, with a swirl of peppery untamed hair, a big head, big hands, and small shoulders. He looks like a college math professor.
In fact, both impressions of Gill are true, and when he was given the Water Corporation to run, Perth didn’t realize how desperately it would rely on both his experience and his inexperience.
“I had no idea what was facing the community,” says Gill. “What I didn’t realize was, it wasn’t raining anymore.”
Gill used an utterly sincere naiveté to spot Perth’s impending water catastrophe. Then he used a quiet political and bureaucratic jujitsu to triumph in public water politics that ran every risk of becoming as inflamed as those of Toowoomba. And he used decades of experience building roads and running railroads to steer Australia’s first desalination plant to completion in just two years, on budget and on time.
Gill took over the water system of Western Australia as Perth was heading into its driest years in recorded history. As CEO of Water Corporation he was responsible for securing and delivering water from reservoirs to 2 million residents, concentrated in the city of Perth but spread across an area of astonishing breadth—a single state, and a single water utility, across a piece of land as big as Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California combined.
It was a single page in a report—a bar graph—that caused Gill to ask the question Robyn McLeod is asking about the Murray River: What’s normal?
Gill started at Water Corporation in March 1995. Two months later, the utility issued a fifty-year strategic plan that had been in the works for two years, a document that laid out the predicted water needs of Western Australia through 2045, and how Water Corporation would meet those needs. It was pretty routine stuff—Western Australia is booming because its incredible mineral resources are being mined to power the global economy, and Water Corporation expected to meet the needs of the new residents and industries the way it always had, with reservoirs, and by tapping some underground aquifers.
“I looked at it as it was published,” says Gill, “and I said, There’s something funny going on here.”
Among the items in the report was the single-page bar graph—exactly the kind you learn to draw in second grade—showing rainwater inflows to Perth’s dams every year going all the way back to 1907. Each year got a vertical, and the line’s height showed how much water Perth’s reservoirs received. There were some stunning years in both directions—six lines in ninety years soar above 800 gigaliters in a single year; four years don’t even show 100 gigaliters. The average going back to 1907 was about 330 gigaliters, and that’s what Perth relied on.
What was odd, from Jim Gill’s perspective, with the bar graph in front of him in 1995, was this: From 1974 to 1995, there was not one big water year. In fact, there wasn’t even one “normal” year—not one year out of the previous twenty-one in a row where the reservoirs got even 300 gigaliters, let alone the average of 330. What was even odder was that in fourteen of those twenty-one years, the reservoirs didn’t even receive 200 gigaliters.
The most recent twenty-one years of rain and reservoir water looked completely different from the previous twenty, and from the previous sixty years.
But Water Corporation’s strategic plan didn’t acknowledge the most recent twenty-one years of low water—it assumed a future of at least 330 gigaliters of rainwater runoff a year.
