Pat Stuart

Rain may be saving California, but desertification has come to the great Southwest. That’s what they call an extreme drought. When temperatures in Phoenix exceed 110 for 25 straight days with no end in sight (as of this writing), when it takes some 30,000 to 40,000 gallons of water a week poured into concrete water holes to keep Arizona’s wild animals alive, then you know it’s extreme.  

The Southwest’s plight reminds me of the years I lived in the Sahel — a huge swath of West Africa just south of the Sahara. For decades now folks there have donned their robes against the heat, blaming “la secheress.” Sounds sexy, doesn’t it.

The reality wasn’t so pretty.  

Year by year, season by season, the desert visibly moved despite people digging ever deeper wells in an effort at sustaining life in villages hundreds of years old. Thick mud-walled houses turned to dust, and the Sahara continued to expand, seemingly inexorably, both north and south. In places like Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger and northern Nigeria, living things withered and died, leaving hard-baked ground. Up north, in Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Morocco actual dunes as high as five-story buildings march inch by inevitable inch over fields and villages.  

Many of the villages I saw are gone.  Land that USAID planted in tree plantations to stop desertification is now bare.  

Sad to think of that happening here when it’s not so much climate change driving the process but government policies and land use plans ... or lack thereof.

We hear a lot about cities like Phoenix with their continued unfettered and rapid growth and their rapacious need for more and more water. The result? Headlines tell us of struggles over who is entitled to how much water from the Colorado River and its feeders. Pictures of vastly depleted reservoirs grace our newspapers and other media, and the region begins to take on the Sahel’s characteristics. Not pretty.

What seems missing is any effort to slow population growth in the Southwest’s arid cities. As for the local land use plans? They seem to run from woefully blind to deliberately wasteful water use.

You think I’m exaggerating about the “wasteful?”

Take Arizona’s water, pumped out of its Butler Valley aquifer and exported to Saudi Arabia. What, you ask? I certainly did. The export takes the form of water-hungry alfalfa raised on 3,500 acres leased by the state to a Saudi corporation (Fondomonte Arizona). Since 2014, the Saudis have been pumping water out of an aquifer and onto alfalfa fields, taking some 12 lush cuttings a year, and shipping it back to the kingdom to feed its dairy herds.  

No one knows just how much water the Saudis are shipping out of Arizona, but it’s a lot, the aquifer being rapidly depleted. The state did ask for an accounting at one point, but the request was lost in the system.

When the aquifer dries up (because of scarce rainfall and minimal recharge), the Saudis will move on. They own giant farms scattered around the world for just this reason. As for Arizona, it has 20 such leases spread around the state.

It’s not a hidden problem. People do know. Many are outraged ... not by the water usage but by its export. Still, the chance of much being done to change current policies comes up against a core belief — that water belongs to the landowner who should be free to use it.

In the meantime, desertification has become more than just a word.

Like those in the Southwest, we live in a desert. Like parts of the southwest with its large underground aquafers and the Colorado River, we also have water. Unlike them, Wyoming’s constitution puts all of our water in the hands of state regulators. Unlike them, too, we have not experienced prolonged drought or massive human growth. If we do, then it will be a case of “Katie, bar the door.” 

Why? Because although water was discussed widely in the run-up to the current land use plan, we still know too little to make accurate forecasts or to craft the land use ordinances that would keep us from desertification should drought conditions strike here.

All of this should be at the core of our land use planning now and in the future.

That’s if we want to prevent our own desertification/secheresse. It’s not pretty.