Abstract
There’s an old saying in the West: “Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting.” And another: “In the West, water flows uphill—toward money.” More than a century of water conflict, and growing cooperation—between new users and old, upstream and downstream users, and among municipal, agricultural, and environmental interests— has produced a complex legal environment for allocating water rights in the West. This wide array of interests has also created an equally complex system of dams and canals for collectively storing, pumping, and diverting water.
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Notes
- 1.
An acre-foot of water is the amount of water it takes to cover an acre of land to the depth of 12 inches, roughly 325,000 gallons.
- 2.
One of the world℉s largest aquifers, the Ogallala Aquifer underlies portions of eight states: Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming.
- 3.
This figure comes from the U.S. Geological Survey’s “Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 1995” (Solley, Pierce, and Perlman 1998). The Survey publishes this estimate every five years. The 1995 report was the last one in which the Survey calculated the consumptive use of water in agriculture. According to the 1995 estimate, nationwide consumption of water was approximately 100 billion gallons per day (BGD). Irrigation consumed 81.3 BGD and livestock consumed another 3.2 BGD, for a total of 84.5 percent of water consumed. In contrast, nationwide domestic consumption in 1995 was 6.7 BGD, commercial was 1.3 BGD, and industrial was 0.7 BGD, for a total of 8.7 BGD (ibid.). More-recent U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates conclude that agriculture consumes more than 80 percent of the nation’s water generally, and more than 90 percent in many Western states (USDA 2008a, 2008b).
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Culp, P., Glennon, R., Libecap, G. (2015). The Western Water Crisis: Long Time Brewing, Now on the Boil. In: Shopping for Water. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-674-5_2
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