Any time I read about water scarcity issues in the United States, I get kind of annoyed.
For starters, the United States is a land of relatively abundant water. Our freshwater resources per capita are above average globally, and while we’re no Canada or Brazil, we easily outpace the world’s other major states in terms of water availability.
We do have a problem, though: While on the whole the United States is quite wet, a significant region of the country is quite arid.
The good news is that a sizable majority of the population lives in the well-watered Eastern United States. Indeed, if you look at a map of the United States at night, the divide is striking. You can trace I-35 from Fort Worth up through Oklahoma City and Wichita, then northeast to Kansas City, Des Moines, and Minneapolis. Way more people live east of that line than west of it, and this historical settlement pattern basically comes down to water availability.
But the Western United States is quite beautiful, and the advent of air conditioning means that places like Las Vegas and Phoenix are now livable, which has created more and more issues around water scarcity in the dry part of the country. A lot of the water used in this dry region comes from the Colorado River and is managed carefully as a critical natural resource. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough water in the Colorado River to meet demand, and this drives most of the conflicts around water use.
Last week the Trump administration sharply cut the water available to Arizona, California, and Nevada. This is, as far as I can tell, the right thing to do. But it’s going to make those conflicts even more intense.
Part of my annoyance with this discourse is that the relatively small minority of the population that lives in the relevant part of the country has managed to inflict its various water-related neuroses on America as a whole. You often get the sense from policy debates that the United States in general suffers from critical water shortages and that we all need to spend a lot of time worrying about this.
