Last month in his state of the state address at the Arizona Capital, Arizona governor Doug Ducey proposed setting aside $1 billion to remove the salt from sea water and bring it to Arizona, a major legacy project as he enters his eighth and final year in office. He said he’d been working on this issue with water experts Republican House Speaker Rusty Bowers and Senate President Karen Fann. Smirk.
I posted about desalination last June where I wrote Most current desalination efforts involve either a reverse osmosis method or a thermal method which separates pure water from salt and other impurities. At this point in time the concentrated waste, the salt and chemicals used in the process, pose a disposal problem. Also, the total costs of desalination are extremely high, especially the energy component, compared to conservation and recycling programs. And there’s the environmental impact to sea life that can get sucked into the equipment, upsetting the ocean’s food chain. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers posted an article last year on the challenges facing the industry.
Among the many environmental experts Ducey could have consulted is Gary Nabhan, an Agricultural Ecologist, Ethnobotanist, Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, and author whose work has focused primarily on the interaction of biodiversity and cultural diversity of the arid binational Southwest. He also serves as the Kellogg Endowed Chair in Southwestern Borderlands Food and Water Security as a research social scientist at the University of Arizona.
He penned an open letter to the Governor last week. As Ducey wants to pull water from the Sea of Cortez, our closest body of water, Nabhan writes Ducey seems unaware that many Mexicans would see this “water grab” much like the “land grab” that occurred in 1848, when Mexico was forced by the United States to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ceding half of its lands to its greedy neighbor to the north. That land grab was followed by six attempts by insurgents from California, Arizona and France to build U.S. ports from some of the same harbors that Ducey now wants to pipe water from. Memories of assaults on Mexican sovereignty die hard in Sonora. Having any seawater pipeline cross the homelands of the Tohono O’odham or Cucupa might also be considered a violation of their sovereignty, since the ocean is sacred to them.
Worse yet, Nabhan goes on, the 2020 “Project Execution Plan” for transborder transfer of seawater prepared by engineers reads like a boondoggle pitch from the era prior to the Environmental Protection Act. It includes no environmental impact assessment. That nearly any pipeline route would have to cross one or perhaps two of Mexico’s prized biosphere reserves- — the Sierra el Pinacate and Colorado River delta protected areas — is never mentioned in the study.
He goes on to suggest that First, we can reduce the costly waste of water associated with furrow irrigation by retrofitting farms with low-cost, low-tech micro-irrigation strategies to trim water use by as much as 90%. If 10,000 of Arizona’s irrigation farmers received incentives to retrofit their operations to hyper-efficient irrigation technologies, that would be better investment than $1 billion for his pipeline.
Secondly, we can invest in drought-, salt- and heat-adapted rootstocks, seed stocks and low-chill fruit trees that can better tolerate both heat waves and periodic drought. To make these more accessible to farmers — especially hardy rootstock from crop wild relatives — Arizona should invest in a new initiative, a Southwest Adaptation Center for Desert Agriculture and Climate Resilience (SAC). Within a decade that investment would provide farmers on both sides of the border with far more climate-resilient crop options than what they utilize today.
And, on Monday, the New York Times reported that the drought in the southwest is the worst in twelve centuries. Twelve centuries. Even with 23 days of measurable monsoon rainfall in Arizona, the second most ever recorded, forecasts predict less rain until the next monsoon beginning in mid-June. Buckle up, folks, and conserve the best you can.
And now…
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“Cadillac Desert”