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Will We Have to Pump the Great Lakes to California to Feed the Nation?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/opinion/california-great-lakes-food-supply.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ak4.Z2P8.K1ZnRHFhOUHo&smid=url-shareThe Central Valley of California supplies a quarter of the food on the nation’s dinner tables. But beneath this image of plenty and abundance, a crisis is brewing — an invisible one, under our feet — and it is not limited to California. Coast to coast, our food producing regions, especially those stretching from the southern Great Plains across the sunny, dry Southwest, rely heavily and sometimes exclusively on groundwater for irrigation. And it’s disappearing — fast.
What happens to the nation’s food production if the groundwater runs out altogether? Unless we act now, we could soon reach a point where water must be piped from the wetter parts of the country, such as the Great Lakes, to drier, sunnier regions where the bulk of the nation’s food is produced. No one wants unsightly pipelines snaking across the country, draining Lake Michigan to feed the citrus groves of the Central Valley. But that future is drawing closer by the day, and at some point, we may look back on this moment and wish we’d acted differently.
States are aware there is a problem — many are trying to sustainably manage their groundwater. But it’s not clear how successful these efforts have been. My research team has found that groundwater depletion is accelerating in the Central Valley, in spite of California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. In Arizona, groundwater is only managed in less than 20 percent of the state, leaving a free-for-all in the state’s unmanaged areas. The United States has no plan for the disruptions that will befall our food systems as critical water supplies dwindle, causing the price of some foods to skyrocket and bringing us closer to the time when we may have to consider pipelines to replenish or replace depleted groundwater.
But it’s not something we should be rushing toward. Americans, particularly those living in places like the Great Lakes region, have already shown that they have little stomach for infrastructure projects that would move their local water to remote locations, even if it is to produce the food they eat every day. It’s not just the political climate that makes tapping water resources in the East such an undesirable prospect. We’ve built systems of canals to move water around California and the Colorado River basin, but constructing a transcontinental pipeline or river diversion, at the scale required to sustain U.S. agriculture, would be staggeringly more complex, expensive and environmentally disruptive.
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