This is a long read for a blog post, but I think it's worth
it...
A few years back I was commissioned by the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife
Conservation and the Playa Lakes Joint Venture to write a feature story about playa lakes. If you don't
know what a playa lake is (and most people don't), please allow my melodious
words to edify you...
Like everything else on the arid, windswept plains of western Oklahoma,
these shallow prairie basins ebb and flow on the random tide of the weather.
Ephemeral is how they are most often described, and indeed, playa lakes are the
spectral phantoms of the plains. They come and they go. One year they’ll be so
numerous that when seen from the air the prairie seems covered in shimmering
pools of quicksilver. The next year they will be utterly gone, ghostly brown
circles of parched clay the only evidence of their existence.
Biologists – a group chronically
prone to dry understatement - call them a “highly dynamic environment.” But
this, too, is part of what they are. Playas are contradictions, but if you
listen closely there is a cadence to the dichotomies of their cycle: They’re
lakes, but found only in the driest part of the state. Their locations are permanent,
but the water in them isn’t. They support a vast and staggeringly diverse
amount of life, but often seem dry and lifeless. Most are so shallow you can
walk across them, but they sit on top – and are largely responsible for - the
greatest concentration of underground water on the continent.
Playas are easy to define, but hard
to understand, which may be expected of something the vast majority of us have
never heard of, never seen and most importantly, never cared about.
But as we’ll see, perhaps we should.
Nature never created anything that didn’t have a purpose and place, and as we
learn to pay more attention to what the playas are telling us we’re slowly
beginning to realize these insignificant little mudholes are a crucial part of
our plains ecosystems and that all of us: landowners, hunters, birders and
anyone concerned with habitat loss, have something to gain by protecting them.
OK, big deal, right? So other than
being glorified toad puddles and giving wetland-challenged high plains
duck hunters like myself a place to hunt, what are these "lakes" good
for? Please, read on...
It is not hyperbole to state the
Ogallala Aquifer is the lifeblood of the plains. In a region generally devoid
of surface water and receiving less than 20 inches of precipitation a year, the
Ogallala is the primary water source for thousands of farms, ranches and
municipalities. Covering some 174,000 square miles in eight states from Texas
through Oklahoma to South Dakota, the Ogallala contains an estimated 3 billion
acre-feet of water.
The noted historian Walter Prescott
Webb didn’t have much to say about playas or the Ogallala in his seminal work
“The Great Plains” but he understood perfectly the importance of water. On the
plains you take water where you can find it, and with the aid of an invention
Webb considered just as profound as the six-shooter and barbed wire, early
settlers found it in abundance. What’s more, unlike surface water, they didn’t
have to worry about it being there from year to year.
The windmill introduced us to the
Ogallala Aquifer, and we’ve been mining that vast underground sea ever since.
It’s taken the ensuing 100 years or so to realize two very important things
about the Ogallala: First, we’re using it up a whole lot faster than it’s being
replenished, and second, there’s a direct link between the playas in the fields
and the water in our wells.
Of course, windmills didn’t hasten
the decline of the Ogallala. Technology did. It wasn’t until the widespread use
of gas and diesel-powered irrigation pumps after WWII that aquifer levels
really started to drop. It was during this same timeframe that playas were
being plowed under and filled in at a record pace. No one suspected the two
outwardly disparate water features had any link whatsoever, but recent research
has yielded a startling and sobering fact: you can’t have one without the
other.
...Just how big a role do playas
play? Research by the U.S. Geological Survey suggests that upwards of 90
percent of the annual recharge filtering down to the Ogallala is occurring on
two to five percent of the land. Guess which five percent that is? Playas.
Ironically, what spurs this abnormally high recharge rate is the dry part of
their wet/dry cycle combined with their unique clay bottoms.
Clay is what differentiates a playa
from a garden-variety water hole. As they dry up their clay linings crack deep
into the earth, forming a subterranean aqueduct pointed directly into the
aquifer. When the rains return and water rushes back into the basin, it doesn’t
just seep into the earth, it pours. On a typical playa you may have 10
acre-feet of water disappear down through the cracks before it ever starts to
fill up.
Even after the clay swells and seals
the cracks, water continues to percolate around the edges where the clay is
thin or absent. Playas are, in essence, the aquifer’s sponges, soaking up
precious water that would otherwise be lost and storing it deep underground for
our and our children’s future use.
The implications of these findings
are profound for anyone living over the Ogallala and especially for the
thousands of landowners and ag producers whose properties contain playas. Playas
can’t be viewed as simply nuisances to be plowed around or filled in. The vast
majority of playas are located on private land, and those landowners now find
themselves not only the environmental stewards of their own water source, but the
economic engine that drives the entire region. As the playas go so goes the
aquifer. As the aquifer goes so go the countless communities big and small that
depend on it.
And lo and behold, here in the May
19th edition of the New York Times, is an update on one of the great
underreported slow-motion environmental disasters of our time...
Forty-nine years ago, Ashley Yost’s
grandfather sank a well deep into a half-mile square of rich Kansas farmland.
He struck an artery of water so prodigious that he could pump 1,600 gallons to
the surface every minute. Last year, Mr. Yost was coaxing just 300 gallons from
the earth, and pumping up sand in order to do it. By harvest time, the grit had
robbed him of $20,000 worth of pumps and any hope of returning to the bumper
harvests of years past. “That’s prime land,” he said not long ago, gesturing
from his pickup at the stubby remains of last year’s crop. “I’ve raised 294
bushels of corn an acre there before, with water and the Lord’s help.” Now, he
said, “it’s over.”
The land, known as Section 35, sits
atop the High Plains Aquifer, a waterlogged jumble of sand, clay and gravel
that begins beneath Wyoming and South Dakota and stretches clear to the Texas
Panhandle. The aquifer’s northern reaches still hold enough water in many
places to last hundreds of years. But as one heads south, it is increasingly
tapped out, drained by ever more intensive farming and, lately, by drought.
Vast stretches of Texas farmland
lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up
to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has
already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to
supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers. And when the
groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require
hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.
Sadly, this is not news to anyone
who's been paying even lukewarm attention to what's going on across the plains
states. I was first introduced to the politics of the Ogallala (forget
that "High Plains Aquifer" shit, it's the Ogallala) when I was a
newspaper reporter covering the corporate hog farm wars of the mid 90s in
Oklahoma and Kansas. The long-term prognosis was grim even back then, and it
has only gotten worse as hydraulic fracking (an unbelievably water-intensive
activity), ethanol mandates, insanely high commodity prices, long-term drought
and even more CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations, basically huge
corporate hog farms and feedlots) combine to literally suck the Ogallala dry. I
shudder to think how many playas have been filled in, graded out and planted to
crops over the past seven years since I wrote that story.
It's obvious to anyone not
congenitally delusional that if we stay on the same path, doing things the same
way, that we are well and truly fucked. Something's gotta give, and in that
eternal tug-of-war between us and the rock we inhabit, we are always going to lose.
Always. We most assuredly need the earth in its present incarnation to survive,
but she damn sure doesn't need us for the few billion years the solar system
has left before the Sun dies and goes all white dwarf on everything. Much
like that famous YouTube honey badger, Gaia don't care, Gaia don't give a
shit. Unfortunately for us, neither do we.
Geez, Louise, how fuckin' stupid can
one species be?
