Seamus McGraw - A Thirsty Land: The Fight for Water in Texas

PRAISE FOR

A Thirsty Land

A reporting tour de force and reminiscent of Cadillac Desert, the 1986 book by Marc Reisner that is required reading for anyone seeking to understand water policy in the West. McGraws work is similarly nuanced, thoroughly researched and beautifully written.... McGraw showcases a deep understanding of Texas law, history, and culture. Theres a desire not just to explain where we stand now, but how we got here.Texas Observer

In stark prose that often gleams like a bone pile bleached in the sun, McGraw travels back and forth across Texas to give a free-ranging but deadeye view of the crisis on the horizon.Texas Monthly

Its hard to write about the slow creep of environmental crises like drought without resorting to shock tactics or getting lost in the weeds.... [McGraw] draws out the conflicts in compelling ways by drilling into the plight of individual water users. Even if you feel no connection to Texas, these stories are relevant to every part of the country.Outside

McGraws book proves that the United States simply isnt ready for the next big drought or flood. This is a problem thats been brewing for a long time, and climate change is about to make it worse. Gulp.EcoWatch

Readers will put the book down with a sense of urgency, a set of strategies, and a feeling of hope.Texas Books in Review

Interviewing both scientific experts and everyday water users, [McGraw] clearly delineates the competing interests, describes political and geological reality, and makes a compelling argument for statewide water policy that utilizes modern technology and fairly weighs parochial needs against the good of the whole.Arizona Daily Star, Southwest Books of the Year

Seamus McGraw provides a sweeping review of the tangled web of interactions between water, politics and the environment.... A Thirsty Land can and should serve as a rallying cry for those with the power to set aside their own interests and unite to come up with a water plan that can keep an ever-thirstier Texas satisfied.Nature

A timely, important book that manages to be a romp, too. Youll meet dreamers, schemers, and even a few genuine heroes who have been fretting and feuding over the water woes of the Lone Star State for centuries. By the time you finish A Thirsty Land, youll understand that water truly is destinyand not just in Texas. Seamus McGraw raises urgent questions that we will all have to face to avoid a parched future.DAN FAGIN, author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation

In Texas, water is the stuff dreams are made ofbut there has never been enough to go around. Seamus McGraws thorough and insightful history of the states water wars gives us an unsparing look at the nightmares in our past and invites us to wake up and prepare for a future of scarcity.NATE BLAKESLEE, author of American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

NUMBER NINE

Peter T. Flawn Series in Natural Resources

A THIRSTY LAND

The Fight for Water in Texas

Seamus McGraw

With a new afterword

by the author

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

The Peter T. Flawn Series in Natural Resource Management and Conservation is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and by gifts from various individual donors.

Copyright 2018 by Seamus McGraw

All rights reserved

First edition, 2018

First paperback edition, 2020

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions

University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020939568

doi:10.7560/322444

ISBN 978-1-4773-2265-9 (library e-book)
ISBN 9781477322659 (non-library e-book)

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

IT IS A HARSH LAND, this bone-dry twenty-one-thousand-square-mile expanse of cacti and rocks and rattlesnakes that sprawls out as far as the eye can see in all directions from the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Pecos in Texas. It is a land that yields little, and even now, for what little it givesa little water, a little food, a little fuelit demands much in return.

It is a land that demands sacrifice.

A desert landscape violently interrupted by rugged canyons, it is stunning in its stark beauty. It is what every child in the East or the North or the Deep South imagines when they close their eyes and conjure up an image of the American Southwest, though for most, if they ever see it all, it simply will be a Wild West backdrop for a cross-country car trip along Interstate 10.

That is a pity. Because you only have to venture a comparatively few miles from that highwaythat single strand of a weblike monument to our modern American belief that we can engineer our way through any problem and enjoy the benefits of those advances in splendid isolationto find a very different monument to a very different way of looking at the world and our place in it.

Hidden in a rock shelter, a few hundred feet above the Pecos, there is a mysterious mural. It is one of scores in the region painted sometime between two thousand and four thousand years ago by a vanished people, linked to the Yaquis and other Native American cultures. But in many respects, this silent cacophony of seemingly unrelated imagesof strange characters, and prancing deer, and odd snake-like lines whirling around a headless figure with a red line across its neckis perhaps the most puzzling.

Long known as the White Shaman, it doesnt depict a shaman at all, says Carolyn Boyd, an artist turned archeologist who has been trying to crack the code of the murals for more than twenty years. Actually, that figure is a prototypical moon goddess.

And if you were to visit that rock shelter on the winter solstice, you would see that the act of creation that those ancient painters set in motion thousands of years ago continues to this day. As the sun rises on December 21, it illuminates one portion of the mural after another, until at last it stops, going no farther than that bright red line across her neck, effectively decapitating her.

It is, Boyd contends, a sacrifice, the goddess giving her life to bring about a new beginning for her people, and it continues to play out, year after year, centuries after her people have gone.

Concealed within these images there is a story of creation, how, in their mythology described dismissively by some as primitive, they believed that the world was once a formless, watery void somewhere in the east, and how, led by a divine deer, people bearing torches were led to the sunlight, emerging from a sacred mountain, and how that act repeated itself each year, as the moon emerges from a water world, ascends, forms a union that brings forth the sun, and then declines, before the whole cycle begins again. It is a story of balance.

But Boyd has teased more out of the mythology as well. The very act of painting those images, she said, was an effort not to memorialize a distant past but to make it real and present. The act of re-creation was actually an act of creation.

And sacrifice. In a complex ritual, those ancient people brought the materials to make the pigments used in the painting, minerals wrenched with great toil from the ground, vegetable matter hard to come by in a merciless desert, and animal fat, precious beyond words to a people living always on the edge of starvation.

Even the minute mechanics of the act of painting itself was a ritual act of continuing creation. Science has given us the tools to suss out how it was done. First the black paint was applied, a communion with that ancient watery world. Then the redyou can see it in the flaming antlers of the mystical deer that leads them out of the darknessthen yellow, then white, which represented the fullness of the cycle, from water to land to light and to a balance between fire and water, between sunlight and rain.