Rain

"The next world war will be over water."
-Ismail Serageldin, former World Bank vice president

It is a Monday afternoon and I am sitting in the beautiful, light, spacious, dry open reading room of the Sojourner-Truth Library. For the moment I am alone. The study tables have not yet filled up with the children of the East African immigrants who make up my neighborhood. Outside it is doing what it does best in Seattle, raining.

That’s a bit unfair. Seattle receives on average 37 inches of rain per year, less than New York’s 46 or Portland’s 45 and paling beside areas of the Olympic Rainforest that receive 160 inches per year. Yet this rainforest is nothing next to Lloró, Columbia. Lloró "is probably the [town] with the largest measured rainfall in the world," at 523.6 inches per year or 43-plus feet (Wikipedia). That’s more than a foot of wetness for every inch that Seattle gets.

LL and I are considering moving to Central Washington next year, with its average annual precipitation of about 7 inches. Unlike Lloró and more like East Africa and much of the rest of the world, it is dry.

Yet when looking at a map it strikes me as odd that there are several areas of this desert which look, well, wet. I was aware, having driven east on I-90, of Moses Lake; just south on the map is an even larger body of water called Potholes. These lakes look out of place. They are.

At the dawn of the 20th century the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was formed with the purpose of irrigating the arid West. In 1933 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized the construction of its largest project, Washington’s Columbia Basin Project and Grand Coulee Dam. The 550-foot dam was completed in 1942 and raised the Columbia River almost 400 feet. Since the early 1950’s water has been pumped, at an annual volume greater than the flow of the Colorado, an additional 280 vertical feet in order to feed a vast network of irrigation projects and waterways including Lakes Moses and Potholes. This is Washington’s fruit bowl, bread basket, wine cellar. Electricity from the dam powers Seattle, Portland, and cities as far south as San Diego.

An annual salmon run estimated at more than 600,000 fish was completely wiped out. So too was the subsistence for countless Native Americans.

Perhaps the fact of the dam’s existence would not be as jarring if FDR’s vision of a Second Bill of Rights had come to pass. That all people were guaranteed, through a government of, by, and for the people, such things as medical care, education, a living wage, and "freedom from unfair competition and monopolies." As it happened, recompense to Native Americans was late in coming and is pennies to the dollar of the Columbia Basin Project’s profit. Irrigated land that was slated to go to small family farms ended up going to huge agribusiness, and water which was to have been paid for by landowners became subsidized.

The loss of the salmon was never even considered.

As a library poster about the Olympic Peninsula reminds me, "not everyone is so lucky" to receive as much rain as this coastal region gets. Attempts to irrigate the desert are not new. They are as old as the first city-states. But these precursors of modern civilization were built on people taking more from the earth than would come naturally. And ever since they started doing this, what they took they distributed unequally. Now more than ever we continue to do this. Apart from the environmental destruction caused by taking more, I wonder if we would ever be able to irrigate new rainless areas for the growing of apples, or destroy mountaintops for the extraction of coal, or chop redwoods for the building of houses without a few people receiving a hugely disproportionate share of those apples and coal and houses.

Perhaps until we figure that out, we would do well to try and share what we have, to accept the fabulously rich bounty of nature as it is found…naturally. And be grateful for the rain.