When the Well Runs Dry: On Lucas Bessire's "Running Out"

Lucas Bessire | Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains | Princeton University Press | May 2021 | 261 Pages

Lucas Bessire’s poignant critique of dramatic groundwater decline in southwest Kansas and resistance to addressing it offers perspective on our failure to confront climate change. The human-caused crises of declining aquifers and our heating climate are both rooted in a reality-denying world view.

Bessire, a fifth-generation native of this semiarid prairie on the High Plains who left in his 20s for university, big cities, and a career in anthropology, returned to his ancestral homeland in 2016 seeking to understand why this epicenter of the infamous 1930s Dust Bowl disaster has become an epicenter of another emerging environmental disaster of our own making.

Blessed with vast underground waters from the ancient Ogallala Aquifer—an irregular spongelike formation of water harbored in pockets of sand and gravel—southwest Kansas again faces desiccation. Today, the deep well pumping for irrigation that began in the 1940s threatens to exhaust the non-renewable fossil water that gave farming a second chance after the Dust Bowl.

In coming home, Bessire confronts his family’s travails and the entangled cultural, economic, scientific, political, and even religious complexities of resource depletion. He ponders what sort of future looms for land and people here as wells go dry while farmers pump water as if there is no tomorrow—or next generation. In an urgent quest to maximize short-term crop yields and profits, irrigators know that by drawing down shrinking waters that once gone are gone forever, they foreclose their and their children’s futures on this land.

Just as the benefits of fossil carbons coal, oil, and natural gas keep us hooked on these planet-heating energy sources, so the life-giving benefits of irrigation water keep crop farmers addicted to wasteful aquifer pumping. And though scientists say reckoning looms, for those hooked, profits and livelihoods outweigh emerging or perceived future costs or calamities.

In exploiting fossil fuels and fossil aquifers, it’s as if we cannot look away from a slow-moving train wreck, except we are the ones driving the train. Our destination is a hotter, drier future. Once we are cooked and are dying of thirst, then what? As Bessire puts it, the question is whether we can take responsibility for the future we are now making.

Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains reveals a history of people transforming the landscape as witnessed by the author in his youth, his contemporary interviews and observations, and his kinship to those who led agriculture’s industrialization here. A haunting section details wanton land clearing campaigns that exterminated prairie buffalo herds and the sanctioned military expulsions and massacres of Native people that opened the prairie for Homestead Act settlers after the Civil War.

The aquifer was discovered in the 1890s by settlers who ditched and diverted rivers like the Cimarron, which flourished from surfacing aquifer water in southwest Kansas. It was only after the Dust Bowl, however, that widespread natural gas-powered pump irrigation arrived. Bessire’s great grandfather was among the earliest to use pump irrigation after the droughts and dust storms of the 1930s blew clouds of airborne soil as far east as Washington, D.C., and drove legions of failed dryland wheat farmers to bankruptcy and exile.

Once pumps came in, the prairie’s surface springs and meadows, which sustained migratory birds and wildlife, dried out as the water table dropped 30 feet in the first decade of pumping. Industrialization of farming was magnified in the 1950s when hundreds of huge center-pivot irrigation rigs arrived that could automatically water a square mile of cropland. In some areas today, the water table is more than 200 feet lower, while other parts of the aquifer have essentially gone dry.

Despite decline and exhaustion in some areas, the High Plains aquifer still supports a sixth of the world’s grain production and a third of all U.S. irrigation. The heart of the nation’s industrial livestock-feeding and meatpacking businesses is here as well, watered by this same vanishing aquifer found under parts of eight states.

Before returning home to pursue this book, Bessire spent a decade in the Gran Chaco region of Bolivia and Paraguay researching what happens to Native people who have been driven off their homelands by the powerful industrial agriculture interests driving deforestation. Now a professor at the University of Oklahoma, he gained insights from the Grand Chaco region for studying complex interconnected social and natural resources issues on the High Plains.

When he returned to his home turf in 2016, Bessire spent nearly two years in Kansas field research, aided by an essentially estranged father who had abandoned him in childhood and who still lived in a small stone house on land once part of the original family farm. Most of the land had since been sold to large agribusiness corporations to cover massive debts from farm business decisions gone bad. Absentees increasingly own the region’s irrigated farmland as smaller operations struggle.

Bessire’s father provided essential connections and introductions, and father and son made their peace along the way. They embarked on a series of field trips and interviews with relatives, water managers, business owners, other farmers, and bankers. They attended meetings of the regional groundwater management district, which approved policies and plans ensuring that the aquifer eventually would run dry—an approach called “managed decline.” Several board members are large-acreage irrigators who benefit from limiting restrictions on water use.

Bessire describes meetings dominated by a bureaucratic language of Orwellian obfuscation. Its discussions created an appearance of water conservation that masked a status quo of maximum pumping. Only agricultural landowners or those owning water rights can vote or serve on the board, so many community members affected by water use decisions—city dwellers, shop owners, and laborers, among others—are not allowed a voice on local water policy. Water democracy here applies only to those who stand to profit.

In a fortunate stroke, Bessire discovered his grandmother Fern’s extensive research archive on local history and aquifer depletion. He found the amassed news articles and notes left in a barn filing cabinet. Her father started deep well irrigation here, and Fern’s detailed documentation seemed a counterpoint to the wild nature and Natives lost to settler colonization and industrial agriculture. In her later years, Fern took Bessire to visit nearby vanished springs; she campaigned to place historical markers at these once verdant oases that served as watering holes for travelers and prairie wildlife.

As an anthropologist, Bessire looks at aquifer depletion from a variety of angles. He tries to understand why people choose policy options against their self-interest when deciding how to use or protect shared natural resources. As in all aspects of life, solutions and desirable outcomes to knotty problems vary according to one’s background and station. Tribalism, denialism, cronyism, conflict-of-interest, and the degree of hopefulness for the future also influence community decision-making and outcomes.

It is striking to read about people who delude themselves into believing that water scarcity doesn’t exist, that mining water with impunity is a right. One faction has a fallback strategy: when the aquifer finally fails, they will lobby the government to build an aqueduct that will divert Missouri River water uphill from east to west across Kansas to save the area’s agribusiness. In that event, it would be the public treasury that would pay to perpetuate private profit.

Just as key factions believe in the magical thinking of using the atmosphere as a cost-free sewer to dump for planet-heating carbon pollution, so some Kansas irrigators believe that freely pumping a permanently declining water supply can go on indefinitely.

Fortunately, an irrigation district in northwest Kansas has already invoked strict limitations on water use. And in southwest Kansas, Bessire met a few farmers who actively practice water conservation, realizing higher crop yields by using less water. But for most, cultural pressure is strong to conform to old norms. Farmers worry that improved efficiency of water use might cut their future water allocations because they use less water than their quota. Unlike elsewhere, no regulatory mechanism exists here to reward efficiency. Some farmers simply use less water because their wells have already run dry.

We are all complicit in our reliance on polluting fossil fuels to provide mobility, heat, and light for our modern lives. Likewise, we all benefit from food grown and raised on the High Plains of western Kansas, watered by a vanishing aquifer whose time is running out. The bill is coming due, and while some accept their responsibility to steward our finite resources, those who most stand to profit in the short-term burn and pump as if there is no tomorrow.

Lucas Bessire’s compelling journey into the heart of denial shows why change comes hard. Out of sight, out of mind, our senses condition us to confront enemies and crises that we can see. Invisible sky-borne carbon pollution that slowly cooks the planet and invisible vanishing groundwater underfoot are beyond our senses. If carbon came in colors or had a face or odor, or if we could see groundwater as a shrinking Lake Huron, perhaps we could more willingly accept and address our looming crises. The kinds of tomorrows we leave to our descendants require a reimagining—a recognition of and confrontation with dangers we cannot always see.

With ample notes and bibliography, this tale on the ebbing of the Ogallala Aquifer is a valuable addition to the literature of aquifer depletion, compelling for its insider’s perspective and probing of contradictory human decisions that discount the future for immediate reward.