Climate and EnvironmentMay 14, 2021

The Hoover Dam Made Life in the WestPossible. Or So We Thought.

The “bathtub rings” of the drying Lake Mead.iStock/Getty Images Plus

By Timothy Egan

Mr. Egan is a contributing Opinion writer who covers theenvironment, the American West and politics.

LAKE MEAD, Nev.— Few things force you to confront hubrisand genius at the same time as much as the magnificentharness on the Colorado River that created the largestreservoir in the United States.

To build Hoover Dam in the 1930s, an army of Depression-eradaredevils poured enough concrete to form a two-lane roadfrom Seattle to Miami. The dam powered Los Angeles andbirthed modern Las Vegas. Downriver canals made Arizonahabitable year-round, delivered cold water to drinkingfountains in Disneyland and created an Eden for wintervegetables in Southern California.

Humans bent nature to their will to shape a civilization in anarid land. Now, human activity — the accelerant of climatechange — is threatening those dreams. Lake Mead, the bigman-made body of water behind the dam, has sunk to near its

lowest level since it was filled, signaling ripples of change inthe world made possible by the backed-up Colorado River.

You may think youʼve seen this movie before: the parched andelaborately plumbed West crying for relief. But the dry spellthat began at the dawn of this century, and has persisted fornearly two decades, is one for the ages. Scientists call this amegadrought, one of the worst in nearly 500 years. And this isjust the beginning.

Still, why care about the big bathtub in the backyard of LasVegas, that improbable, well-watered city in the middle of theMojave Desert? Itʼs easy to make fun of a place where ads fordivorce lawyers pop up a screen while you pump your gas,where one planned community is called the Lakes andanother Desert Shores.

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Las Vegas is among the fastest-warming cities in the UnitedStates, its average temperature having risen more than fourdegrees since 1970, according to one analysis. But Vegas, andother oasis metropolises like Los Angeles, Phoenix andTucson, are not the problem. Water use has actually fallen inArizona since the 1950s. These cities have been praised forcreative use of the worldʼs most precious resource by

conservationists.

The problem is us — a planet in fast-declining health. Think ofLake Mead as the worldʼs largest heart monitor. Right now, itʼsshowing extreme distress. Within a few months, water levelsare projected to reach a critically low threshold that will forcecutbacks throughout the system.

Nobody wants a desiccated West, a place where dying treesoutnumber the living ones in many places, where wildfires arenot a seasonal siege but a year-round peril, where once-fertilefields are permanently fallowed.

But itʼs here now, and a reservoir built to hold enough water toflood all of New York State a foot deep appears to beinexorably drying up.

The other day I walked the floor of Lake Mead, a cracked andsun-baked Martian-scape that was once more than a hundredfeet underwater. On the horizon, the eerie geologic formationsthat freaked out early white explorers displayed the latestbathtub rings in the rock.

Beyond the Southwest, the message of a vast and fast-evaporating artificial lake is that we canʼt engineer our way outof this problem. The region is a relic of an era of ingenuity, andpromise. Hoover Dam, like its upstream companion thatcreated Lake Powell, demonstrated American engineering

muscle at the peak of its powers. The dams were built aroundthe idea that weʼre bigger than any obstacle of nature; we candynamite, dig and fill our way into creating a hydraulicmachine.

And for more than 80 years, things have mostly worked asintended. As it flows for 1,450 miles from snowmelt in the highRockies to a trickle in the Gulf of California, the Colorado Riverserves 40 million people. It meanders by fields, forests andcliffs in the upper basin and powers through Grand Canyonand other national parks in its lower half. But over the lastcentury, natural flows have decreased by about 20 percent,largely because of climate change.

So long as the world continues to warm, no amount of newdams can resuscitate a gasping resource. Doing all the rightthings — growing more food and building smartercommunities with less water — can only go so far.

A previous megadrought in these parts may have compelledthe Ancestral Pueblo cultures, also known as the Anasazi, toabandon their homes in the cliffs during the 1200s. Thatʼs onetheory, for they didnʼt leave behind a detailed history. Only theempty dwellings.

Scientists know about their catastrophe from studying treerings, a book of nature with chapters on wet and dry years. Ofcourse, this was well before we started pumping greenhouse

gases into the atmosphere. Their peril was believed to havecome from years of drought, not a warming earth. In themodern age, dry years can be somewhat managed. Climatecannot.

An ancient tree would suggest that we can live through this,as well. But what if the tree canʼt make it through this year, ornext? Then, weʼll be left with human artifacts, the shell of LasVegas, a lake no more, to tell the story of what happened. Thecause will not be a mystery.

Timothy Egan (@nytegan) is a contributing Opinionwriter who covers the environment, the American Westand politics. He is a winner of the National Book Awardand author, most recently, of “A Pilgrimage to Eternity.”

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