This book has explained numerous reasons to take the time and trouble to understand that it could be a huge mistake to ignore what is going on. ( )

McGraw gives a history of Texas water law and policy, suggesting that a too-heavy focus on individual property rights has encouraged mismanagement. It was a useful story, though I thought he was too forgiving to the “individualists,” for example describing one majority-white little town where lots of residents put in their own water tanks and solar panels so they didn’t have to pay for hookups as full of people who were independent. Pretty sure they didn’t manufacture those tanks and panels; they just fit the ideology of independence, hiding the ways in which they are dependent on others. ( )

Ricefields in the desert

Two plagues are definitely coming. Land will be submerged, creating a billion refugees seeking a place to live. And drinkable water is fast disappearing, as we pollute it and waste it. A Thirsty Land is about this second plague, and how Texas avoids dealing with it.

Like everything Texan, the numbers are overwhelming. While the average water consumption per person in the US is 60-70 gallons per day, in Texas it is 118. The average home in Texas uses 10,000 gallons a month. Lawns and golf courses use nine trillion gallons a year. And Texas expects to add 20 million more Texans to its increasingly parched land in the next 50 years.

It all comes from a non-renewable resource. Texas used to be under water. The land rose, and there is still an ocean under it. That ocean is divided into several aquifers, which Texans have been merrily pumping out for a hundred years. Unfortunately, in far fewer than the next hundred years, Texans will have drained them completely.

There’s a typically Texan saying about water: If I’m pumping it, it’s mine. If you’re pumping it, it’s ours. And if it’s polluted , it’s yours. Texans own everything from the sky over their property to very center of the Earth. They have given themselves the unlimited right to pump the aquifer dry (the Right of Capture), which doesn’t sit well with nearby states desperately rationing pumping rights. In Texas, whoever has the biggest pump wins – everything. When one rancher decided he could pump out the Ogallala aquifer himself, build a pipeline and become his own private water utility, lawsuits stopped him. So he just pumped the water out onto the ground and grew rice. In the desert. It is said that Lance Armstrong uses more water on his lawn than the nearby city of Houston.

The 16 Texas water regions all go their own way, but they all seem to favor damming rivers and creating reservoirs. Not only do these reservoirs force out the native everything, but the water evaporates in the Texas heat. Meanwhile, the lawsuits cost a fortune and prevent any movement. For decades. There is a neat solution – the state could pump the water into the empty aquifers, where it can safely stay for millions of years. But the state is not about to take charge. It seems to believe the market will settle all accounts fairly. Texans themselves are even more removed. Seamus McGraw says they fully expect technology to provide a solution any day now. So they are not changing their lifestyles or moving to greener pastures. They continue to create greener pastures themselves.

The state has simply ignored its role in all this. “We’re the only state that has abdicated a global view of water,” says State Rep Lyle Larson. The water regions do not co-ordinate. Worse, they prevent the transfer of water outside their regions. Rather than legislate, the state prefers to have people sue each other to set precedents. And they do. A Thirsty Land is as much about lawsuits as it is about water. People sue over anything remotely to do with water. But the Right of Capture means the landowners usually get away with anything they try. Supreme Court Justice Craig Enoch ruled: “It has become clear, if it was not before, that it is not regulation that threatens progress, but the lack of it.”

Seamus McGraw reports it all with thinly suppressed amazement. But he shouldn’t be so surprised. His own native Pennsylvania forbids water being used a second time without completely filtering it. So in Pennsylvania, gray water is illegal. It is all just more whistling past the graveyard.

David Wineberg ( )