Nor Any Drop to Drink

Phoenix, Arizona, is headed for trouble.

It seems an unfair thing to say about such a charming and salubrious city. Phoenix is an oasis in an alkali desert, created by the "magic of irrigation," says The American Guide. She has sunshine aplenty, low humidity, universal air conditioning, two whacking Air Force bases, civil harmony and boom profits in agriculture, mining and tourism.

Phoenix is in the Salt River Valley, which its local boosters would rather call "the Salad Bowl." It is the largest irrigated area in the most heavily irrigated state. Since World War Two, acreage under irrigation has nearly doubled. In a year, the Salad Bowl produces $60,000,000 worth of lettuce, citrus fruits, cantaloupes, celery, grapes and apricots, which freshen Northern market bins in winter. It grows lush alfalfa to bulk up market beef.

Phoenix took her enviable seat in nature and skyrocketed her economy within a human life span. In 1940, she snoozed along with 65,000 people casually involved with distribution, invalidism and tourism. Ten years later, after the wartime bonanza, the population had doubled. Today she is nearly five times as big as she was in 1950, and only a few sourpusses obsessed with hydrology would say that Phoenix can ever be stopped.

In Phoenix it is interesting to go to the Heard Museum in the old La Cuidad quarter and look at relics of an ancient Amerindian people called the Hohokams, whose pueblo once occupied the city. About the time of Christ, the Hohokams founded a long-lasting culture in an area that then and now receives only a quarter of an inch of rainfall a year. They were prodigious canal diggers. They diverted the slightly saline waters of the Salt river through hundreds of miles of irrigation canals, some of them 75 feet wide and 30 feet deep. They artificially watered perhaps a quarter of a million acres of maize and beans. About 500 years ago, before the Spanish conquest, the Hohokams vanished from the valley, leaving a few artifacts, some canal ruins and a faint trace in the lore of the surviving Pima Indians as "those who have gone."

Scientists have deduced what happened to them. Although the river was not salty enough to harm their crops, over the centuries the Hohokams concentrated salt in their soil. Phoenix' vaunted "84 percent possible sunshine" evaporated water in the fields, leaving behind more and more salt. The Indian engineers moved their canals farther upriver, but the lethal salt trace continued to accumulate until the Hohokams were driven from the Salad Bowl into oblivion.

Today, says the Geological Survey Division of the U. S. Department of the Interior, "the Salt River Valley is a principal part of the largest area of ground-water overdraft in Arizona. Both surface water and ground water are inadequate for perennial irrigation. Ground water is heavily overdrawn.... Declines of ground-water levels were as much as 150 feet in 1950--1960 and averaged about 50 feet in areas where ground water is the sole source of supply. The depth to the water table in 1960 ranged from 150 to 300 feet in most of the valley but was more than 400 feet in Phoenix. The salt content of the ground water is increasing as a result of 'return flow' of irrigation water."

As the water table sinks, farmers no longer can afford more power to pump deeper after less water. Growers near Phoenix are lucky. The city is expanding and they can sell out profitably to industrial parks and shelter developers. Manufacturers and householders will pay more for water than farmers can. But the water table continues to fall whether water is lavished on a head of Boston lettuce or on the bottom of a baby.

Phoenix continues to pack in more people and thirsty industries to compete for her dwindling water supply. A contemporary civilization doesn't quit and die like the resourceless Hohokams did. Phoenix is named for a mythical bird that is born anew from its own ashes every 500 years. The ashes are courtesy of nature, but the rebirth will be charged to Uncle Sam. Phoenix is looking toward the Office of Saline Water, Department of the Interior, to work out a cheap method of purifying the water into which she keeps emptying salts. Instead of looking for water near which to build a city, Southwesterners build cities and then look for water. On this count, the Federal Government is no smarter than builders. Uncle Sam splashed enormous air bases over these deserts in World War Two in order to train in perfect sunshine crews that were going to fly in Europe's darkling wet and the Pacific's mighty moods.

In the Southwest, stream flow has always been too low to support irrigation beyond the modest usages of the Amerindian. Yet the land holds the ingredients for a money salad: year-round sunshine and warmth, and soil full of natural fertilizers. The recipe lacks only water. This priceless catalyst is found underground in aquifers, water-filled deposits of coarse sand and gravel, or permeable sandstone, limestone and dolomite. An aquifer is filled by surface water percolating down. In wet climes you can pump as much water out of an aquifer as the rains have put in without depleting your ground-water supply. In arid regions, you are ill-advised (or a squanderer of your country's resources) to take more water out of an aquifer than nature can drip back in. In the perennially dry regions of the Southwest, it has taken nature thousands of years to fill the aquifers.

Unfortunately, what the Great Spirit has taken many millenniums to do, earth people can easily undo in a generation. Southwesterners are pumping away fresh water deposited deep underground in the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. "Mining" is a word that geologists use for removal of an irreplaceable underground natural resource. The Salad Bowl and other temporary Edens are living for the moment on waters gathered through epochs. It will be mined dry in a few decades.

On the other end of the water panorama is my friend in Vermont, Professor Fred Fisher, who was accustomed to the free-and-easy way New England country folk took their water. They used "dug wells," 10 or 15 feet deep, with tile or stone casing, and raised water with a bucket or pump handle. Or, like Fred, they enjoyed "gravity feed" water. Two or three neighbors would pick out a perennial spring on high ground and lay soft lead pipe underground to their kitchens. They let the water flow continuously to avoid aeroembolisms in the narrow pipe and they anointed their frugal consciences by "gauging down" the pipe mouth--inserting a plug that reduced the flow to a trickle. About the worst thing that could happen was a lucky lightning hit that would pinhole the buried pipe. In that case, you dug it out and soldered the hole.

"Driven wells," that is, drilled to an aquifer, were unknown. "Well," said Fred, "my gravity feed failed in 1963. And I found everybody else was also looking for the well driller. We sunk a bit 265 feet before it struck water. It cost me $3000." This happened in an area that has a surplus of rainfall over the national average, where the drought has been mild and where population and economic growth have not been demanding.

Water is the most versatile and dynamic of the essential elements, but it has no organic virtues. It is only a vehicle, a slave of solid matter. It carries nutrients into living things and hauls away their wastes, including excess heat. It performs much the same services for farms and industry. But in its titanic movements, powered by the sun and gravity, water is the Atlas supporting the world.

Water is probably unique to this earth; none has been proven to exist on other planets. Everything here that moves or exists is saturated with water. Mechanically speaking, a human being is a balloon full of varicolored waters with an articulated armature inside to make it work. It is prevented from bursting by atmospheric pressure on its frail envelope. Seventy percent of the body is water and 90 percent of the brain is water. Inside the body there is a fierce oxygen furnace that must be precisely cooled by constant water intake and evaporation through the pores.

The same recirculation of water takes place by the megatrillionfold in nature. The global cycle takes place almost invisibly, except for precipitation from the clouds. You can walk carefree across a pleasing summer meadow without realizing that 50,000 tons of water vapor per square mile is rising about you during the day.

Water revolves perpetually between earth and sky. There is no beginning and no end to the revolution; but to hitch onto the merry-go-round somewhere, start with the ocean, the largest concentration of water around. Solar heat striking the top layer of the sea energizes water molecules to break off and fly away as vapor. Water vapor is lighter than air, and the molecules ride aloft on convection winds. The vapor expands in the thinning pressure above the earth and, given elbow room, the molecules cool off and cluster around dust particles or automotive exhaust molecules, flecks of salt liberated in ocean chop or, perhaps, these days, radioactive motes blasted aloft by nuclear explosions. Still lighter than air, the droplets gather in (continued on page 257) Nor Any Drop (continued from page 152) clouds, the water tankers of the sky, and grow fatter and heavier. Sea clouds trend toward continents. Nature has 19 methods of triggering clouds to dump precipitation--rain, hail or snow.

The biggest carrier of earth water to the sky is vegetation. Like ourselves, plants drink water and flush out their impurities with it, by a process called transpiration. In one day an acre of corn moves 3000 gallons of water from the ground to the atmosphere. A tree may transpire 50 gallons a day. Yet the sky holds only a tiny fraction of the world's total of water--about 3000 cubic miles. If it rained down evenly around the globe, the water would be only an inch deep. More than 9,000,000 cubic miles of water is on land. But, brother, where the water is is in the oceans--97 percent of the existing total, or 326,500,000 cubic miles, and all of it salty.

Until this century, the U.S. depended on surface water coming conveniently by gravity from watersheds or springs that welled from overcharged aquifers; if enough water piles into them to raise pressure, aquifers geyser from a drill hole.

Rivers contain 20 times as much spring water as they do rain runoff. The aquifer is the warehouse for our water. Streams are its trucking service. The aquifer is better than any dam invented by man. It will store cool water under a flaming desert for 10,000 years, and it filters and repurifies water.

Rainfall, aquifers and rivers are not found where you please. One third of the planet is arid, and even in North America, the big oasis, virtually a waterlogged land, many regions have no water and parts that have are using it up fast.

The first settlers here looked for water before anything else. They sought a tidal river or sheltered harbor deep enough for seagoing craft, because commerce was by keel. And they needed handy fish and shellfish to keep from starving. They looked for a spring near the homesite. They didn't need much fresh water: A gallon a day per head would satisfy both gullet and cookpot. Washing and cleaning didn't ask much; more water was used for brewing and distilling. Their domestic animals were modest water users. A hundred turkeys were satisfied with five gallons a day. Carrying water and dumping it on the crops might have drawn a charge of witchcraft.

In contrast, contemporary U.S. households spend water something like this:

One toilet flush--3--4 gallons

One tub bath--30--40 gallons

One shower--10--20 gallons

One wash of dishes--10 gallons

One washing-machine cycle--20--30 gallons

One dripping faucet, at a drop per second--4 gallons a day

Leak in toilet bowl--35 gallons a day

Sprinkling lawn of 8000 square feet--30,000 gallons a year

There are many ways to reduce home consumption without hardship. Three or four bricks in the toilet tank will save a gallon a go. Showers use roughly half as much as tub baths. All the day's dishes can be saved for one attack. Leaks can be stopped, lawns can go brown. To really save domestic water, we would need ordinances requiring spring-closed faucets, bowls with trap-door bottoms (as in planes and trains) and European-type gas water heaters that start giving hot water as soon as you turn on the spigot. We run off gallons of cold water while waiting for hot water to ascend from remote heaters. Of course, the sure-fire way to reform the consumer is to meter his house and, during shortages, charge premium rates for excess drawoff. Water engineers have found that families paying flat rates use twice as much water as people with meters. Another way to inhibit domestic consumption is to lower the pressure in water mains. Usually water comes to the faucet at four times the pressure of the atmosphere. Cut it in half and people use less water. But no matter how families mishandle water, they take only eight percent of U.S. consumption. Two developments unknown to the first settlers, industry and irrigation, split the remaining 92 percent.

Industry uses most of our water, 125 billion gallons per day. Ninety percent of it is used for cooling; 25 gallons of water are required to make each gallon of beer. The nation's electric power plant uses three times as much cooling water as all the other industries combined. Other big drinkers are steel mills, which require up to 75,000 gallons to make one ton of steel; rayon plants, which use three times that much for a ton of fiber; and paper mills, 188,500 gallons per ton of newsprint. Even in petroleum cracking it takes 10 gallons of water to turn out a gallon of gas, and 70 gallons for aviation gas. Some refineries lose most of this coolant through evaporation. On the other hand, bigger water consumers, like steel and power, reuse the fluid as many as 50 times. The water that comes out of the 50th round is usually so loaded with impurities that it has no further use. The maximum water user is the aluminum industry--to produce a ton of this metal requires 495,000 gallons of water.

Irrigation got at our water resources after industry did, but now giant corporate farms and contract growers are consuming water at a dizzying rate. Irrigation is a very inefficient use of water. Sprinklers throw away a quarter of the volume as evaporation, and overloaded ditches waste even more.

American irrigation was out of business for hundreds of years after the Hohokam Indians lost out in the Salt River Valley. Modern irrigation started in 1847, when a troop of religious outcasts, gunned out of New York, Ohio and Illinois, "forted up" at the Great Salt Lake, shining silver under the snows of the overhanging Wasatch Range. By impounding runoff water from the Wasatch, the Mormons let loose the Tantalus of the West. In 1850 they were irrigating 16,000 acres, and by 1900, 300,000 acres. They styled our fundamental water laws beyond the Mississippi. A hundred years after the Saints got there, the east bank of the Salt Lake was waterlogged, streams went dry before the irrigation season was over, farms were rubbed out by mud avalanches from the slopes of the Wasatch, ground water was turning saline and Utah was importing water from Colorado.

Agronomists on the High Plains of Texas started mining water in 1911. By 1937 there were 600 irrigation wells. A piratical water raid got under way during World War Two. Eleven thousand irrigation holes were drilled into the Ogallala aquifer between 1943 and 1951. Around Amarillo, the water table in some areas fell 100 feet in ten years. While the water was disappearing, the population soared. Amarillo bought a water mine 70 miles away. With a paper-thin annual rainfall, the Ogallala aquifer can never be replenished. The crops it irrigates are mainly winter wheat and sorghum, for which there is no market. They are surplus crops, subsidized by the national treasury and stored at the taxpayers' expense.

In the Texas Panhandle, growers formed the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District Number One and filed a suit in the U.S. District Court, asking income-tax reductions for "depleting a natural resource." Congress gives them tax cuts for depleting natural gas, petroleum and mineral deposits. Why not water? The growers broke through last December, when the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals awarded a $113 tax repayment to Marvin Shurbet, on the evidence that the Ogallala aquifer was shrinking beneath his ranch at Lubbock. Twenty thousand of his neighbors are now lining up for tax rebates. From the head of the queue Marvin said, "It's something we're entitled to. We're very humble."

However humble Uncle Sam succeeds in rendering the Texas Panhandlers, their aquifer is dying and soon they will need somebody else's water for their subsidized surplus crops. The Reclamation Bureau and Corps of Army Engineers are planning to furnish it by throwing up two huge dams in the Grand Canyon of Colorado. If the American people let them. These dams, if built, will drown scenes of cosmic natural wonder and erase the last wild West experience we have--that of rafting down the Colorado. The Grand Canyon will become renowned for water skiing.

The Corps of Engineers is partial to growers. To furnish "flood control"--actually more irrigation water to citrus farmers--the engineers have recently built 1400 miles of dams and levees in 18 central Florida counties. This impoundment is drying up the Everglades National Park, the third in size of our national preserves. Ibis and egrets no longer form rookeries in once-frequented areas. On the salt rim of the great swamp, the breeding grounds of boneheads and shrimps are being dried out. On the cracking mud of receding ponds, there lie the bleaching bones of turtles and garfish, the accustomed food of the Everglades alligators. The gators have taken to eating each other. Last year, while the Everglades croaked, the engineers had a dangerous surplus of water in their network. They opened the floodgates and dumped ten billion gallons at sea.

Although for quite a while conservationists have been concerned over abuse of the nation's water reserves, World War Two tramped the throttle on the superhighway to aridity. Army camps were established in the cheap, warm South, and air schools in the sunny Southwest. The aircraft and instrument industries followed them to the sun. Simultaneously came air conditioning and big money for irrigated foodstuffs. I mean steak, too. "A steer drinks ten gallons a day," a hydrologist told me, "plus a lot more water to make the grass he eats. One pound of prime steak runs into thousands of gallons." These new factors revolutionized the Southwest, at increasing expenditure of its ancient stores of water. Droughts hastened the massacre of the aquifers. In north Texas, a six-year dry spell started in 1951. The Ogallala was drawn upon for nine times as much water in 1958 as when the drought began. In the Southern High Plains the period 1952--1954 was deficient in rain, and irrigation shafts increased from 14,000 to 44,000.

The profits from irrigation excited farmers all over the country. "Dry farmers" in Kansas and Iowa, who had been growing acceptable crops with natural rainfall, went in for "supplemental irrigation" to fatten up fruit and vegetables, and make juicier forage for bigger livestock. U.S. agriculture was turning into the Strasbourg goose that is forcibly fed until its swollen liver is big enough to sell as foie gras. This kills the goose that gives the golden liver.

In western Iowa, which gets more rain than the national average, unnecessary irrigation has old neighbors feuding over the whack-up of local water supplies; yet the state government considers flood control its paramount water problem. The Iowa parliament is also suspicious that upstream states--the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin--are going to steal the Missouri and Mississippi river waters from her.

We Americans run our water supplies on what might be called the croak-or-choke system. Either we have not got enough water or we have too much. The latter case is called a flood. The public is dealt a lot of malarkey on this subject. Some of it comes from the Corps of Army Engineers, one of whose missions is flood control. Now, the purpose of a military organization with a billion dollars a year to spend is not to grow smaller. It is to grow larger. The toiling engineers are no exception. They do not go around knocking flood control. Floods occur in American rivers about every ten years and are easier to dramatize than droughts.

Floods are a normal aspect of the hydrological cycle. Old rivers run through flood plains of sand, gravel and sediments they have brought along to upholster themselves. The banks become aquifers and the sediments make good arable land. At times of peak precipitation and snow melt, usually in the spring, rivers spread over their flood plains. Only ignorant or deceived persons would take up residence or business on a river bottom, yet developers continue to gull people into buying there. Such land is good for farming or recreation, but if you put a building on it, sooner or later the river will knock it down and carry it off.

Pennsylvania is a flood-prone state with many valleys and flood plains. Engineers would have a much easier time erecting flood-control dams if people did not insist on living in what would be a good bottom for a dam. In fact, in Appalachia the development of surface storage of water is impeded because towns have pre-empted the better damsites.

Alabama is one of the most fortunate states of the Union in water reserves, both in the ground and in watercourses. Mobile, for instance, receives as much as 68 inches of rain a year, more than twice the national average. Yet the Gulf city is partially crippled by salt-water invasion of its aquifer. The salt water moved in during World War Two, when Mobile went gaga over air conditioning and sucked deep into its pure-water store. Mobile has now cut down on pumping, but a quarter of a century later, drip water has not completely flushed out the subterranean reservoirs.

There is no water shortage in the United States. The same amount is circulating in nature's cycle as before, and we are receiving our share, an average rainfall of 30 inches a year, far higher than most countries of the world. After natural vegetation has drawn its needs, there is left 7500 gallons per day for each man, woman and child. With industry and irrigation taking their lion's portion of this, we are still using only one fifth of the available supply.

The trouble is that water is unevenly distributed and the activities we call progress and prosperity are constantly increasing its maldistribution. We are throwing away many billion gallons per day by looting fossil aquifers and by pollution. Only about half our population is served by sewer systems, of which nearly half have no treatment plants to make the water reusable for the guy downstream.

On a working day the slaughterhouses of Omaha, Nebraska, dump 750 tons of grease and undigested stomach contents of killed animals into the Missouri river. Grease clogs the water intakes of Saint Joseph 100 miles downstream. Public indignation, pointed up by Lyndon Johnson's criticisms of the meat industry as a major river polluter, has obliged Omaha packers to join the public in erecting a waste-treatment system.

If we are to make up losses by pollution, replace plant and meet increasing need, a Senate study says we'll have to spend 228 billion dollars in the next 15 years.

The American water problem is caused by one thing: mismanagement by man. The code of sovereign states, of farmers, industrialists and communities alike is: To hell with the guy downstream. To this precept a new dimension is being added: To hell with posterity.

A bizarre method of punishing our great-grandchildren has been worked out in New Mexico, one of the states that has assumed powers to stop abuse of water resources. If the state engineer finds that the ground water available in a locality will be exhausted in 40 to 60 years, he orders a moratorium on drilling in order to give the current owners enough time and water to recapture investments and take reasonable profits. After that, the area becomes worthless--and unpopulated.

The outfit charged with finding, measuring and reporting on the nation's water resources is the Geological Survey Division of the Department of the Interior. I talked with one of its leading scientists, Dr. Raymond L. Nace, a weathered geologist from Wyoming with an Indian hint to his features (colleagues call him Chief Rain Ace). On the worries of the Western states, he says:

"Throughout human history desert living has been based on an oasis-type economy, and this is still true. The most striking feature of our deserts is not their great irrigation projects around air-conditioned oasis cities; rather, it is the vast expanse of unoccupied, pitiless desert that surrounds these oases. But, even within them, human occupation hangs in precarious balance. Extensive industrial and agricultural development has been possible only by drawing on fossil ground water that accumulated in natural reservoirs during past millenniums. These reservoirs will be depleted in the foreseeable future. Unless new sources of water are found, and none is in sight, the oases will shrink and some may revert to desert."

Another trouble out West is useless plants called phreatophytes (pronounced free-at-o-fights), which eat what little subsurface water there is across 15,000,000 acres. The freeloaders that fringe desert rivers are willows, salt cedars and cottonwoods. In the Rio Grande valley, salt cedars slurp up so much water that New Mexico is scarcely able to meet her delivery quotas to the Elephant Butte Reservoir under the Rio Grande water distribution compact with the Republic of Mexico. Salt cedar was imported from the Mediterranean by some idiot about a century ago. Arizonans have attempted to burn it off and uproot it with stump pullers, but the following season the stuff shoots up six feet high. Incineration and decapitation seem to stimulate the deeper roots. Airplanes have attacked with chemicals, but only occasionally succeed in exterminating salt cedar. It is now figured that seven repeated chemical attacks will rid you of the water eaters, but as with flies and DDT, salt cedar becomes increasingly resistant to herbicides. In Nevada, it is estimated that eliminating phreatophytes would leave enough water to irrigate 130,000 acres of alfalfa, which is also a phreatophyte, but nourishes beef cattle. Alfalfa, incidentally, uses ten times as much water as other edible cattle grasses.

In Israel, a water-conscious country, desert kibbutz farmers maintain a constant offensive against phreatophytes. In some areas destroying them has increased the settlers' water supply by 15 percent.

• • •

"Every major river system is now polluted," said Lyndon B. Johnson in a message to Congress in 1965. "Waterways that were once sources of pleasure and beauty and recreation are forbidden to human contact and objectionable to sight and smell."

Water pollution killed 18,000,000 fish in 1964, according to returns from state fish and game authorities in 42 states. Industrial pollution killed 7,000,000 of them in the Miami river between Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio.

The tonnage of poison U.S. communities and industries void into the nation's waters would shame an anarchy. In the industrial East, two out of five plants still dump acids, chemicals, oils and organic refuse into our watersheds. An equal number of firms treat pollutants before discharge. But south of the 37th parallel from Norfolk to the Grand Canyon, less than one fourth of our manufacturers refrain from dumping nuisances into streams. The best record in the country for cleaning industrial discharges belongs to California and the Rocky Mountain basin. Half of their plant managers could dunk a hand in the river and see their fingers. That is, if the water wasn't boiling. One of the worst industrial pollutants is hot water, spilling out of cooling systems. Along the Mahoning river in eastern Ohio, steel mills pipe in water from under the ice during the winter and discharge it downstream at a temperature of 84 degrees F. In the summer, the downstream temperature rises to 104 degrees. Executives of these mills do not go trout fishing in the Mahoning.

Our misuse of water is killing off Ostrea virginica, the celebrated American oyster that once paved the tidewaters of the East. Oysters thrive in brackish water, above the tidal meeting of ocean and rivers. Already hard hit by overfishing and pollution, the oyster beds are now threatened with extinction by invasion of a murderous salt-water parasite called MSX. The killer cannot live in the diluted oyster environment, but as upriver water drawoff reduces stream pressure, MSX washes in with the salt front. Ninety percent of the splendid Chincoteague oysters of Delaware Bay now come up in the rake gaping open and dead.

A great many streams of Appalachia, in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky, are made lifeless and unusable by sulphuric-acid drainage from coal mines. Coal seams contain iron and sulphur pyrite, which when exposed to water and air is converted to sulphuric acid. In working mines the sulphuric water is pumped out; from abandoned mines it flows out. Each year the Monongahela river carries off 200,000 tons of sulphuric acid from mines in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, enough acid to manufacture twice the industrial explosives the country uses in a year.

Sewage and industrial wastes are also making sick lakes. In the states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York and the province of Ontario, 10,000,000 people drink from Lake Erie. They and their industries also dump their waste there. Excrement forms a pool in the center of the lake, setting off an explosive growth of plant spores that consume the water's natural oxygen content. Trout, pike and whitefish die of anoxia and, from the central cesspool, there drift ashore big stinking, rubbery skeins of algae. Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall recently flew over Erie's "cloudy mess of murderous pollution" and thought he was "reading the flyleaf of a book on the end of civilization."

People are busily polluting lakes in high mountains, too. Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada is undergoing heavy abuse. A few years ago you could drink Tahoe water without a qualm. Today its clear Mediterranean blue is stained by seepage from cesspools of cabins, motels, restaurants and casinos that occupy most of the 70-mile shore line. The lake banks are permeable and the cottage boomers didn't bother about sewage when they sold the property.

California, ever water-alert, shares Lake Tahoe with Nevada. In this case, differences in state water laws are not allowed to interfere with common sense. Both states agree that sewers must be laid and the effluent treated. Then the stuff can be dumped down the mountain to help irrigate Reno. The U.S. Public Health Service is putting money into a modern sewage-treatment plant to save Lake Tahoe.

A bizarre aspect of the post-War degradation of water is pollution by detergents. In order to make the powders sudsy--an advertising advantage having nothing to do with cleansing efficiency--a chemical called ABC, for alkyl benzene sulfonate, was added. ABC was not affected by water bacteria or oxygen reactions that disintegrate most pollutants. The late-late movie's favorite-favorite product went foaming through filtration plants, piled up in rivers and came frothing out of your faucet. This went on for years, until the state of Wisconsin and Dade County, Florida, clapped penalties on detergents containing ABC. Currently the sudsmongers are substituting a softer foaming agent called LAS--linear alkylate sulfonate. We'll see.

Twenty-five million Americans are drinking water that does not meet the minimum standards of the U.S. Public Health Service. About 10,000,000 of them consume water with too big a load of dissolving solids and another 9,000,000 are drinking too much iron.

The Senate subcommittee on water pollution estimates that by 1980 the American people will be consuming 650 billion gallons a day. That happens to be the maximum amount available from all natural sources. Gladwin Hill of The New York Times picked up the gist of the problem from a conservationist, who said the United States was "standing knee-deep in sewage, shooting rockets at the moon."

In the past ten years Uncle Sam has put $650,000,000 into state antipollution projects. However, the establishment was a little embarrassed by a hard-working subcommittee of the House Government Operations Committee headed by Representative Robert E. Jones of Alabama. Mr. Jones' outfit inspected waste disposal in 1000 Federal installations and found 68 bases, most of them military, pouring 21,000,000 gallons of untreated sewage and industrial pollutants into streams every day. The Marine Corps at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, asked headquarters for $1,500,000 to build a sewage-treatment plant for 6,000,000 gallons of raw wastes it dumped per day into the New river. Headquarters, however, needed the money to maintain its combat men in Vietnam.

The President has since issued an Executive Order to the Armed Forces to fall out for latrine detail, but San Diego, for one, is still waiting for results. Its metropolitan sewage system with outfalls three miles at sea cleaned up the harbor, except where the First Fleet sits with 30,000 men on the hoppers, producing about 2,000,000 gallons of untreated waste a day.

The nation is currently spending about 2.2 billion dollars a year on water problems, of which $100,000,000 is for research and the rest for engineering works. The sum contrasts with the 50 billion dollars we are spending to visit the big dust balls up in the sky. Perhaps our water shortcomings would receive better legislative attention if Dean Rusk were to blame them on Mao, Castro and Ho.

By the mid-Sixties, Washington and regional authorities had built or planned more than 3000 water resource projects, most of them in the 17 arid Western states. The largest current expenditure per annum--1.3 billion dollars--is laid out by the Army Corps of Engineers. The Bureau of Reclamation is next, with $146,000,000. Reclamation, which was founded in 1902, benefits only the states west of the Mississippi. Senator Frank E. Moss of Utah is one from that region who would like a lot more. While admitting that the water "just isn't there" in a report of the Senate Western Water Development Subcommittee, he predicts, "The problem will get worse." His committee foresees that the West will need twice as much water in 1980 and three times as much in 2000 A.D. The water-shy states are increasing in population faster than the rest of the country. Senator Moss' committee paper says: "The present population of the Western states is in excess of 43,000,000 and is expected to reach 108,000,000 people in the year 2000." Although Western farm ownership is declining sharply in favor of bigger corporate farms, Senator Moss thinks the nation should provide land reclamation and water for 230,000 more "family-size farms" in the West.

Water imperialism is now a grim aspect of Western life. The state of Colorado is in the unique historical position of being simultaneously exploited by 18 other states. Colorado's neighbors take half of her water runoff under contracts that are likely to inhibit her growth. In her South Platte and Arkansas river valleys urbanism cannot develop without importing water. Moss' report prints the situation in boldface: "There is only so much water available and inevitably every proposed project raises the controversy over taking water away from one place to help another."

Southern California is the world's most successful desert. The first artesian well came in at Compton in 1868 and soon the aquifer was pierced by thousands of gay waterspouts. When a drought arrived in 1904--1905, the region had effectively exhausted its ground water. At the time, Los Angeles, a city of 100,000, was living off the Los Angeles River, which flowed out of the San Fernando Valley. A private water company monopolized the water sources in the valley and relentlessly profiteered on the sun-kissed suckers. Los Angeles sued them and eventually won a novel Supreme Court ruling based on Spanish law antedating American occupation, which gave the pueblo historic rights to San Fernando water.

In reply, the syndicate made a mysterious rook move by exercising options to buy 108,000 acres of the watershed at $5 to $20 an acre and then letting it lie fallow. After a series of complicated machinations that rumbled all the way up to conservationist President Theodore Roosevelt, they managed to secure water rights to hundreds of plats of land alongside streams and canals in the Owens River Valley. Then they offered kippered Angelenos a peek at the fountains of heaven; a miraculous aqueduct was to bring them the sparkling waters of the Owens Valley--if they voted a $25,000,000 bond issue. To help them make up their minds, parties unknown created artificial water shortages by dumping water into sewers before it reached town. On the eve of the voting, city hall forbade lawn sprinkling. The people voted for the bond issue.

The citizenry swelled with pride as the lordly aqueduct came toward L. A. But when it reached the San Fernando Valley, work ceased. Not a drop of water reached Los Angeles. It was distributed for irrigation on syndicate land. The mob then put the San Fernando Valley up for sale at $500 to $1000 an acre and cleaned up $100,000,000. The sons and grandsons of this money are among the gracious civic leaders of L. A. today. The city was obliged to annex the San Fernando Valley in order to bring the upstate water to town.

The waterless farmers of the Owens Valley started dynamiting the conduits and opening control gates and L. A. sent up shotgun men to stop them. The farmers sued and lost. In 1927 Los Angeles papers carried ads: "We, the farming community of the Owens Valley, being about to die, salute you!" The farms went back to desert and the valley became a potential flood generator. Los Angeles taxpayers had to shell out again to buy up land for reclamation. This romance of Old Los Angeles has appeared in several books, but few people there have ever heard of it.

By 1928 Los Angeles needed more water than the Owens Valley could supply. She joined up with 13 neighboring communities in the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and went farther afield to capture water 392 miles away in the Colorado River. The thriceblessed Angelenos were told the Colorado Aqueduct would take care of them until 1980. They voted the money.

In 1964 the state of Colorado got a Supreme Court standoff that may curb further Southern California withdrawals from the river. L. A. sent money 700 miles into the Sierra Nevada to get control of runoff in the Feather River Canyon, and she took another whack at the Owens Valley with a big new aqueduct. Although it isn't 1980 yet, on top of three billion dollars invested in the Metropolitan Water District, at L. A.'s rate of expansion, Angelenos will have to spend three billion dollars more by 1980 to fill pools, bathe cars and vaporize orchid houses. And there is no guarantee their leaders won't make them pay two or three times more for it.

New York City should emulate L. A., counseled Professor Rolf Eliassen of Palo Alto, a New York--born sanitary engineer. New Yorkers "have got to have the courage to go long distances to get their water," said he. "If you need water desperately you have to go get it. We haven't had rain here in four months," he told his drooling ex-landsmen, "but I am able to water my lawn any time I want to. My garden is beautiful."

When droughts come along--and nobody knows what causes them, how to prevent them or how long they'll last--the American economy becomes masochistic, almost suicidally so. Having too little water, it demands more than usual. Crackling forests call for bigger water reserves to fight fires. Sanitary use of water goes up, swimming pools are filled and air conditioning increases its inordinate thirst. Air conditioning is a phreatophyte. Refrigerating a large office building takes enough water to meet the ordinary needs of a town of 25,000 people. The nation uses an average of two billion gallons a day for cooling, and in the hot months it peaks to ten billion gallons. To cover the hottest day, power companies must maintain this extra capability the year round, although in the North these reserves may lie idle for 11 months.

In the humid states, droughts occur in relatively small areas, but the resulting howls of pain are in proportion to population density. The big thirst of the day is New York City's, whose celebrated six-year drought has sounded a tocsin to the nation. There was a dry-up in New York in 1929-1932. A lesser brown-out in 1950-1951 brought the city to hastily erect a million-gallon filtration plant near Poughkeepsie to clean Hudson river water. The city had previously classified the Hudson as "hopelessly polluted." It rained in 1952 and the plant was dismantled. Sweet hydrophilia lasted for ten years and people forgot the dry days. To furnish water for the unnatural growth of the city, politicians ignored the Hudson and hooked into watersheds in the remote headwaters of the Delaware, the river in the heart of the booming downstream industrial basin around Philadelphia. Gotham statesmen diverted the Delaware to fill three huge reservoirs at Pepacton, Neversink and Cannonsville, New York. This made downriver people apprehensive; in a water squeeze New York could leave them with the short end. The Supreme Court ordered New York to join a Delaware River Basin Commission, composed of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the Department of the Interior. The high Court decreed that New York could never divert enough water to reduce the flow of the river below 1525 cubic feet a second. A lesser velocity would let salt tides from the Atlantic roll upstream, knocking out water supplies for cities and industries. The Supreme Court appointed a scorekeeper known as the rivermaster.

In 1962 the precipitation in New York's watershed was below normal. Mayor Robert Wagner asked New Yorkers to conserve water. Two more lean years followed. The mayor deplored waste of water, but made no move to obtain more or regulate what was available. Again in 1965, the shortage continued and Wagner requested restaurants not to serve water unless the patron asked for it. This Spartan measure saved about a thousandth of no percent of the city's water. City Hall issued Save Water stickers and wags printed their own, Help Conserve Water. Shower Together.

In the meantime, dribbling taps, leaking pipes, flowing johns, ruptured air conditioners and other impedimenta of the big waste continued in action. Lyndon Johnson made a crack to the effect that Bob Wagner ought to locate the third of his water that was being wasted. New York was using 900,000,000 gallons daily. The Department of the Interior estimated that 200,000,000 was escaping through leaks, but the city said it was only 30,000,000. Nobody knew. Wagner had steadfastly refused to require water meters in all buildings, maintaining that in New York water had "always been free." Of course, water was about as free as crossing a Robert Moses bridge. Only one fourth of New York City has water meters, because builders of cardboard apartment houses don't want to be troubled with the extra piping. Landlords get water at low flat rates. Tenants get the water "free"--the landlord packs it in the rent--and consider water meters an encroachment on their liberty. So they pay about ten bucks a month for water, buried in their rent.

New York's reservoirs did not fill up for the big summer splash of home pools, lawn soaking and cops turning on fire hydrants for ghetto kids. The mayor pleaded and reproached. Finally one citizen answered Mr. Wagner's prayer to save water; the city water commissioner stopped releasing it from his dams into the Delaware. The rivermaster requested him to return it; the salt front started up the Delaware at 3000 feet a day. The flow gauge fell off to 943 cubic feet a minute less than the agreed minimum. The rivermaster was helpless; only if a state of emergency were declared could he order Wagner's water boy to return Philadelphia's water.

Three and a half million New Jerseyites faced "a question of survival," said Robert A. Roe, the state's conservation chief. In south Jersey the ducal canneries and farms of the Campbell Soup Company were in danger of drowning in salt. Salt scale built up in the cooling systems of riverside plants. Scott Paper spent $500,000 to overcome salinity. The salt front ran past Atlas Chemical's big plant and the firm had to buy water from private sources. The saline content of the river reached 280 parts per million, almost the limit of human potability, and sufficient to corrode cooling systems. Wells and aquifers turned saline as the ocean invasion soaked through porous riverbanks.

Dr. Maurice K. Goddard, Pennsylvania member of the Delaware River Basin Commission, accused New York of water piracy. Governor Richard J. Hughes of New Jersey charged New York was violating the compact. Newsmen quizzed Wagner's water commissioner on the crisis. He said, "Look, Mayor Wagner is not a planner of the water supply."

A reporter wanted to know, "What if there is a drought next year?" The commissioner replied, "That is an iffy question." Then the water commissioner asked his "drought cabinet" for ideas. One was that the Air Force Reserve should fly over the city in a formation spelling Save Water.

The Delaware Basin boys convened a hearing in Philadelphia to declare a state of emergency. The salt front was headed for Lambertville, New Jersey, from which the Raritan canal carried 90,000,000 gallons of water a day to reservoirs serving Jersey's northeastern counties. This promised to put salt water right in New York City's dormitories across the Hudson. "We just can't sit back and let one city decide the fate of four states," said Roe. "New York City must start loosening up."

The redheaded mayor of Camden, New Jersey, Alfred R. Pierce, took the mike. Camden depends on wells recharged from the Delaware river and reacting quickly to its chemical changes. Camden and its water-dependent industries could not live unless New York returned enough water to beat the ocean back.

Mayor Pierce said something human and unstatistical: "I remember as a GI learning the importance of water for the first time, when you had to drop a pill in every cup you drank." He went on, "Most of us who appear here today are certainly guilty of provincialism. We are looking after our own locality. But when we are dealing with something as vital as water, we are all Americans. People will do what is for the common good. Gentlemen, give us the facts so that we can do the job with our people."

One speaker after another mentioned that his city was installing water meters; Trenton, New Jersey, was 70 percent covered. In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, every owner paid per gallon used, and their rates rose for excessive drawdown. Allentown's representative said, "Fellows, whatever you do, don't tap the Lehigh river." His town can no longer get the water it needs from the Little Lehigh River and has applied for 70 mgd from the Big Lehigh. The mayor of Easton, Pennsylvania, which is completely metered, testified that his filtration plant was clogging with algae, the vegetation of still ponds, which thickened as the flow of the Delaware slowed down.

Finally, New York was ordered to observe the pact and release enough water into the Delaware to beat back the encroaching salt front. By then New York could not release enough to keep the flow gauge up to minimum. Fortunately, in midsummer 1965, rains and releases from lakes could be combined to stem the on-rolling Atlantic 90 miles up from the river mouth.

The drought continued. The Good Lord kept his back turned on New York City as the withering summer scraped along. New York politicians were stricken with hydrophilia and ran loose in the newspapers, howling and biting each other. Senator Jacob K. Javits jostled his fellow Republican, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, for the driver's seat of the water wagon. The Senator demanded a nuclear desalting plant to save Sodom-on-the-Subway. He did not seem to recall that frightened New Yorkers had already prevented a utility from running up an atomic electricity factory in the city.

Neither did Rocky. He snapped back by ordering the construction of a million-gallon-a-day nuclear plant at River-head on the north fluke of Long Island. The area is the terminal moraine of the last glacier and used to contain an enormous fresh-water aquifer, but it got pumped out by potato growers and split-levels and is now full of ocean. Rocky said his atoms-for-water store would also peddle steam for electricity and offer a side line of high-energy radioisotopes for use on moon rides. As the governor put the pencil to it, the $4,250,000 plant would sell converted water for 35 cents a thousand gallons and steam electricity for 15 mills per kilowatt hour. This would bring in about $1000 a day. Nelson is lucky his grandfather didn't run Standard Oil that way.

Mr. Rockefeller's 35-cent ocean cocktail would be the best water bargain since the Johnstown flood. No salt-water distillery has yet been able to sell its product for less than a dollar a thousand gallons. The Navy spends $1.25 to produce a thousand gallons at Guantánamo Bay. Unmentioned by Governor Rockefeller and other desalination enthusiasts is yet another by-product of the stills--salt. Quite a bit of salt. Ocean water holds three and one half parts of salt per thousand parts. A million gallons of sea water a day will boil out to more than 900 long tons of useless, impure salt per week. This would tend to litter up the grounds around Rocky's nuclear spa. Burying it would be an expensive pain in the neck and it might taint underground fresh water. Dumping it at sea in the form of brine would require a big pipeline or special tankers and the corrosion effects on this hardware would be impressive. Local dumping of such a quantity of salt would wreak strange effects on marine life.

The mind was beginning to seesaw at Rockefeller's plan, but when Mayor Robert A. Wagner broke his silence on the water dilemma, the mind got off the teeter-totter, pulled its hat down over its nose and just enjoyed. What the politicians were staging, the mind perceived, was a Happening, one of those heavily improvised jollifications for in-people and pop-persons. The lame-duck mayor put his Happening on television. The mind thinks it should be called "Salt Water Taffy," and has noted parenthetically some effects that might have been added.

"The water we save today can be drunk tomorrow," Wagner declared. (A red-nose banana enters from stage right and recites a verse called Water Today, Drunk Tomorrow.)

The mayor said: "In New York City we do not charge for water on the basis of individual use, any more than we charge for the use of our streets or other public facilities." (Shower of torn-up parking tickets. A chorus dressed as toll booths from the Lincoln, Hudson, Brooklyn-Battery and Queens-Midtown tunnels and pay bridges comes upstage and explodes. A weeping landlord climbs the side of an apartment house, paying back water tabs he has buried in tenants' rent.)

"I am ready to reconsider my position [on water meters]," said his Honor, "but I want to be sure that the action to be taken is practical and supportable." (Back projection of the take-off runway at O'Hare crowded with jets loaded with Chicago-made water meters. Song, You Never Miss the Water till the Well Runs Dry.)

The mayor then demonstrated the uses of the old trouper's adage "Always make the third entrance." From his coat-tails, out popped a "long-range idea" for a $300,000,000 nuclear desalting plant to produce 100,000,000 gallons of water a day. Not 1,000,000 but 100,000,000 gallons. (Rocky and Jack Javits stick their heads in each other's mouths and 13,000 tons of salt fall onto the stage.)

As Mayor Wagner's Happening closed, one occurred in real life. A 36-inch water main burst at 90th Street and Central Park West and in a couple of hours a million gallons were gone.

New York had a mayoralty election coming up and nobody wanted to be Wagner. All the candidates were terrific water experts, deeply concerned and instantaneous with solutions. There was a spirited competition among them to find the biggest leak in New York. Candidate number one in the Democratic primary got off to a big lead by penetrating a grotto under the Central Park reservoir and unveiling a secret leak worth 750,000 points in the game. Against this handicap, his rivals could only scream for Wagner to drain the reservoir. Wagner's water commissioner lunged back by firing two water engineers for not reporting the leak, although they had done so years before. A second Democratic candidate yelled for pipes into a "huge natural water reservoir" under Long Island, most of which is polluted with salt. A third contestant wanted to bore into wells underlying Brooklyn; the others claimed they were brackish. The fourth candidate found wells pouring 15,000,000 gallons daily into the subway, from which it was pumped into the sea. One of his henchmen plunged into a subway pumping station and drank two glasses of the stuff. "You'll drop dead! It's poison!" a rival shouted.

A city water engineer told Murray Schumach of the Times, "I pray for rain, not just to get water, but also to get these politicians off my back. None of this political grandstanding will add a drop of water."

As the liquid treasure hunt went on, the G. O. P. candidate, John V. Lindsay, coolly referred water complaints to Wagner's water bureau. Lindsay got elected, but the drought didn't go away. At the beginning of this year's dry season, after a wet winter, New York's water holdings were at only three-quarter capacity and Lindsay was holding onto consumption controls. But the city had only 50 men assigned to stopping leaks.

Most Eastern hydrophiles look north. "The use of the Great Lakes as a water resource for the great Northeastern metropolitan area must be considered," Wagner once said. Just as the Southwest gazes strategically at the Canadian cascades, Northeasterners look upon the Great Lakes. Twelve million people in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo and other lakeshore cities have all the water they can use from the Great Lakes, which contain one fifth of the fresh water on earth.

Skimming off the Great Lakes looks to be technically easy. The Erie Canal and the Mohawk Canal to Lake Ontario, built by our provident forebears, could convey oodles of lake water to Gotham. Alas, there are other difficulties. The level of the Great Lakes has been declining to a point that embarrasses navigation, and pollution has greatly increased in recent years. Then, too, Canada owns water rights to all the lakes save Michigan. For New York to "tap" the Great Lakes, she would have to make a jumbo treaty involving two nations, the lake cities including Windsor and Toronto, and seven other states and a province: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Ontario. They are closer to the lakes than Manhattan; namely, on them. I would not care to be water referee on that setup during a dry spell.

Los Angeles has blatantly practiced water imperialism for 50 years and crows about knocking off other people's supplies. Now, New York City wants to emulate L. A. The two largest cities in the United States are the two largest phreatophytes. L. A. is a hydrological error on a scale never before approached in history. New York is probably already far too big for the water supplies she may expect in the hard years that many hydrologists think lie ahead.

As well as taking water out of the earth, we are preventing rain water from sinking into it by waterproofing the ground. America is sealing off much of its humid land with housing developments, superhighways, jet ports, go-cart tracks, shopping centers, drive-in movies and parking lots. Bulldozers destroy transpiration by smashing down trees, and graders crush vegetation that conducts rain into the ground. Then comes the ready-mix to pave the area for builders' trucks. Storm sewers are laid to flash away rain. The aquifer is almost roofed over. Precipitation is shunted into sewers and becomes a net loss to the community's water stocks. A multilane highway is a deck 200 to 600 feet wide, stretched across leagues of water-receptive earth. It repels rain not only by paving but by cuts and shoulders that divert rain into gutters.

Engineers hate mud, floods and earth slides. They love dams. Every new dam surface they expose increases evaporation over that of nature, in which already two thirds of the precipitation goes up before we can use it. There is ample underground storage capacity for cool, clean water throughout the country, including its driest regions. For many years wise communities have been recharging their aquifers when water is plentiful. Flash floods and wasteful runoff from paved acreage can be filtered back into ground storage, where, unlike impounded water, it will not evaporate during dry spells. California has 87 recharge projects. Not only is the Golden State the biggest water user of them all (12 billion gallons daily), but she is the most efficient. Only nine percent of her water production is allowed to drain into the sea. The secret is reuse of the fluid.

A remarkable transformation of secondhand water takes place in Santee, California, a town with 13,000 population, 20 miles inland from San Diego. Santee taps the Colorado river aqueduct. As the town sprang up, it was faced with using the expensive San Diego sewer system. Instead, Santee asked help from health officers of the nation, state and county. With a $700,000 bond issue, the town dug a pond and filled it with sewage that had gone through preliminary purification treatment. Natural oxidation further reduced the noxious content, but the water was still not harmless. Santee engineers pumped it uphill into a dry sedimental canyon of an ancient river--30 acres of sand and gravel 12 feet thick, constituting an empty alluvial aquifer. "We were just going on blind faith," said Ray Stoyer, manager of the water bureau, "but somehow it worked. What came out at the bottom was clean enough to make a nice lake."

The lifeguard's whistle blew and the kids jumped in. Today Santee disposes of sewage for ten percent less than the cost of transporting it to San Diego and has five recreational lakes in the bargain. The citizens of Santee are quite aware that they are bathing in water that went through their johns and disposers. The community water experiment was conducted in the open and the results are there for all to see and enjoy. There was no yammering of cranks like that which has attended fluoridation.

Soviet Russia looks at water through wide-angle lenses. In her land expanse there is a macrocosm of the water-resource regions of North America, from glacier to desert. She has high plains in Siberia, Rockies in the Urals, and great lakes--the Caspian and Aral seas filled with fresh water, and Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on earth. Baikal contains as much water as the American Great Lakes combined.

In recent years the level of the Caspian Sea has been sinking alarmingly. Russian hydroengineers propose to reverse the great north-flowing rivers, the Ob, Yenisei and Lena, to rebuild the Caspian and refresh the deserts of Turkistan. The Russians do not expect nature to restore things to "normal."

The prevailing Soviet climate theory is that the earth undergoes great cycles of cold-wet ages and hot-dry ages, each as much as 2000 years long. Many U.S. and European scientists support the probability that the Northern Hemisphere is now entering long centuries of warmer weather and less precipitation. Droughts and lasting water shortages may be visited upon us in more places at more times. The Russian climatologist Dr. Anatol Schnitnikov says, "Water-development schemes should be planned now, taking into account the present transitional phase of climatic fluctuations. Bad droughts are coming in the future." If so, nature is not going to rescue nations that ball up their water supplies as badly as we Americans do.

Hydrologists are not at all sure that the rains will come next year to top off the dams and fatten the aquifers and put New York City back to sleep. Whatever comes, it will not be fun in Phoenix. It will not be easy in regions flooded this year that will dry up next. No power save patient centuries can refill the Ogallala and other ground reservoirs that are being mined in the Southwest.

Not only people and politicians tend to forget droughts. There is no article on the subject in either the Columbia Encyclopedia or the Britannica, and none in Haydn's Dictionary of Dates, a volume glutted with disasters. Yet more people have died in droughts than in floods, earthquakes, tidal waves and eruptions. None of these natural disasters has erased an entire civilization as drought has done many times. A dry cycle finished Babylon. The Saracen Empire disappeared in the 13th Century after the Mongols took its capital, Baghdad, and destroyed the irrigation systems.

Aridity and deficient water supplies underlie the misery and malnutrition of Islam, Pakistan and India. The UN is making a start on the world's water problem. Several years ago, Dr. Ray Nace and a colleague called for an international program in hydrology and in 1965, as a result, the International Hydrological Decade began. This occurred only one year after the U.S. Government recognized that hydrology was a science. Chief Rain Ace is the U.S. representative for the water-improvement decade.

Six years ago, before the long Eastern drought started and before the full effects of pollution and water mining were clear, four United States Senators sounded the alarm. "The United States," said they, "is shockingly in arrears in water-resource management. We face a water crisis that threatens to limit economic growth, undermine living standards, endanger health and jeopardize national security. We live on the edge of water bankruptcy.

"The free water frontier is past. Additional water can no longer be taken heedlessly or effortlessly. The United States is squeezed between the pincers of inadequate water development and rapidly increasing water requirements, while pollution makes more and more of our available water unfit for human or industrial uses."

The statement came from Senators Philip A. Hart of Michigan, Gale W. McGee of Wyoming, Frank E. Moss of Utah and the late Clair Engle of California. They were from water-conscious states. Today their warning calls to the whole nation.

All reasonable questions--from fashion, food and drink, hi-fi and sports cars to dating dilemmas, taste and etiquette--will be personally answered if the writer includes a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Send all letters to The Playboy Advisor, Playboy Building, 919 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Illinois 60611. The most provocative, pertinent queries will be presented on these pages each month.