Editor’s note • The following is an excerpt from the Salt Lake Tribune’s new Open Lands newsletter, a twice-a-month newsletter about Utah’s land, water and air from the environment team. For a sneak peek at what we’re working on and news we’re following, sign up to have Open Lands delivered to your inbox . Seven states — Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming — rely on water from the Colorado River.
The water sustains crops in California’s Imperial Valley and grew Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Pheonix into giant cities. But the river is overused and, as the world warms, its flows are shrinking. They are down 20% since the turn of the century.
Lake Powell and Lake Mead, two giant, interconnected reservoirs, are closer to empty than full. These are huge problems, and sometimes, journalism loses the big story in incremental news. What’s the big picture? What happens if the Colorado River continues to dry up as demands for its water increase? What is the worst-case scenario? Bacigalupi is an award-winning science fiction writer and former journalist who spends a lot of time imagining how bad it could get.
In 2015, he published “The Water Knife,” a near-future novel where the Colorado River’s water is starting to run out. Then, as now, the states try to grab what water they can from the West’s lifeline in the desert. But in Bacigalupi’s future, the federal government is weaker and the states are using every tool — courts, m.