Running Out by Lucas Bessire

The subtitle is "In Search of Water on the High Plains" and it is terrifying, from a whole bunch of different ways of looking at it. This is a poignant critique of dramatic groundwater decline in southwest Kansas and resistance to addressing it offers perspective on our failure to confront the change. The human-caused crises of declining aquifers and our heating climate are both rooted in a reality-denying world view. The region is 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. The bottom line is that potable water is going to be hard to come by, and there are a lot of examples, including here, where the writing is on the wall, and yet, much like climate change, the powers that be have their heads in the sand. It is compounded by the fact that conservatives seem to do a lot less planning for the future than liberals do, and the affected area is a Republican stronghold. So basically they are screwed.