Northern Nevadans Don't Want to Gamble With Their Water

Nevada's valleys are majestic and arid, sloping floors covered in greasewood bushes and fields of alfalfa irrigated with springs or wells the ranchers have dug themselves. As Baker drives his land, antelopes, coyotes and jackrabbits, gathered at pools of water, are startled by the sound of his truck.

"This is a closed basin and it is in balance now," Baker said of Snake Valley. "The water is coming in through precipitation and going out through evaporation and transpiration of the plants. Nobody knows of any river underground where the water's going. It's here, and it's being used here."

Other counties along the pipeline route have formed agreements with Southern Nevada, but this summer White Pine County turned down $12.5 million from the water authority to drop its protests and cooperate.

The county could use the money. It's a depressed area, and thanks to financial mismanagement the government is under state receivership. Still, that doesn't matter to White Pine County Commissioner Gary Perea. "They could offer us 12 or 15 billion dollars, but what good is the money if there's nobody living here?" he said.

Perea wishes the city people would leave his corner of the state alone, the way he's had the good sense to do with them. "People live up in rural areas for a reason. They don't like big cities," he said. "We want to be independent. We want to take care of ourselves. To take the money from Las Vegas and endorse the project -- people did not want to do that."

Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, understands such resistance is political and cultural as much as environmental. "They've lived in their world forever," she said of the ranchers, some of whose families have worked the land for more than a century. "They feel disenfranchised. . . . All that anger finds its expression through this project."

Las Vegas recycles water and imposes conservation measures, but that's not enough, Mulroy said. "We don't have a network of streams. Southern Nevada has no backup," she said. "Nevada has to find a way to safely and sustainably develop groundwater resources. If they cannot do that, the entire state of Nevada can lock its doors."

Mulroy said the best way to prevent environmental damage is for the people of White Pine County to cooperate with her agency to monitor the effects of pumping. But activists scoff at the idea that they will have any power to change the water agency's plans.

"That's exactly what Mr. Mulholland said" about Owens Valley, said Bob Fulkerson, state director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, which is fighting the pipeline. William Mulholland, as head of the Los Angeles water department in 1904, conceived the idea of an aqueduct from the Owens Valley. "He had no interest in draining the valley, he had no interest in creating that wasteland," Fulkerson said. "He did not want that to happen, but that's what did happen because once the siphon was started it was impossible to turn it off."

"This is going to create a sacrifice zone of thousands of square miles so Las Vegas can continue to be the fastest-growing city in the United States," he added.

To Rothman, that calculation makes sense. "Simply put, water has infinitely more value in urban areas," he said. "Ranchers are an oligarchic anachronism, privileged by a world long gone."