Aquifers are groundwater. In some places they rest close to the surface and in other places they are deeper down. Even deserts have aquifers under them. There is an aquifer under Cape Cod. Aquifers form when freshwater from any source, for example rain, snowmelt, and glacial melting, seeps through porous layers of soil and rock and is stored underground. The water in the Ogallala Aquifer (or the High Plains Aquifer as the New York Times labelled it) is ancient. We call it "fossil water" because it originated during and after the last ice age, when water west of the 100th parallel was abundant, thanks to melting ice and moist climatic conditions. The Aquifer runs roughly north and south for hundreds of miles, from South Dakota to parts of west Texas. The region gets about 8-15 inches of rain per year so very little of the today's rain reaches the aquifer. In that sense it is a finite, non-renewable resource.
For several decades farmers have withdrawn water from the aquifer in enormous quantities. It was cheap and easy to withdraw and with it, they irrigated millions of acres. Incidentally they made enormous profits and of course, fed millions of people. The crop circles that you see in this photo are irrigated with water from the Ogallala Aquifer. Each circle is a mile across.
The next photo is even more amazing. It is a satellite image from NOAA's Earth Observatory site. This photo really provides a sense of the extent of irrigated land that depends on the Ogallala Aquifer.
Courtesy of NOAA Earth Observatory
The article in the New York Times touted the "miracle" of providing so much food grown in a dry but fertile place, and one commentator declared the problem of the aquifer to be "economic" at its heart. Draining the Ogallala Aquifer for meat is an economic problem but its scope is much larger. It threatens our ability to feed ourselves in the coming decades.
I have a student who stated that human inventiveness would find a way around this problem. But there is a certain bottom line. Where meat consumption and water consumption continue to grow, and where resources are finite, the end result transcends what we can invent our way out of. Either we must move away from meat consumption (we can't seem to break our habit and the rest of the world is following suit), move to exploit other localities and water sources (we have already done this at tremendous, ongoing, global ecological cost to places like Amazonia, where the rainforest was cleared for pasture). Or we will continue down the road to a system of food production and consumption that is ever more inequitable as we lose control over the right to feed ourselves.
As the right to eat becomes a privilege, the devastating results are pretty horrible to imagine.
Human cultures have thrived for hundreds of thousands of years without the gross consumption of meat that has become the norm for us. Human ingenuity from diverse cultures has come to the fore in managing water, collecting water, and storing water in ways that we are only beginning to learn.
Back to the classroom. When I teach environmental science I inevitably discuss the demise of the Aral Sea, an example of mid-20th century ecological mismanagement by the former Soviet Union. The death of the Aral Sea was a slow motion disaster that unfolded over several decades. Abundance eventually gave way to disaster. In the United States we are seeing the end of abundance within our lifetimes. With potential disaster on the horizon, isn't it time we Americans took a lesson from the rest of the world on how to manage our resources more responsibly?