Parked at a laundromat in Gunnison, Colorado doesn’t seem to be the best place to think about water issues, but it was. Near the laundromat is a car wash, and the last time I was there it was bristling with business, with cars, trucks, and RVs in line to use the self-service wash.
All of this was amazing to me, as I knew that the entire region was in drought, that the Gunnison and Colorado rivers were running low, and that the nearby Blue Mesa reservoir was a fraction of its normal volume. Forest fires burn throughout the state because of the drought, killing firefighters and bringing masks back in style for the first time since Covid.
How could this happen? For the same reasons it always has — we take water for granted.
You would think that we would all know better. We’ve all learned in school how important water is for living things. We know that NASA scientists look for evidence of liquid water on other planets for precisely this reason. “Hydrate or Die” is a common meme. Right?
Yet, we often treat water like it is limitless: besides washing cars, we use it for summer entertainment, long showers, food production, and even fracking for natural gas.
But it is not limitless, and never has been. We live on a blue planet because oceans make up more of our world than land does. But freshwater resources — the water we can actually use — is only about 2.5% of the water on the planet. That is adequate to maintain human populations, but only if we use it sustainably, which we definitely have not done so far.
These limitations are particularly evident in the western U.S., and especially this year. Many of us have been rationing water with simple steps, like making sure we turn off the faucet, taking quick showers, and not washing our cars. Some pray for rain. Others seem to use it like the drought isn’t happening — or they don’t realize what they are doing, because water, to many people, is like air — you just use it and don’t think about it.
Car washes and some other uses are conveniences that are taking thousands of gallons from those living downstream. Some of the victims of this use are farmers, others are the residents of towns and cities that are hurting a lot worse than the mountain towns that still allow the use of water to clean cars.
Think about this implication. Even in ‘good’ years, the Colorado River runs dry before it reaches its terminus in the Sea of Cortez. Even in ‘good’ years, humans take and take from this once mighty river until it no longer exists. Obviously, this has implications for people, agriculture, and industry, but it also impacts the freshwater and marine life that have relied on a functioning Colorado River for thousands of years.
Now, my friends in the eastern U.S., imagine if the same was true for the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee, or even the mighty Mississippi River. All of those things seem simply unimaginable, just as they once did for the Colorado.
Of course, one might say, the desert southwest is more prone to drought. It’s just the overuse by all of these western communities, which are living above their means. It could not happen in the east.
Maybe so, in an unchanging world. But what is happening in the west is due in part to population growth and increased need, and that is also occurring in the east — including the cooling of data centers, an amazingly insane use of freshwater. The west’s issues have also been affected by climate change, and we should all realize by now that no part of the planet is immune from that.
Does it seem fantastic that a river runs dry? Of course. But it happens yearly on the Colorado, and your river might be next.
It is not just the Colorado River that warns us. There are red flags all over the country and world. The Great Salt Lake in Utah is now a fraction of its size because of the diversion of water by Salt Lake City, surrounding agriculture, and increasing temperatures. The Ogallala acquirer, which sits under eight breadbasket states, has been mined for ancient “fossil” water — which will not be replenished — to keep U.S. agricultural production going. Around the globe, the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest lake, has lost 90% of its volume due to diversion of water for human use, producing a barren, toxic salt plain known as the Aralkum desert.
These are not isolated events—they are a trend. We are using too much water, in some cases because there are too many humans in places not meant to support large populations, and in some cases because we continue to take one of our most precious resources for granted.
An easterner can rightly argue that water is still extremely abundant where they live—in fact sometimes too abundant, with rampant flooding. So why should they worry?
At one point, there were people in the western U.S. who thought the same thing about water. The Colorado will never run dry. The Great Salt Lake will never change. Wells in Kansas and Nebraska will never run dry. But they have. The east will change too, if we are not more careful with how we treat water, and if we don’t begin to think about what our relationship should actually be with such a precious resource, instead of using it to spruce up our vehicles, entertain our kids, or force natural gas out of fractures in rock.
Consider the effort by some western states to divert water from the Mississippi to the west using massive pipelines to solve their water problems. Again, that seems like fantasy — but fantastic ideas are floated before they become legislation, and then reality. The west already diverts Colorado River water through huge pipelines from the western slope to drier eastern slope cities like Denver. Why not just ramp up?
Ask the families of Las Vegas about their relationship with water. Water use is strictly regulated by the government, and the region actually recycles wastewater — you read that correctly — to allow their city to continue to persist. Las Vegas has had to do this because there is no longer enough water to just use once; it has to be reused as many times as possible, and they have become extremely efficient at doing so.
The east may never have the water problems of the west — at least I hope they never do — but the issues facing the west, and the fact that there is still rampant waste of water even in western towns under drought conditions, suggests to me that a wake-up call is in order. The sooner all of us can start appreciating and respecting water, the better off all of us, and our environment, will be.
Dr. Howard Whiteman is the Commonwealth Endowed Chair of Environmental Studies and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Murray State University.