Snake Valley to Las Vegas: Keep Your Pipes Out of Our Aquifer!

摘要

Consider, if you will, the parallels. In 1904, the chief water official of Los Angeles, a cash-rich but water-poor desert city, began implementing a plan designed to obtain water that the city needed for its growing metropolis by going north several hundred miles to a place called Owens Valley.1 How this plan was secretly earned out became the plot of an Academy Award-winning Hollywood movie.2 In 2004, not so secretly, the Southern Nevada Water Association (SNWA), tasked with the responsibility of providing water to the exploding Las Vegas Valley population, submitted an application to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for rights-of-way needed to pump huge amounts of ground water from two mountain valleys several hundred miles to its north.3 In the case of Owens Valley, Los Angeles' actions exacted so much environmental devastation on the valley that it was eventually required to spend