Re: The Water Knife. Was: Nebula finalists 2010

Titus G wrote:

On 20/11/24 08:18, William Hyde wrote:

 The following is perhaps the only relevant quotation to your question.
"Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma,
and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century,
pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from
ten-thousand-year-old aquifers.

This certainly is a problem.
But most of Texas gets a fair amount of rain. As I recall Deaf Smith county, well away from the coast, gets 20 inches of rain per year. That's not much less than Toronto, and the farmlands around here are very rich - or were until we paved them over.
There seems to be this illusion, perhaps from movies, that Texas is a dry western state.  But much of it is a wet southern state.  One local geographer told me that about ten percent of the state qualifies as being in the west.
When I first arrived in Texas, some local students were making submissions to Penthouse letters which began:
"As I was driving through the desert 65 miles northwest of Houston ..."
I was told that one was published.
  They’d played dress-up-in-green and
 > pretended it could last forever. They’d pumped up the Ice Age and spread
 > it across the land, and for a while they’d turned their dry lands lush.
 > Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans—vast green acreages, all because someone
 > could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from
 > what they were. They’d had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and
 > they fell back,  realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed,
 > and there would be no more coming."
Something similar happened on a smaller scale in the Texas hill country, which went from being one of the richest parts of the state to one of the poorest in a generation as cattle destroyed the local grasses.  But it wasn't owing to a water shortage.
William Hyde