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#1309 Water for a Dry Land with Char Miller

from 2018 by Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson

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The following is a rush transcript:

David Swenson: 00:00 Good day citizens, and welcome to this podcast edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour and welcome

Clay S. Jenkinson: 00:06 Great fun today, David. We had my friend, Char Miller from Pomona college in southern California on to talk about the reissue of an important book, one that he cowrote: Ogallala water for a dry land along with John Opie and Kenna Lang Archer. Ogallala means the Ogallala Aquifer, underground lake in the western great plains that has created one of the great agricultural production zones in the world. And Char Miller is interested in that resource and interested in how finite and unsustainable a resource it is.

DS: 00:41 And we've talked about water before and I think we're both the same line that, uh, maybe not, I shouldn't assume, but I firmly believe that as the decades progressed, water is going to become one of the most valuable natural resources we have. If it isn't already, I guess.

CSJ: 00:57 Well, in this book, Char Miller and his coauthors say that 40 percent of the world's population does not have an adequate supply of safe water. Think of that - 40 percent. That's almost half we, you and I live in North Dakota. The great Missouri river's here, it's, it, it, it backs up two gigantic dams, two reservoirs, here - we feel we have an infinite amount of water here and we don't have to be careful, but I lived in southern California, uh, I taught at Pomona College at the beginning of my career and their water was rationed very tightly there. Everyone has a special toilet. Watering restrictions are permanent. People are conscious at a restaurant, they don't automatically bring you water because you have to ask for it because the water is as precious as can be down there. That's still a place of abundance, but that's closer to the world's model than ours

DS: 01:46 It's a good public awareness, uh, to increase public awareness. Even if it, you know, I mean, a glass of water here, glass of water there compared to what's used for industrial reasons, agricultural reasons is not - but the public awareness of it, I would -

CSJ: 02:02 Well, the California water system, for example, which is one of the world's most extraordinary engineering feats, 85 percent of that water is used in agriculture.

DS: 02:10 That was really interesting at the very beginning of the discussion that you had with him, he talked about how the federal government has nothing to do with this

CSJ: 02:18 Not much at all. It's mostly local irrigation associations where we self police and it works because these irrigators, they're not idiots. They're aware that it's expensive to pump that water and that it's a declining resource and so they're doing what they can to conserve it at least to to extend the life of the Ogallala and they will then have these meetings where they'll say, well, we tried this. We only water at night or only water from five to 5:14 AM and it works.

DS: 02:46 It was fun to go back to Kansas in a sense again, after the show a couple of weeks ago where we broadcast your live performance in Pittsburg.

CSJ: 02:55 Pittsburg, Kansas

DS: 02:56 still getting mail about that and

CSJ: 02:58 I loved being there.

DS: 02:59 Yeah, so with that, sir, let's go to this week's show.

CSJ: 03:02 We're talking with Professor Char Miller, one of the nation's leading historians, particularly environmental historians. The author of a brilliant biography of Gifford Pinchot. A friend of mine who came to our Theodore Roosevelt public humanities symposium in Dickinson North Dakota in 2017, and he's the coauthor of this remarkable book, Ogallala: water for a dry land, third edition, University of Nebraska Press, John Opie, Kenna Lang Archer, and Char Miller. Let's, let's go to the program.

DS: 03:34 Good day citizens, and welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with President Thomas Jefferson. I'm your host, David Swenson and seated across from me is the creator of the Thomas Jefferson Hour and the portrayer of Mr Jefferson, Clay Jenkinson. Good to see you sir. I'm very excited about this week's show you, uh, you've met someone who has written a very important book and he has agreed to come on later in the program to talk about it. Could you fill in our listeners

CSJ: 04:04 Mr. Char Miller of Pomona College, where I taught briefly at the very beginning of my wayward career, Char came to western North Dakota last year, to lecture at a Theodore Roosevelt symposium that I was hosting and his topic then was Gifford Pinchot - the forester had such an influence on Roosevelt's conservation policies. Char Miller has written a ton of books. He has a distinguished chair of environmental studies at Pomona college and he sent me his, his book recently. It's called Ogallala: water for a dry land. The original author was a man named John Opie, but Char Miller and Kenna Lang Archer have revised the book for its third edition. That's University of Nebraska Press. He's an extraordinary scholar, has written a ton. He has essays. Uh, he's a fabulous lecturer and he's deeply interested in examining the sustainability problem in American life in our, in our forests, in our water supply, in agriculture and, and the Ogallala Aquifer for those who aren't aware of, but we'll put some things on the website, Jeffersonhour.com, is an underground lake, the size of Lake Huron beneath the western great plains in the panhandle of Texas, parts of Oklahoma, parts of New Mexico, parts of eastern Colorado and western Kansas, western Nebraska, even parts of Wyoming. It's this gigantic resource, but the thing about it is that it's not reChargeable, it's fossil water. It comes from millions of years ago and it's just been sitting in these water bearing sands beneath the western great plains. And it was discovered in the 1950s and since 1960, tens of thousands of farms on the great plains have tapped into this resource and made one of the most important agricultural regions in North America, uh, over the Ogallala. But people like Charles Miller, um, remind us that this is not a sustainable resource that in 50 years or 100 years, we will have pumped the Ogallala effectively. And there's no way to reCharge it. We would have to wait. He said, I think he says 6,000 years for it to reCharge.

DS: 06:16 Who of us hasn't flown over the great plains? I remember back in the eighties is heading to Dallas, Texas. On a plane and for the first time looking down and noticing all these huge green circles

CSJ: 06:27 the green crop circles

DS: 06:29 and that's the Ogallala

CSJ: 06:30 right - So they're pumping water out.

DS: 06:33 And you and I have talked about this before, there was another book Cadillac desert that we just

CSJ: 06:38 Marc reisner's book

DS: 06:39 which is another really important book

CSJ: 06:41 by the way, just to say I'm doing the waters retreat at Lochsa Lodge in January of 2019, so people should come. We'll be talking about all of this - water in the West. Marc reisner's Cadillac desert is sort of the number one first entry into

DS: 06:56 this book is, is uh, more specifically about

CSJ: 06:59 one place

DS: 07:00 the plains. And it's a very detailed read, but it's pretty fascinating.

CSJ: 07:04 I lived out there. I lived out there for a couple of years when I was married. Right on top of the Ogallala.

DS: 07:11 Did you think Perhaps you'd end up being a farmer in Kansas

CSJ: 07:13 I Tried. Want to hear some stories? I think I washed out. I'm, I'm a, I'm an agrarian in the library. I was less efficient.

DS: 07:25 That should be a bumper sticker

CSJ: 07:26 My father in law was this great man. He was a pioneer irrigator, so back when the Ogallala was just being discovered. He was one of the first to understand it. He was an extraordinary man and he developed this huge four section farm nine miles of underground pipe. I mean he. He was a master at this and so I went out there. I came from my brand of agriculture which was my grandparents on a small dairy farm in Minnesota, 80 some acres and so I went out there and I suddenly saw a whole different agriculture and my former wife Etta Walker said about the kind of farming I talk about. Those are farmie farms. You're talking about farmie farms. She said this is about agriculture and so I had to learn

DS: 08:12 You have to give her that. That's good.

CSJ: 08:14 Yeah, and they were producing food like crazy using this fossil water and they were all aware that it's a. it's a finite resource, but they thought, what the heck? You know it's here, but are you going to do. You're going to not tap it,

DS: 08:26 I can't help but think about Jefferson and all of this and how he would react to it. You know, we talk about Jefferson and gardening, but Jefferson was a farmer and all of his compatriots were farmers and you know, it's, it's pretty easy to do some research and find out how he thought things were going to work and you know, they were aware of this, the crop rotation, but his big plan was there's so much land. Everybody can be equal by having their own land and producing their own things. And um, I can't imagine that he would have thought of water as a finite resource in his wildest imaginations.

CSJ: 09:00 No because Forty four inches of rain per annum at Monticello, Plenty for all the kinds of crops

DS: 09:05 Well he did have an an ecological bend. You know, the, the stories about him cutting down trees was murder

CSJ: 09:10 - a sustainability ethos in Jefferson that we don't have in modern agriculture.

DS: 09:14 Those, that group of farmers in that time really had no worries about running out of water.

CSJ: 09:21 No, because until you get to the western side of the Mississippi River, there's always enough water. That's what John Wesley Powell is great insight was in the 1870s that from the Atlantic coast until at least the Missouri River it always rains enough - one, maybe one year out of 20 there's a drought, but it always rains enough that you're going to get wheat and potatoes and -

DS: 09:42 But they did have dry years in Virginia.

CSJ: 09:45 Once in a while

DS: 09:46 there was really

CSJ: 09:47 nothing like what we're talking about on the great plains

DS: 09:48 there was really no irrigation methods and took what you got

CSJ: 09:53 because you're going to get crops nineteen years out of 20.

DS: 09:55 It would be a little bit difficult if he lived on the say the top of a mountain and it didn't have water unless of course you had a lot of free labor

CSJ: 10:02 Well let's not go into that. So then

DS: 10:04 I just thought

CSJ: 10:05 John Wesley Powell in his arid lands report in 1878. One of my heroes, the one arm civil war veteran, he said that the hundredth Meridian, it goes from Bismarck to Pierre, South Dakota from North Platte, Nebraska. And all the way down, he said that's the line

DS: 10:21 and you can, you can actually see it - us being in Bismarck. You get, there's eastern, North Dakota and then there's western,

CSJ: 10:28 North Dakota is drier, tawnier, more russet. More ranching. Fewer farms

DS: 10:35 and beautiful too

CSJ: 10:36 beautiful in its own way. Thank goodness. Because if it were Iowa, it wouldn't be beautiful anymore. It would be

DS: 10:41 careful. I have a sister in Iowa

CSJ: 10:43 I've been in Iowa many times, so east of the hundredth Meridian said John Wesley Powell, you're always going to get a crop or virtually always west or the hundredth meridian, not so much. And so - You could either leave it alone as kind of a Buffalo Commons or as ranch land, but if you want to farm it, you're going to irrigate. And so if you take, you know, there's this Jeffersonian or isn't it? So Jefferson would say, all right, here's some land that's very fertile, but it lacks water. If there's a way to put water on it, maybe that's a good thing. I mean, it's not clear that Jefferson would condemn irrigation out of hand because he's for human ingenuity. The problem is as Char Miller points out, it's unsustainable because this is not a reChargeable aquifer and the damage we've done by creating monoculture out there is not good in the long term Holistic sustainability of the great plains. It wasn't maybe the smartest thing to do. We might have wanted to leave it as grass and graze it in some way.

DS: 11:42 I. Yeah, I, I can't even imagine how at that time anybody could. I mean they were killing millions of buffalo because it was a nuisance

CSJ: 11:51 and he talks about Wes Jackson, my friend from the land institute in Salina, Kansas. Jackson is a genius and he's been working on a kind of a post-monoculture model for his whole lifetime, but how do we get there from here? I mean, we're. We are inherently an extractive people. We find gold, we take it, we find silver, we get it. There's oil under the North Dakota. We frack it. We want zinc, we want copper, we want all these things. We go get them. This is how western capitalist, northern European culture works. It's not a leave it alone culture. It's a What can we do with the culture? Right. And so irrigation makes perfect sense from that point of view.

DS: 12:33 Yeah. I hope I get a chance when we speak to him to talk to ask a question or two about dirt.

CSJ: 12:38 What do you mean by dirt?

DS: 12:39 Well, he and I think it's in the first or second chapter. He talks about the, uh, scientific makeup of dirt, um, and you know, the requirements to have good soil. And what really struck me is talking about farmers during that era. Not really having the scientific background, but understanding it

CSJ: 12:59 intuitive

DS: 12:59 right. And then breaking down actually, you know, what's going on biologically in the soil. And so you've got to have dirt, you've got to have water if you're going to farm.

CSJ: 13:08 But now it's a whole different world. David, when I lived on this farm, my brother in law one day was, we had a job, you've seen them in North Dakota, these giant plastic liquid receptacles there. They hold a thousand gallons or 10,000 gallons and he was going to fertilize this field of corn and it was all banged up. There was some kind of blockage where the water has to go into the spring mechanism on the sprayer, and so he gets into this tank. He takes his shoes off and gets into this tank and he's got sticks and he's stirring this to try to unclog it. My view is cancer cancer. I mean he's. He is waist deep.

DS: 13:48 Is he still living?

CSJ: 13:49 Oh yeah, he's fine. He's waist deep in herbicides and fertilizers because that's the nature of this. We're talking about the Petro Industrial Chemical, agricultural pyramid,

DS: 14:05 right

CSJ: 14:05 and the soil in some respects is only the. The thing which you use to hold the seed, but it's largely if you've read Michael Pollan's books

DS: 14:14 sure.

CSJ: 14:14 It's largely about how chemistry can make something grow on cardboard if you really want it to. And so what Jefferson understood that we don't is how to read the soil - that's what you're talking about, how to understand what's, what's going on there. When we look at soil, when I looked, when I lived out there, we looked at soil as something that you know you're going to use, but if you cut off all of the pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers, not much would grow. It grows because we we kill off everything that we don't want in that field and we turn it into monoculture and then we. We put steroids into it so that it will grow a giant cob of corn and so it's agriculture of course, because it produces food, but it is not quite Jeffersonian agriculture in the sense that you listened to the soil and determined what you can tease out of it

DS: 15:04 and there's so much written about that. I'm sure we'll get into it, but Adams and his, his fascination, obsession.

CSJ: 15:13 He's a real farmer. Jefferson's not a real farmer, but Adams is up there shoveling crap.

DS: 15:17 Now you really want to say Jefferson was not a real farmer. He's an agriculturist?

CSJ: 15:21 Well, he's a slave holder. He's running. He's running a

DS: 15:24 It was a pretty complex program of crop rotation

CSJ: 15:27 but you know Joe Ellis, our dear friend, says that he never once stood behind the plow. Jefferson.

DS: 15:32 I could believe that.

CSJ: 15:34 You know, you've got somebody else doing that. He's in planning with graphs about which field should be perfectly geometric and how you know, how many acres he's going to plant this year and his crop rotation system and what the prices are in Paris and London and Edinburgh, but he's not out there with a plow under the sky like Hamlin Garland up here and on the great plains.

DS: 15:54 We'll be back in just a moment. You're listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour

DS: 15:59 Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Now we're talking this week about water, a little bit about dirt, but mostly about water. We have a very special guest to speak to the author Char Miller, who has a new book

CSJ: 16:15 Char Miller, Pomona College. He's the W M Keck professor of environmental analysis at Pomona. Pomona is in the Los Angeles Basin, along with John Opie, the original author of this book, and Kenna Lang Archer, my friend Char Miller, has reissued the third edition now of Ogallala water for a dry land and it's about this fossil lake in on the great plains, which has been tapped and tapped again by industrial irrigation.

DS: 16:44 Jefferson would just love all the science involved in this. He wouldn't believe it

CSJ: 16:47 of course - it's amazing. And so, uh, so Char is concerned about how dependent we are on industrial agriculture.

DS: 16:58 Before we talked to him, there was a passage that you noted and talk to me about, could you read that

CSJ: 17:02 Let's give you a sense of Char's prose style - This is

CSJ: 17:05 the last passage and the in the whole book, again, that's overall a water for our dry land. Here's what he writes. 'That is why the Ogallala belongs to the world because humanity today is a globally dominant species whose needs spin a web of mastery, perhaps illusory, across the earth - when food from a radius of thousands of miles enters a single shopping cart or when bags of grain stamped US AID avert starvation in Africa's Sahel, the whole world depends upon the Ogallala. As a result, the clear fresh waters of the Ogallala are being gulped down at 10 times their trickling pace of replacement. Over the next 50 years. When the world's food needs multiply five or 10 times the Ogallala waters, fulfilling Adam Smith's 18th century prediction, will become as precious as diamonds.' Last last passage in this really remarkable book by an extraordinary American historian, Char Miller of Pomona College. So I had the good fortune of a number of years ago to live out on the Ogallala Aquifer. David, my wife Etta Walker, had a farm right on top of the western fringe of the Ogallala in western Kansas, and it was a pretty amazing operation. Nine miles of underground pipe, couple of giant va the engines pulling water from 250 feet below the surface. It was not Jeffersonian agriculture exactly, but it was. It was remarkable and we have the great good fortune to be able to talk this morning with my friend Char Miller of Pomona College, the coauthor of a book called Ogallala water for a dry land. Three authors, John Opie, Char Miller, and Kenna Lang Archer. Good morning, sir.

Char Miller: 18:45 Good morning, Clay.

CSJ: 18:47 When I read your book, I found something really remarkable, pretty close to the beginning. You say you and your coauthors say that while we normally think of irrigation projects in the west as involving massive dams and canals

lyrics

"Our technology that has unleashed such creativity has also unleashed the capacity for us to destroy the very things that we were creating."

— Char Miller

Clay and David speak with Char Miller, one of the three authors of the 3rd edition of Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land. Char Miller is Director of Environmental Analysis, and W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College.

Drop Jefferson into Western Kansas or Oklahoma. What does he say about the Ogallala miracle? The Ogallala aquifer is a huge underground water resource which stretches from South Dakota all the way to Texas — an underground lake the size of Lake Huron that most people have never heard of. The aquifer is used to create one of the best agricultural productivity zones on Earth. It supplies water to people, industry and agriculture, and it's expected to run dry by the end of the century. The aquifer is now living on borrowed time because of its decline as a fossil resource. How would Jefferson have reacted to all of this?

Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land is coauthored by John Opie, Kenna Lang Archer, and Char Miller.

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from 2018, track released October 23, 2018
jeffersonhour.com/blog/1309

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Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson

The Thomas Jefferson Hour is a weekly radio program dedicated to the search for truth in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson.

Nationally acclaimed humanities scholar and award-winning first-person interpreter of Thomas Jefferson, Clay S. Jenkinson, portrays Jefferson on the program, and he answers listener questions while in the persona of our third president.
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