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From: William Hyde <wthyde1953@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: The Water Knife. Was: Nebula finalists 2010
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2024 14:43:33 -0500
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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