Ogallala Blue: Water and Life on the Great Plains

William Ashworth's Ogallala Blue is a great story expertly told. The author lays out the agricultural and political aspects of groundwater use in the High Plains. Drawing on the personalities and perspectives of those managing and studying the aquifer, his style is both relaxed and information dense. The reader is left wondering if our political and legal institutions can respond in time to prevent exhaustion of the aquifer and a forced return to dry-land farming in the High Plains.

I was born in Valentine, Nebraska but I had only the vaguest knowledge of the Ogallala Aquifer that was underfoot. The events of Ancient Rome or Middle Earth of Tolkien (which never did exist, of course) were of greater reality to me than the buffalo and loons and prairie dogs that were around me all the time. Now that I am half a century old, I cry over the despoilation of that beautiful land and all of North America. Mr. Ashworth's book was really excellent! I found it exciting and informative, packed with numbers at times, and at other times full of drama. I think he captured most of the political and economic issues very well, and did a really excellent job of introducing us to the scientific issues. It is very hard to disentangle a review like this from the issue involved. The book is great, no doubt about it, but the issue is so gripping and heart-wrenching. My grandfather was a dryland cattle rancher in Cherry County from about 1915 until the 1960s. What would he think now? I remember the old wooden windmill on his ranch, pumping water into the round corrugated metal tank. I have so many fond memories of the sandhills -- looking for arrowheads in blowouts (mentioned in the book) with my dad as a kid... watching for trains, picking up garter snakes, seeing a "plague of frogs" after a summer rain (I kid you not!!! I drove over Highway 20 once evening in to Valentine, right over thousands of frogs that swarmed everywhere, including the highway. I didn't know what to do! I slowed down but that made the sounds all the more horrible. What terrible karma have I accumulated for myself on that fateful June evening so many years ago?) I think it is funny that today we spend extra money for chickens and cattle that are organic and free-range. That was all they were for years and years!!! All my grandfather's cattle were free-range! Truly. They were shot and slaughtered, true, but up to that point they had a good life on the prairie. My experience is mostly Nebraska, though I have done a lot of driving through eastern Colorado, and I have toured South Dakota, esp. the badlands. But the Ogallala Aquifer is home to me... and water, well, how you can say that water isn't home? Thank you, Mr. Ashworth! I hope that the future works out better than the past! I truly do! (PS I remember thinking center pivots in the Sandhills were a HUGE mistake in the 1980s! And I've done enough farmwork that I feel I can criticize!)

I spent my summers in the 1950's as a child on my grandmother's farm in western Kansas. I was always fascinated by the abundant water flowing out of the Caterpillar irrigation pump. It was frigidly cold on a west Kansas 100 degree day. My uncles would put a watermelon in a burlap bag and suspend it under the discharge water from the pump. The water could not have been much more than 60 degrees--or so it seemed. They used the old style irrigation method of that era: unlined ditches and irrigation tubes (first rubber, later aluminum). My older brother and I used to float down those ditches in inner tubes. So, I'm a little sentimental about the Ogallala. Still, beyond the sentimentality, the story of the Ogallala is a fascinating one. So much water, so many square miles of the high plains. It's somewhat a sad story because of so much depletion of the aquifer. But it's actually a lot more upbeat than I anticipated because of the awareness of most of the people involved in overseeing and using the Ogallala and the regulatory authorities. It seems like the great majority of people in the region know that conservation is the name of the game--while still utilizing the resource in an intelligent manner. There are exceptions, of course. The state of Texas with it's water law of he who has the biggest pump wins. In this day and age, I don't know why that doesn't surprise me. Oklahoma also sounds to be a little unsound on conservation with its water law, as well. Overall, the author has done a fine job of telling a story of geology, people, conservation, and irrigation technology blended together. I found it very informative and I learned a number of things about which I was totally unaware. I plan on giving the book to my mother for her 80th birthday.

From Texas to South Dakota, there is a 5 trillion gallon underground lake. From the time of the glaciers, this water source has made our nation livable