The fossil fuel industry emptied the reservoirs of the American West.
I read the wire Tuesday morning on the bench at the shop, with the parts catalog open to a Stihl chainsaw order I needed to call in. A woman named Dianelis Molina Cruz and her friend Noel De Leon walked the receding shore at Boulder Beach on Lake Mead on August 16. De Leon bent to pick up a rock and pulled up a jawbone with the teeth still set into it. The National Park Service and Las Vegas Metro responded; the investigation is open. That is how the story starts. With someone holding a piece of a person who is not here anymore, because the water has dropped more than a hundred and fifty feet from where it was when the reservoir was full, and what is at the bottom of a reservoir when the water goes down is whatever was drowned when the water went up.
The water at Lake Mead dropped last week to 1,040 feet above sea level — below the record low set in July of 2022, comfortably below any level the modern water-rights system was built to deliver. The Bureau’s own measurements have been tracking toward it for four years. Two pieces of paper from two federal agencies — the Bureau’s water-level figure and the Park Service’s statement about the bones — told the same story a few days apart. The water is leaving. What is underneath is coming up.
The compacts are the heart of it. In 1922 the seven basin states — Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California — sat down and divided the river among themselves in a document called the Colorado River Compact. They allocated more water than the river, in their own climate, actually carried. That over-allocation has been the explicit deliverable of Western water policy for a hundred and four years. As long as the snowpack held and Mead and Powell ran near full, the math hid. The two reservoirs did the hiding.
The hiding is over. The Bureau now wants the lower basin to cut deliveries by as much as 40 percent — the deepest cut the system has ever ordered. What the compacts did was promise water that wasn’t there, and then have someone — us, for a hundred years — make up the difference from the reservoirs. The reservoirs were supposed to be banks. They have become, under twenty-five years of aridification, withdrawals. That is what running them dry amounts to. The water wasn’t there. The compacts said it was. The compacts keep saying it is. The dead surfacing at Boulder Beach are what happens when you keep saying something is there when there isn’t.
The question the bones ask is the question the water asks. Who did this. Who was told, who knew, who kept on anyway.
ExxonMobil’s own scientists had the warming modeled by the late 1970s. The American Petroleum Institute ran a multi-million-dollar communications plan in 1998 whose stated goal, in the words of the plan itself, was that “victory will be achieved when average citizens understand uncertainties in climate science” — to manufacture doubt, in other words, so the policy response could be deferred. The Heartland Institute took Philip Morris money in the 1990s to run the same playbook the tobacco industry had used, and when the tobacco playbook ran out of road, they ran it on climate instead. The same architects, the same memos, the same front groups. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway named this in Merchants of Doubt fifteen years ago, and they named the men. They are still named. The pattern is documented. The documents are in the documents.
The politicians they kept in office knew, or could have known, or could have been told by any of the career civil servants at NOAA or the EPA or the U.S. Geological Survey who tried to tell them. They took the donations anyway. They signed the letters. They put out the statements. They voted the way the donors needed them to vote. Some of them are still on the committees that oversee the Bureau of Reclamation, which is the agency that has spent the last five years trying to figure out how to allocate less water to fewer farms and cities while the lawyers argue about a compact signed in 1922. The compact was signed in 1922. The climate was not what it is now in 1922. The compact assumes a river that no longer exists.
Aldo Leopold was standing on a piece of worn-out land in Sauk County when he wrote the second essay of the Sand County Almanac, talking about the Wisconsin River and what it costs a country to settle land it cannot settle. He said the waste, drained into the rivers, did not vanish; it added itself to the next county down. The compacts did the same at scale, with river water instead of topsoil. Lake Mead is handing back the receipt.
I keep a notebook on my bench for what the woods and the lakes around here are telling me. Twelve years now. The deer used to bed down in the south end of my forty in the second week of October. They bed down there now in the last week of October. The mosquitoes used to show up in May; they show up in March some years. The ice on Lake Petenwell — my lake, the one I ice-fish through February and watch the bald eagles on in March — used to go out the second week of April. The last three years it has gone out the last week of March. The fishing pier near the dam has been two feet out of the water, then four, then eight. The marina operator down at the Castle Rock end has a stop on his motors. Twelve years of notebook entries. The line goes one direction.
Lake Petenwell is Wisconsin’s second-largest lake entirely within the state’s borders, twenty-three thousand acres of flowage on the Wisconsin River, and it is not the reservoir that supplies drinking water to twenty-five million people across the Southwest. But the physics is the same physics. The same warmer winters that have moved my ice-out date three weeks earlier in twelve years are the same warmer winters that have cut the snowpack on the Rockies that feeds the Colorado River that fills Lake Mead. The U.N. climate panel said it in plain language in 2021. The Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts said the same thing in plainer language for Wisconsin in 2021. The U.S. National Climate Assessment said it for the Midwest in 2023. The line goes one direction on every piece of paper that measures it.
Wendell Berry has written about this in The Unsettling of America, in the essays, in the Port William novels — in the way he writes about everything — as a question of membership. A community is the people who belong to a place, and a place is the land and the water that belong to the people, and the people who belong to the place are responsible for it. When the responsibility is taken from them — when the river is given to a compact and the compact is given to lawyers and the lawyers are given to Congress and Congress is given to donors — the river is lost, and then the people are lost, and then the bones come up. Berry would put it in plainer English than I do. The plain English is that we took a place that could have been cared for and we let it be emptied so that someone could keep getting paid.
The bones at Boulder Beach are not the first bones the drought has given back. Three weeks ago the same kind of drought was exhuming the hull of a broken-up World War Two vessel near Prahovo in Serbia, and a German Wehrmacht motorcycle out of the Danube at Budapest with two German soldiers’ bodies alongside it. Rutland Water in England gave up the foundations of the village of Nether Hambleton, demolished and flooded in the 1970s to make a reservoir for the East Midlands, foundation by foundation. The same atmosphere is warming over all of them. It does not care whose country the river runs through.
What it would look like to do this differently is not a secret. It is what the rural electric cooperatives built under the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 have done for ninety years. Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, headquartered three miles from my shop on the south edge of Friendship, is one of them. Take the infrastructure that the market said was not worth building and build it anyway, because the people who live in the territory need it. The Bureau of Reclamation could be doing the same thing on the Colorado — running the water system for the people who live in the basin, not for the lawyers arguing over a compact. The fossil fuel industry could have been told forty years ago that the externalized cost of its product was no longer going to be externalized. The U.N. climate panel could have been right in 1990 when they warned that emissions had to be cut soon to avoid dangerous warming — and they have repeated the same warning, in plainer language, in every report since. The window is closing. The bones at Boulder Beach are the receipts.
Washington is draining Mead and Powell to keep the compacts alive. The compacts are dead in the climate we are actually living in. Everyone in Western water policy knows that now. They have known it for a decade. They are negotiating, slowly, against the prospect of their own admission.
The next generation of Western water managers will negotiate the compacts that should have been negotiated in 1990. They will not have my sympathy. They will have my attention. The bones surfacing from Lake Mead this August belong to people whose deaths were not their fault. They will be told their families, where any remain. The slower deaths — the cities whose growth met their compacts, the farms whose pivots met their compacts, the wells whose water met the compacts — those are slower and harder to grieve. They are what the compacts cost. They are what a serious renegotiation would prevent for the next century.
Mike will be 27 then and Quinn 24. They will or will not have a Petenwell, an Adams County, a Wisconsin. That is what this column is for.