Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (10 page)

The next set of environmental problems in Montana involves its soils. One "minor" and specific soil problem is that the Bitterroot Valley's boom in
commercial apple orchards, which were initially very profitable, collapsed,
due in part to apple trees exhausting the soil's nitrogen. A more widespread soil problem is erosion, resulting from any of several changes that remove the plant cover normally protecting the soil: overgrazing, noxious weed in
festation, logging, or excessively hot forest fires that sterilize the topsoil.
Long-timer ranching families know better than to overgraze their pastures:
as Dick and Jack Hirschy expressed it to me, "We must take good care of our
land, or we will be ruined." However, one of the Hirschys' neighbors is an
outsider who paid more for his property than it could sustainably support
by ranching, and who is now overstocking his pastures in the short-sighted
hope of recouping his investment. Other neighbors made the mistake of renting grazing rights on their land to tenants, who overgrazed for a quick
profit during their three-year lease and didn't care about the resulting long-
term damage. The net result of these various causes of soil erosion is that about one-third of the Bitterroot's watersheds are considered to be in good
shape and not eroded, one-third are at risk of erosion, and one-third are al
ready eroded and in need of restoration.

The remaining soil problem in Montana, besides nitrogen exhaustion
and erosion, is salinization, a process involving salt accumulation in soil and
groundwater. While such accumulation has always occurred naturally in
some areas, a more recent concern is the ruining of large areas of farmland
by salinization resulting from some human agricultural practices that I'll
explain in the next few paragraphs and in Chapter 13
—particularly from
clearing of natural vegetation, and from irrigation. In parts of Montana, salt
concentrations in soil water have reached levels double those of seawater.

Besides certain salts having specific toxic effects on crops, high salt con
centrations exert a general harmful effect on crops similar to the effect of a
drought, by raising the osmotic pressure of soil water and thereby making it
harder for roots to absorb water by osmosis. The salty groundwater may
also end up in wells and streams and may evaporate on the surface to leave a
caked layer of salt. If you imagine yourself drinking a glass of "water" more
concentrated than the ocean, you will appreciate that not only does it taste
horrible and prevent farmers from growing crops, but that its dissolved 
boron, selenium, and other toxic ingredients may be bad for your health
(and for that of wildlife and your livestock). Salinization is a problem today
in many parts of the world besides the U.S., including India, Turkey, and es
pecially Australia (see Chapter 13). In the past it contributed to the decline of the world's oldest civilizations, those of Mesopotamia: salinization pro
vides a large part of the explanation for why applying the term "Fertile
Crescent" today to Iraq and Syria, formerly the leading center of world agri
culture, would be a cruel joke.

Montana's main form of salinization is one that has ruined several mil
lion acres of cropland in the northern Great Plains as a whole, including
several hundred thousand acres in northern, eastern, and central Montana.
The form is called "saline seep," because salty water building up in the
ground in an uphill area percolates through the soil to emerge as a seep in a
downhill area up to half a mile or farther distant. Saline seeps frequently be
come bad for neighborly friendship when the agricultural practices of one
farmer uphill cause a saline seep on a downhill neighbor's property.

Here is how a saline seep arises. Eastern Montana has lots of water-
soluble salts (especially sodium, calcium, and magnesium sulfates) present
as components of the rocks and soils themselves, and also trapped in ma
rine deposits (because much of the region used to be ocean). Below the soil
zone is a layer of bedrock (shale, sandstone, or coal) that has low permeability to water. In dry eastern Montana environments covered with native
vegetation, almost all rain that falls is promptly taken up by the vegeta
tion's roots and transpired back into the atmosphere, leaving the soil below the root layer dry. However, when a farmer clears the native vegetation to practice crop-and-fallow agriculture, in which an annual crop like wheat is
grown during one year and the land is left fallow the next year, there are no plant roots to take up rainwater falling in the fallow year. That rain
water accumulates in the soil, waterlogs it below the root layer, and dissolves
salts that then rise into the root zone as the water table rises. Because of
the impermeable underlying bedrock, the salty water doesn't drain deeply
into the ground but emerges somewhere downhill nearby as a saline seep.
The result is that crops grow more poorly or not at all, both in the uphill
area where the problem arises and in the downhill area where the seep
emerges.

Saline seeps became widespread in much of Montana after 1940 as a consequence of changes in agricultural practices
—especially the increasing
use of tractors and more efficient soil tilling devices, weed-killers to kill
weed plant cover during the fallow period, and more land under fallow each

year. The problem must be combatted by various intensive types of farm
management, such as sowing salt-tolerant plants in the downhill seep areas
to start reclaiming them, decreasing the length of fallow time in the uphill
area by a crop schedule known as flexible cropping, and planting alfalfa and
other perennial water-demanding crops with deep roots to take up excess
water from the soil.

In the areas of Montana where agriculture depends directly on rain
fall, saline seeps are the main salt-related form of land damage. But they
are not the only form. Several million acres of agricultural land that depend
for their water on irrigation rather than on rainfall are distributed patchily
throughout the whole state, including in my summering areas of the Bitter-
root Valley and Big Hole Basin. Salinization is starting to appear in some of
those areas where the irrigation water contains salt. Another form arises >
from an industrial method to extract methane for natural gas from coal
beds by drilling into the coal and pumping in water to carry the methane up
to the surface. Unfortunately, water dissolves not only methane but also salt. Since 1988, the adjacent state of Wyoming, which is almost as poor as Mon
tana, has been seeking to boost its economy by embarking on a big program
of methane extraction by this method, yielding salty water that drains from
Wyoming into southeastern Montana's Powder River Basin.

To start to understand the apparently intractable water problems that bedevil Montana along with other dry areas of the American West, think of
the Bitterroot Valley as having two largely separate water supplies: irrigation from ditches fed by mountain streams, lakes, or the Bitterroot River itself, to
water fields for agriculture; and wells drilled into underground aquifers,
which provide most of the water for domestic use. The valley's larger towns
provide municipal water supplies, but houses outside those few towns all
get their water from individual private wells. Both the irrigation water sup
ply and the well water supply are facing the same fundamental dilemma: an
increasing number of users for decreasing amounts of water. As the Bitter-
root's water commissioner, Vern Woolsey, explained it succinctly to me,
Whenever you have a source of water and more than two people using it,
there will be a problem. But why fight about water? Fighting won't make
more water!"

The ultimate reason for decreasing amounts of water is climate change:
Montana is becoming warmer and drier. While global warming will pro
duce winners as well as losers in different places around the world, Montana 
will be among the big losers because its rainfall was already marginally ade
quate for agriculture. Drought has now forced abandonment of large areas
of farmland in eastern Montana, as well as in adjacent areas of Alberta and
Saskatchewan. Visible effects of global warming in my summering areas in
western Montana are that snow in the mountains is becoming confined to
higher altitudes and often now no longer remains throughout the summer
on the mountains surrounding the Big Hole Basin, as it did when I first vis
ited in 1953.

The most visible effect of global warming in Montana, and perhaps any
where in the world, is in Glacier National Park. While glaciers all over the
world are in retreat
—on Mt. Kilimanjaro, in the Andes and Alps, on the
mountains of New Guinea, and around Mt. Everest—the phenomenon has
been especially well studied in Montana because its glaciers are so accessible
to climatologists and tourists. When the area of Glacier National Park was first visited by naturalists in the late 1800s, it contained over 150 glaciers;
now, there are only about 35 left, mostly at just a small fraction of their first-reported size. At present rates of melting, Glacier National Park will have no
glaciers at all by the year 2030. Such declines in the mountain snowpack are
bad for irrigation systems, whose summer water comes from melting of the
snow that remains up in the mountains. It's also bad for well systems tap
ping the Bitterroot River's aquifer, whose volume has decreased because of
recent drought.

As in other dry areas of the American West, agriculture would be impos
sible in the Bittterroot Valley without irrigation, because annual rainfall in
the valley bottom is only about 13 inches per year. Without irrigation, the
valley's vegetation would be sagebrush, which is what Lewis and Clark reported on their visit in 1805-1806, and which one still sees today as soon as
one crosses the last irrigation ditch on the valley's eastern side. Construc
tion of irrigation systems fed by snowmelt water from the high mountains
forming the valley's western side began already in the late 1800s and peaked
in 1908-1910. Within each irrigation system or district, each landowner or
group of landowners has the right to take for his or her land a specified
quantity of water from the system.

Unfortunately, in most Bitterroot irrigation districts the water is "over-allocated." That is
—incredibly to a naive outsider like me—the sum of the
water rights allocated to all landowners exceeds the flow of water available
in most years, at least later in the summer when snowmelt is decreasing.
Part of the reason is that allocations are calculated on the assumption of a
fixed water supply, but in fact water supplies vary from year to year with cli
mate, and the assumed fixed water supply is the value for a relatively wet
year. The solution is to assign priorities among landowners according to the
historical date on which the water right was claimed for that property, and to cut off water deliveries first to the most junior right-owner and then to
earlier right-owners as water flows in the ditches decrease. That's already a recipe for conflict, because the oldest farms with the earliest rights claimed
are often downhill, and it's hard for uphill farmers with lower-ranking
rights to see water that they desperately need flowing merrily downhill past
their property and yet to refrain from taking the water. But if they did take
it, their downhill neighbors could sue them.

A further problem results from land subdivision: originally the land was
owned in large blocks whose single owner of course took water from the
ditch for his different fields in sequence, and who wouldn't have been so
silly as to try to water all his fields simultaneously and thus run out of water.
But as those original 160-acre blocks have become subdivided each into 40
four-acre house lots, there isn't enough water when each of those 40 house-
owners tries to water and keep the house's garden green without realizing
that the other 39 neighbors are irrigating simultaneously. Still another
problem is that irrigation rights apply only to so-called "beneficial" use of water benefitting the piece of land holding the right. Leaving water in the
river for the fish and for the tourists trying to float down the river on rafts is
not considered a "beneficial" right. Sections of the Big Hole River have actu
ally dried up in some recent dry summers. Until 2003, many of those potential conflicts in the Bitterroot Valley were amicably adjudicated for several
decades by Vern Woolsey, the 82-year-old water commissioner whom every
one respected, but my Bitterroot friends are terrified at the potential for
conflict now that Vern has finally stepped down.

Bitterroot irrigation systems include 28 small privately owned dams
constructed across mountain streams, in order to store snowmelt water in
the spring and to release it for irrigating fields in the summer. These dams constitute ticking time bombs. They were all built a century ago, to weak designs now considered primitive and dangerous. They have been maintained poorly or not at all. Many are at risk of collapses that would flood houses and property lying below them. Devastating floods resulting from
failures of two such dams several decades ago convinced the Forest Service to declare that a dam's owners, and also any contractor that has ever worked
on the dam, bear the liability for damages caused by a dam failure. Owners
are responsible for either fixing or removing their dam. While this principle
may seem reasonable, three facts often make it financially onerous: most of 
the present owners bearing the liability get little financial benefit from their dam and no longer care to fix it (e.g., because the land has been subdivided
into house lots, and they now use the dam just to water their lawns rather than to earn a living as farmers); the federal and state governments offer
money on a cost-sharing basis to fix a dam, but not to remove one; and half
of the dams are on lands now designated as wilderness areas, where roads are forbidden and repair machinery must be flown in by expensive heli
copter charters.