“ECHOES FROM A WELL:
Texans, Groundwater and the Future”
Transcript
OPENING MONTAGE
AUDIO VOICE OVER:
“There is approximately the same amount of farming done in Pecos County as there was in 1950, the
difference being that they have to pay to pump all the water instead of having it flow to them naturally.
“People here are very concerned about this proposal to suck, to mine, groundwater—and we’re
talking about mining groundwater—that’s when you’re taking more water out of the ground than
what’s annually replenished by recharge from rainfall. That’s mining.”
“Here I live out on the farm, and I had to drill a new well last year because I had reached the bottom of the
other well. I did hit water thank goodness, but in some places they don’t…”
“I mean it’s not the eight inch wells, the six in wells as people call them, the 700 gallons a
minute…they don’t exist anymore. Maybe there’s 400, that’s big well, or 300….”
“There are other purchasers of land in the valley, in the immediate area, that we believe have purchased for
the water resources that are present.”
“That just as you can do what you want on your property, someone else can do what he wants on his
property, and that might be draining the water out of your area.”
“If you ask Texans what is most important to them about the environment, they will tell you it is both the
quality and the quantity of the water…”
CG [Computer Graphics - text]:
MAIN TITLE: “Echoes From a Well…Texans, Water and the Future”
CG:
As the population of Texas shifts from the rainy east to the arid west, pressure will be
placed on the already stressed aquifers that have so far quenched the thirst of farms and
people. Water policies driven by short term urban goals may jeopardize the sustainability of
the region.
CG:
CHALLENGE: What consequences will these projects pose to the people, wildlife and
land? This is not the first time Texans have battled over water—and the stories of veterans
from those struggles which follow may offer some insight into both the problems and the
potential solutions…
CG:
DAVID SCHMIDLY is the former President of Texas Tech University in Lubbock. He is the
author of “Texas Natural History: A Century of Change.” This book provides a comparison
of the Texas visited by pioneering biologist Vernon Bailey in 1905 and its modern
incarnation.
If you look at the population of Texas, it’s very interesting. I told you at the beginning of the century it was
3 million, today it’s 21. It’s gonna be 36 million in 30 years. OK. But look at where those people are—
they’re not spread evenly across the geography of Texas. 70 to 80 percent of those people are along the I-35
or east of the state. Thirty years from now you’re talking about a density of people on the upper Texas coast
that’s greater than the density of people in China! Think about that. Today, there is more water per capita in
west Texas, for people, than there is in east Texas. And that’s because of this population differential. Well,
and that is projected to continue for the next 30 years. That’s gonna put a huge pressure on water and people
are gonna—and the question is—are we gonna have the vigilance to preserve any of our water for the
ecological integrity of the state? And that’s gonna require the will of the people to want to do that.
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CG:
ORIGINS: The arid lands of west and north Texas have been blessed with groundwater
from the Edwards-Trinity aquifer and the Rio Grande bolsons of the Trans Pecos, as well as
from the Ogallala aquifer of the High Plains. Pumped from shallow wells, this, “sandstone
champagne”—once believed limitless—irrigated vast fields and fed booming cities.
CG:
JOHN MAC CARPENTER, of Fort Stockton, has worked in farming and oilfield
development during his career, and is known for his expertise on Trans-Pecos botany and
his concern for the environment of west Texas. He fears that the remaining groundwater
may no longer be able to satisfy all users and uses.
During the early 50s, after World War II, was a very prosperous period for this part of the country, and
farming was doing really well. And they did develop this area southwest of town called Belding as a farm
area. And it’s still in use, but pumping that water out finished those springs and except for occasionally in the
winter, Comache Springs do not flow anymore. When Comanche Springs went dry the farmers who
irrigated from Comanche Springs sued the farmers who were pumping the water out at Belding and this is
what established the ‘right of capture’ that in Texas, whoever owns the land can pump whatever water is out
from under it. Now, when it comes to oil and gas, this is different, because they recognize that those are
pools that are shared and I remember when fellow in Grand Falls, when I was in high school, drilled and oil
well in his backyard and was horrified to find out that in order to produce it he had to share his royalties with
his neighbors. But if it had been water, he wouldn’t have. And the country people—my people—have
fought off changes in that. It’s that “it’s my land, by God, and I’m gonna drill a well.” But now that El Paso
has bought the old farms near Valentine, and is talking about a 30 year supply for El Paso from there, it’s
what--must be 170 miles—but they’re going to build a huge pipeline, and they’re going to pump it until it’s
dry. And at that point the aquifer will be caving in and even if they stop pumping and it continues to rain at
it’s normal level, and that’s a very rich grassland at this point, but that water it will not recharge in pools
under there because the aquifers will have been destroyed, they will cave in on themselves. This, there are a
lot of ranchers whose parents and they themselves when younger would have fought you hand-to-hand over
the right of capture. But a lot of them are getting to the point where they would fight you for the other way.
Because they realize that the cities have the votes now and they are going to be able to run the new legislation and we may wind up losing all of our water in the west. And if we do, you know, we can’t live here.
CG:
POLITICS: Arguments over the ‘rule of capture’ have played a major role in legislation that
controls how Texans distribute, use and even sell water. It is a policy that has created
unusual alliances and bitter controversies.
CG:
GARY OLIVER lives in Marfa, and performs widely as a musician-activist. An artist, he
draws political cartoons for regional publications that frequently lampoon ecological follies.
It just is not in the rancher’s self interest to continue to being for everyone having unlimited use of water as
long as the city has the same rights as a person does. And that’s, that was a big line to cross, that’s been holy
ground, the law of capture in Texas. Now they are talking about, the head of the regional board who’s a
rancher, has been talking about ‘reasonable use’ as a standard. And of course that means some kind of board
has to decide what reasonable use is. Now, I won’t get into water law in the state, that’s a big issue—the last
two legislatures have dealt with it and there are water districts all over the state now—a lot of them were
killed, you probably know in the last legislature where they were made, they were ‘watered down’ so to
speak. They passed a comprehensive water law, Senate Bill 1 I think, two legislatures ago, but it had a
loophole: His bill of course was to help the big folks, industry and cities, and the loophole was that
underground water conservation districts, which could be a countywide group, could form with enabling
legislation, and could regulate transport out of district. Well, that’s not what the big guys want. They don’t
want Presidio County to be able to have a board of local guys telling whoever buys a ranch here that they
have to come before them to have transport, which means pipelining, water out of district, tell them ‘that’s
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OK.’ You know, that’s not the idea. They want to come in and take all the water they want with no local
input. Because of course the locals are going to say ‘no.’ You don’t have to drain an aquifer to trash it, all
you have to do is lower the level enough so that suspended minerals in pockets come down into it and the
quality of the water can change. We have wonderful water, ancient water, and El Paso is proposing, I think
they said, 15,000 acre-feet a year when there is little over ten times, maybe many times, more than the
recharge.
CG:
COMMERCE: Throughout the 20th Century, water in Texas has been seen as not simply
the fount of biological life, but as an engine for economic growth and development. What
will happen to the quality of human life when the pace of growth outstrips the supply of
water?
CG:
BILL ADDINGTON is a grocer and landowner in the far west Texas town of Sierra Blanca,
where he helped lead the fights to protect the high-desert ecosystem and aquifer against
radioactive waste and sludge disposal projects.
People here are very concerned about this proposal to suck, to mine, and we’re talking about mining
groundwater, that’s when you are taking more water out of the ground than what’s annually replenished from
rainfall. That’s mining. And that’s what they want to do. They say it’s not mining, that they’re not gonna do
this, and we say it is. And we know it is. There is very little recharge coming into these aquifers. Now,
they’re…we have a group, fledgling group we stared, the West Texas Water Protection Fund, which we’re
trying to educate the people of this region, including the people in the city by the way, into this issue so we
can work together. We don’t believe, David, that it should be an urban versus a rural war. There will be a
water war if El Paso continues in its path of being arrogant in trying to run over us and take our water. There
will be a water war. But we think the people in El Paso want the same things—the majority of people
anyway—want the same things that we do. They want a good life for their families, they want their children
to have a quality of life equal to theirs; and it’s the same things we want. I don’t think the people in El Paso
want—once they have this information—to be another Los Angeles, another Phoenix, another wanna-be
Mexico City. We have big problems already from the expansion of El Paso, of congestion, infrastructure,
schools, traffic problems—it takes a long time to drive anywhere anymore because of the gridlock and traffic
and people are starting to notice that. So I think the developers and bankers should not control the future of
El Paso, and they’re the ones that have historically controlled the city council, the mayor, and the very
powerful public service board, that wants to take our water. They control them—the developers and the
bankers—for the agenda of growth at any cost. Explosive, unplanned, unsustainable growth at any cost and
that is a path that hurts us all—people in the city and people in the rural area.
CG:
FOOD: Conscientious farmers have always understood the concept of land stewardship
even if the general public little notices the hard work that goes into maintaining our supply
of fresh food. But without water, even the best farmers would be hard-pressed to produce.
CG:
JIM LYNCH along with his wife Mary, has successfully farmed the high Trans-Pecos desert
in Dell City for close to 50 years. Recently he has grown concerned about pending water
projects that might undermine his region’s agricultural base.
We were told about the area by people in the oil industry who had come here in the late 40s to probe for oil
and gas and were not successful. However, they realized the abundance of the water and told us about it and
on investigation it proved to be very worthwhile, so we migrated from California to west Texas and have
been here ever since….There are other purchasers of land in the valley, in the immediate area that we believe
have purchased for the water resources that are present. They’re not farm people and they are people with
sufficient money and resources to buy up a lot of land and that has occurred to some degree….If it can be
proven that the Dell Valley can afford to sell or ship a portion of their water to El Paso and not injure the
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economy of the local community, then I think people would be, permit that sort of thing to occur. But until
we are convinced that that is the correct way to go, we’re very skeptical, we’re very fearful that it will make
farming more difficult, more costly, and perhaps even rule out farming because in the Texas legislature,
they’re at the present time they have a what they call Senate Bill number 2; it’s being considered just this
week in Austin, that would be very damaging, we would lose more control over our water and so it would
give the state a little more control and therefore they would favor the larger cities as opposed to the farming.
They do regard farming as a marginal use of water, when you compare it with domestic use for city
consumption.
CG:
HERITAGE: Farm families have generations of history and tradition tied to their plots of
land. However, it is a history that may be quickly erased if the planned sales of water from
the High Plains Ogallala aquifer—much like those from rural aquifers in west Texas—are
not reconsidered.
CG:
JEAN GRAMSTORFF is a farmer and banker in the Panhandle town of Farnsworth, where
she has led efforts to protect local family farms and merchants as well as the region’s allimportant Ogallala aquifer.
The Ogallala is going down rapidly. The recharge rate to the Ogallala is like less than half an inch a year and
we’re pulling it down at about two to three feet a year. So it’s gonna be gone. The optimists say we’ll have it
until maybe 50 years from now….T. Boone Pickens came into Hemphill and southern Ogiltree and I think
maybe part of Gray county. He has a ranch down in that area, and he decided it would be very good just to
export that water down state and they’d just pipe it down there and make a whole bunch of money on it.
Well the problem it did for the adjacent ranchers is that if T. Boone pumps it out of his place, it’s gonna take
it out of their place too because the Ogallala goes all the way under. So it made it very difficult for these
ranchers to decide what to do and many of them said, ‘OK, we’ll sell you the water rights’ because at least
they’re gonna get some money out of it when they lost their water. And this has been a real big thing. And T.
Boone talks a big line and he encourages them to tell them that they would get it sold, he thought, to San
Antonio. Well San Antonio hasn’t bitten yet and neither had Dallas, but even so, it is still in the offing that
this will be shipped. Well when we only have a 50 year supply of water, and he’ s gonna be pumping it out
by the millions of gallons, you can imagine what that’s gonna do to that 50 year supply. It will go do to 20
or whatever….Here I live out on the farm and I had to drill a new well last year because I had reached the
bottom of the other well. I did hit water, thank goodness, but in some places they don’t. This Ogallala goes
under this Panhandle, under part of—quite a bit of Kansas—Nebraska, western Oklahoma, and it the chief
and only water supply for this area.
CG:
ECOSYSTEMS: While the courts and Legislature work to determine the fate of these water
sales and exports, some ranchers are taking pro-active steps to restore a healthy balance
between land use and rainfall, and to revive the grass-covered plains.
CG:
DARRYL BIRKENFIELD is a farmer, teacher, writer and former priest in the High Plains
town of Nazareth, where he works in the grass-fed livestock business and teaches land
stewardship.
I see one of the things that has come in and changed things for the most has been the Conservation Reserve
Program, the CRP. It started, I believe, in 1985. And what it allowed farmers to do was to idle marginal
land, land that as many people would say, should never have been taken out of grass. So they idled it by
planting it to grass and receiving a government payment per acre for 10 years to keep that land out of
production….But I think, again, the ecological effect was to take out marginal land, to cut soil erosion, to get
some biodiversity going, and then this interesting thing of, in these drought years, the past 3 and 4 summers,
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they have allowed emergency grazing of the CRP. And that’s been really good. For one thing, it’s allowed
these cow-calf operations that have come back into the area, for the medium and small producer to have an
outlet. I think a lot more of those cows would have had to been sold in the past 3 or 4 summers had there not
been the Conservation Reserve Program….It’s transformed this area. In Nazareth, for example, irrigation
has really been going ‘south’; I mean, it’s not the 8 inch wells that…the 6 inch wells as people called them,
the 700 gallons a minute. They don’t exist anymore. Maybe there’s 400—that’s a big well—or 300. There’s
a lot of 200 gallon a minute wells. So as that threshold is lowered, as the aquifer and the ability to pump it at
that level has declined, you see those wells are being closed, shut down. And east of here and north of here
you have lots of sections, lots of acreage where there’s no irrigation going on. So what’s the effect? I’m sure
the aquifer is not dropping 3 or 4 feet a year. I think the figures from the High Plains Underground Water
District would collaborate with the fact that some of them have stabilized—the aquifer is stabilized in some
areas. That’s good news for the long term. And even the short term. It has allowed what I think is the
beginning of a grass economy to come back into play. And who would have thought it in the 80s that we
would get there.
CG:
SUSTAINABILITY: To insure that all Texans, be they urban dwellers or high country
farmers, have access to the life-giving waters will require a new paradigm: an ability to look
at water as something more than a commodity to be bought and sold by the highest
bidders.
CG:
TONYA KLEUSKENS is a farmer in the Panhandle community of Dawn, where she has
also helped organize the efforts to protect the Ogallala aquifer from the impacts of a highlevel radioactive waste site.
We cannot control the natural elements. You know, there is some much that we understand about it, but
there’s also so much that we don’t. And this little plot of land down here is a very good example because,
while the water is 67 feet deep in that one spot, as you move toward the Tierra Blanca creek, there are
springs that are flowing; some not more than a mud puddle, but at least one that flows 20 gallons a minute in
the heat of summer. You know, it doesn’t run down the creek very far, but it lets us know that there’s some
characteristic going on there in terms of hydrology that we don’t necessarily understand. Because they don’t
know if it’s water on its way to the aquifer, if it’s water coming from the aquifer being pushed up through
fissures in the rock, or if it’s just the water puddling in the shallow areas and moving over there. And when
we talked with representatives of the High Plains Underground Water District out of Lubbock, they said
there simply was not enough information about the hydrology in that area for them to make a definitive
statement about what was going on or how it might happen. You know, there are just areas beneath the earth
where we can drill holes, but we can’t see. And we certainly can’t control when it rains and where it rains.
And I think that, as a whole, there is some humility about that. During the industrial era, as we came into
that, it seemed we were going to learn to control everything, and we’re not. We’re just come to the point
where we have to understand that we can’t. We have to learn to interact.
CG:
WITNESS: The pageantry of Texas has been recounted in paintings, on the printed page
and across the wide screen. The poet, as well, has offered his voice, and sings a ballad
that flows through history like the waters in this tale.
CG:
ANDY WILKINSON has had a varied and colorful career as a poet, playwright and singer.
His artistic work recounts the human and historical experiences of life in the Panhandle,
near his Lubbock home.
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(sings) Sandstone Champagne
It started with windmills, air motors and eclipses—
And then it was engines of gas and electric,
The flick of a switch spewing water through ditches
And long the aluminum veins
Popping the cork on the sandstone champagne.
It bubbled up cool, clean and wet ,
Sparkling like diamonds on a young girl’s neck.
With a taste so sweet we were quick to forget
The sweat the toil and the pain.
Were just part of the price of the sandstone champagne.
So we nursed the cattle the cotton and wheat,
Tthe corn and the sorghum the soy beans and beets,
The cities and the highways of steel and concrete.
Well, everything’s been sustained,
By a pull on the bottle of the sandstone champagne.
And we’re all getting drunk on sandstone champagne.
Three bales to an acre and four if it rains, if it rains.
Just keep drilling deeper no one will complain
Till the cellar is empty of sandstone champagne.
Well, it’s a dam foolish party
And there’s a hangover due
For our sons and our daughters
When all the drinking is through
Because hungry and thirsty
They’re going to curse me and you.
We’ll only have this to explain.
We drank it like water, the sandstone champagne.
And we’re all getting drunk on sandstone champagne.
Three bales to an acre and four if it rains, if it rains.
Just keep drilling deeper no one will complain
Till the cellar is empty of sandstone champagne.
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END CREDITS:
Videotape Production
DAVID WEISMAN
GARY SPALDING
Produced by
DAVID TODD
Written & Edited by
DAVID WEISMAN
---------------------------
Content Review
LAURA BROCK
NORMAN JOHNS
SUSAN KADERKA
MARY KELLY
BARBARA McCULLOUGH
JENNIFER McMAHON
ERIN ROGERS
COLIN ROWAN
MARY SANGER
--------------------------Music
ALAN WEISMAN
SONG: “Sandstone Champagne”
Written and performed by
ANDY WILKINSON
--------------------------The Conservation History Association of Texas wishes to thank the following individuals for their
time and consideration in appearing in this production:
Bill Addington
Darryl Birkenfield
John Mac Carpenter
Jean Gramstorff
Tonya Kleuskens
Jim Lynch
Gary Oliver
Fran Sage
Andy Sansom
David Schmidly
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Andy Wilkinson
--------------------------For Additional Resources and Information:
Environmental Defense, Texas Ofice
National Wildlife Federation, Texas Office
Sierra Club, Lone Star Chapter
(512) 476-9805
www.texaswatermatters.org
Texas Parks and Wildlife
(512) 389-4800
www.tpwd.state.tx.us/texaswater/sb1
--------------------------ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Brown Foundation
Center for American History, University of Texas
Friends of the Texas Historical Commission
Hershey Foundation
Houston Endowment
Magnolia Charitable Trust
Meadows Foundation
San Luis Video Publishing
School of Information, University of Texas
Summerlee Foundation
Susan Vaughan Foundation
Texas Parks and Wildlife
Wray Charitable Trust
--------------------------FOR THE CONSERVATION HISTORY ASSOCIATION OF TEXAS
Board of Trustees:
Janice Bezanson
John Hamilton
Susan Petersen, Chair
Ted Siff, Treasurer
Advisory Council:
Laura Dunn
Stephen Klineberg, Ph.D.
Louis Marchiafava, Ph.D.
Martin Melosi, Ph.D.
Char Miller, Ph.D.
Paul Steckler, Ph.D.
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--------------------------Copyright 2003
Conservation History Association of Texas
www.texaslegacy.org
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