Near one of the last desert terminal lakes in the American West, water profiteers continue to scour the desert looking to gain.
As real estate developers, hedge funds, and tech bros fight over the last drops in aquifers and surface water systems in northwestern Nevada, we must prepare to push back.
Recent speculative efforts in the Granite Springs Basin, the Smoke Creek Desert, San Emidio Basin, and Hualapai Basin, and others all portend a future where more and more entities are looking for water to extract for corporate gains. There are tech companies like Blockchains, hedge funds like Water Asset Management, and real estate interests like DR Horton (Vidler) with major plans to commit more unsustainable water uses in the region.
While we can’t see it, the groundwater in these basins connects to important places like Pyramid Lake and rural communities while also providing water for springs that sustain wildlife and plant life. If we allow more pumping, we will lose all that we have left underground, seeing devastating effects above ground.
In the high deserts of the western Great Basin, water for sprawl has been a longstanding threat to ecosystems and communities. For decades, we’ve heard promises of pipelines and exportation schemes that will shower riches of subdivisions, factories, and shopping malls on now-barren patches of desert.
Proposals for more sprawl development in Sparks, Pershing County, Storey County, Fallon, Fernley, Dayton, Silver Springs, Stagecoach and elsewhere puts immense pressure on the small amount of water that remains available in the groundwater systems surrounding Reno.
That is why GBWN birddogs companies in the region. We have built friendships with indigenous communities, farmers, ranchers, and other desert dwellers looking to keep their water where it belongs. We have learned about connection, responsibility, and the need for more conservation.
In recent months, we have engaged on multiple efforts to export and extract water from deserts near Pyramid Lake, the ancestral home to Paiute people, a refuge for Lahontan Cutthroat Trout and Cui-ui, and a remnant of the ancient Lake Lahontan that once covered 8,500 square miles in Nevada and California. The last wet remnants of that waterbody are only visible at Pyramid Lake and Walker Lake. But the water lines etched in stone and the tufa formations spiraling from the ground serve as reminders of what was here a mere 12,000 years ago.
But another reminder exists: groundwater.
Carbon dating and other methods of gleaning the age of groundwater shows that many of our aquifer systems are connected to subterranean sources that still hold waters from when Lake Lahontan existed in its largest extent –– with some water ages dating back more than 16,000 years.
Once these waters are gone, they won’t come back. And once they are gone, it will impact the water that is available for generations to come.
Join GBWN in our efforts to keep water where it belongs. Every drop counts.