THE SUBTERRANEAN H20 BLUES....

Many years back, I was commissioned by the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation and the Playa Lakes Joint Venture (one of many such “joint venture” public/private partnerships across the nation, each with its own conservation focus) to write a feature story about playas and the crucial role they play in groundwater recharge in the Ogallala aquifer.

And if you don't know what a playa is (most folks outside the plains don't), please allow my melodious words to edify you...

Like everything else on the arid, windswept plains of western Oklahoma, these shallow prairie basins ebb and flow on the random tide of the weather. Ephemeral is how they are most often described, and indeed, playa lakes are the spectral phantoms of the plains. They come and they go. One year they’ll be so numerous that when seen from the air the prairie seems covered in shimmering pools of quicksilver. The next year they will be utterly gone, ghostly brown circles of parched clay the only evidence of their existence.

Biologists—a group chronically prone to dry understatement—call them a “highly dynamic environment.” But this, too, is part of what they are. Playas are contradictions, but if you listen closely there is a cadence to the dichotomies of their cycle: They’re lakes, but found only in the driest part of the state. Their locations are permanent, but the water in them isn’t. They support a vast and staggeringly diverse amount of life, but often seem dry and lifeless. Most are so shallow you can walk across them, but they sit on top—and are largely responsible for— the greatest concentration of underground water on the continent.

Playas are easy to define, but hard to understand, which may be expected of something the vast majority of us have never heard of, never seen and most importantly, never cared about.

But as we’ll see, perhaps we should. Nature never created anything that didn’t have a purpose and place, and as we learn to pay more attention to what the playas are telling us we’re slowly beginning to realize these insignificant little mudholes are a crucial part of our plains ecosystems and that all of us: landowners, hunters, birders, and anyone concerned with habitat loss, have something to gain by protecting them.

OK, so big deal, right? Other than being glorified toad puddles, what are these "lakes" good for? Read on...

It is not hyperbole to state the Ogallala Aquifer is the lifeblood of the plains. In a region generally devoid of surface water and receiving around 20 inches of precipitation a year, the Ogallala is the primary water source for thousands of farms, ranches and municipalities. Covering some 174,000 square miles in eight states from Texas through Oklahoma to South Dakota, the Ogallala contains an estimated three billion acre-feet of water.

The noted historian Walter Prescott Webb didn’t have much to say about playas or the Ogallala in his seminal work “The Great Plains” but he understood perfectly the importance of water. On the plains you take water where you can find it, and with the aid of an invention Webb considered just as profound as the six-shooter and barbed wire, early settlers found it in abundance. What’s more, unlike surface water, they didn’t have to worry about it being there from year to year.

The windmill introduced us to the Ogallala Aquifer, and we’ve been mining that vast underground sea ever since. It’s taken the ensuing 100 years or so to realize two very important things about the Ogallala: First, we’re using it up a whole lot faster than it’s being replenished, and second, there’s a direct link between the playas in the fields and the water in our wells.

Of course, windmills didn’t hasten the decline of the Ogallala. Technology did. It wasn’t until the widespread use of gas and diesel-powered irrigation pumps after WWII that aquifer levels really started to drop. It was during this same timeframe that playas were being plowed under and filled in at a record pace. No one suspected the two outwardly disparate water features had any link whatsoever, but recent research has yielded a startling and sobering fact: you can’t have one without the other.

...Just how big a role does the playa play? Research by the U.S. Geological Survey suggests that upwards of 90 percent of the annual recharge filtering down to the Ogallala is occurring on two to five percent of the land. Guess which five percent that is? Playas. Ironically, what spurs this abnormally high recharge rate is the dry part of their wet/dry cycle combined with their unique clay bottoms.

Clay is what differentiates a playa from a garden-variety water hole. As they dry up their clay linings crack deep into the earth, forming a subterranean aqueduct pointed directly into the aquifer. When the rains return and water rushes back into the basin, it doesn’t just seep into the earth, it pours. On a typical playa you may have 10 acre-feet of water disappear down through the cracks before it ever starts to fill up.

Even after the clay swells and seals the cracks, water continues to percolate around the edges where the clay is thin or absent. Playas are, in essence, the aquifer’s sponges, soaking up precious water that would otherwise be lost and storing it deep underground for our and our children’s future use.

The implications of these findings are profound for anyone living over the Ogallala, and especially for the thousands of landowners and ag producers whose properties contain playas and the communities that depend on the Ogallala for their very existence.

Playas can’t be viewed as simply nuisances to be plowed around or filled in. The vast majority of playas are located on private land, and those landowners now find themselves not only the environmental stewards of their own water source, but the economic engine that drives the entire region.

As the playas go so goes the aquifer. As the aquifer goes so go the countless communities big and small that depend on it.

All that was written 18 years ago, and the more things change, the more they stay the same. I shudder to think how many playas have been filled in, graded out and planted to crops over the years since I wrote that story.

I was first introduced to the politics of the Ogallala as a newspaper reporter covering the corporate hog farm issue of the mid-90s in Oklahoma and Kansas. The long-term prognosis was grim even back then, and it has only gotten worse as none of the issues putting immense pressure on the resource ever went away.

Climate change, long-term drought, continued (and accelerating) grassland/grazing land conversion to center-pivot agriculture, hydraulic fracking, ethanol mandates, commodity prices, and even more CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) and feedlots are still combining to literally suck the Ogallala dry.

The reason I bring this up is that I recently saw a story about how the level of the Ogallala has dropped yet again in southwestern Kansas, and the rate of decrease seems to be increasing year-over-year. Some areas of the Ogallala seem to be stable, while in other regions the decline is so severe that many farmers are abandoning crop irrigation altogether.

And while the issue itself is regional, the consequences are not. In a world seemingly overflowing with bad environmental news on every front, the continued decline of the Ogallala is one of the more underreported slow-motion regional environmental disasters of our time, but it is a glaring example of the primacy that water will play in the many issues facing not this region, but the entire country.

It's obvious to anyone not congenitally delusional that if we stay on the same path, doing things the same way, that we are well and truly screwed. Something's gotta give, and in that eternal tug-of-war between us and the rock we inhabit, we are always going to lose. Always.

Because while we most assuredly need the Earth in its present incarnation to survive, she damn sure doesn't need us.

I just wonder how long—if ever— it’ll take us to accept that immutable fact.