Yesterday's New York Times Magazine article about the worsening water availability issue affecting American Western states is excellent. While global warming is expected to make the globe generally wetter, decreased snowmelt, reduced precipitation, and population growth is having the opposite affect here in the West:

[NOAA climatologist Roger] Pulwarty is convinced that the economic impacts could be profound. The worst outcome, he suggested, would be mass migrations out of the region, along with bitter interstate court battles over the dwindling water supplies. But well before that, if too much water is siphoned from agriculture, farm towns and ranch towns will wither.

The article also has a section on the water situation in and around Las Vegas, where Lake Mead -- a product of the Colorado River and the Hoover Dam which provides much of the water for Las Vegas -- is at its lowest levels ever, and still dropping:

It is all but impossible to look into the future of the Western states without calling on Pat Mulroy, the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Mulroy has no real counterpart on the East Coast; her nearest analog might be Robert Moses, the notorious New York City planner who built massive infrastructure projects and who almost always found a way around institutional obstructions and financing constraints. She is arguably the most influential and outspoken water manager in the country — a “woman without fear,” as Pulwarty describes her. Pulwarty and Peter Binney respect her willingness to challenge historical water-sharing agreements that, in Mulroy’s view, no longer suit the modern West (meaning they don’t suit Las Vegas).

(I love how similar her last name is to Chinatown's Hollis Mulwray.)

Water restrictions didn't affect me much when I was in Vegas since I lived in an apartment complex, but here in Reno I'm constrained to water the vegetation in front of my house on only Thursdays and Sundays. I haven't done enough research to know whether Nevada golf courses have to follow the same rules, but somehow I doubt it.

But with millions of people still moving into the West, and with the water situation not even maintaining status quo but worsening, I wonder what the future has in store for a state like Nevada, both the driest and the second fastest growing state in the country.

Photos by ChrisMRichards (left) and Roadsidepictures (right).