How the West was Drained

A great article popped up on Bloomberg today describing the difficulty in maintaining a city in the desert, particularly Las Vegas. Prevailing wisdom is that society tends to prosper, and dare I say survive, where there is water. For thousands of years, people clutched to their rivers, springs, and oases as a vital element to their very existence. But recently, man's arrogance and foolishness has gotten the best of him.
Vanity has led us into the desert, building gleaming golden sky scrapers, reflecting daziling light to the dusty earth. Much like the housing crisis that has cut Las Vegas down at its needs, this development was highly leveraged. You do not need to look far to see the dropping water in Lake Mead, or the struggling ranchers outside of the city. Vegas was built on leveraged water, water that was never really there to begin with. Los Angeles also faced such a problem in the past century, and they have hardly begun to escape it.

My grandfather used to say that you start getting in real trouble when you move water between watersheds. This throws the hydrological cycle out of sync, jeopardizing the regions future water. But in Vegas they like to gamble, big, and this bet might not come through for them.