The Greening of the Negev—and Mojave?–Deserts

Egypt’s Qattara Project is a mega-construction plan to cut a waterway from the Mediterranean coast inland to fill the Qattara Depression. The newly created body of water, constantly evaporating in the brutal environs of Egypt’s northern desert, would provide electric power owing to turbines being turned by the non-stop inflow of seawater to replace the loss. Moreover, the arid, harsh and barren landscape could very well benefit greatly from what may turn out to be a local climate reversal, actually greening the area to an extent with rainfall created by the sea inlet.

Neighboring Israel has already accomplished very much the same. Its Desert Water Project pulls in truly impressive acre-feet of the Mediterranean, flowing inland and converting the low-lying Negev Desert from wasteland into farmland. Moreover, the seawater is desalinated at the coast, being funneled first through reverse osmosis plants. So the water that arrives in the Negev is clean and potable. There are now forests and parks and a booming population where scant years prior, and for millennia before that, was utter desolation.

California possesses its own vast territory of desert wasteland—desolate tracts also near to a coastline, situated hundreds of feet below sea level as well, and extending all the way to the Nevada and Arizona borders and beyond. There are few places on Earth crying out louder for a feasibility study to determine whether the unstoppable power of human engineering could remake and reclaim this land. California, though, may not be able to answer that call—not any more.

The Golden State’s era of energy, competence, fearlessness and epoch-changing construction may be coming to an end. It’s been almost half a century, for example, since the last major dam in California was built. And the proposed Huntington Beach desalination plant was quashed before a drop of potable water was produced, denied a permit by the California Coastal Commission in May of 2022.

It’s not just commissioners bored with water policy; California’s governors, senators, mayors sit by idly while 200 million acre-feet of precipitation falls on the state every year, watching almost all of it, close to 90%, run wastefully off into the sea. And it’s certainly in Nevadans’ and Arizonans’ interest for their neighbor to bring its crucial water infrastructure up to present-day standards, instead of  relying on the massive diversion of Colorado River water that supplies a third of Southern California’s needs, and which otherwise could be available for Nevada and Arizona.

California’s leaders though are not only absolutely careless about the floods of precious waters having been consigned to the Pacific Ocean over the last decades, but would be almost certainly even less interested in how the Mojave Desert might be improved. Again, it was the protesting activists hounding the Huntington Beach desalination plant to whom the Coastal Commission listened, and not those productive segments of society ready, willing and able to provide the next glass of clean water to the state’s next generation.

Instead of competence and deeds Californians are constrained to make do with feckless sloganeering. The state’s double-talking governmental functionaries have been wringing their hands for decades about the world’s water “crisis,” and yet haven’t managed to lay the first stone in the foundation of a single major dam since 1979. They’re constantly predicting doom, gloom and starvation, supposedly concerned about “food insecurity” and wondering aloud how the world’s future burgeoning population will somehow be fed. But as to solving that problem by bringing vast new acreage under cultivation through clever, sober and efficient water management, California’s bureaucrats defer to the Egyptians, and the Israelis and everyone else.

And it isn’t just that consequently Californians and their fellow citizens in the US Southwest suffer the opportunity costs of water resource malfeasance. The state’s leaders’ myopic obsession with a host of other bizarre issues taking center stage—enacting preferred pronoun usage in schools and the workplace, passing legislation to make condoms available for students, mandating gender-neutral toy sections in retail stores—adds insult to the injury.

Californians should have a look at what people in the Middle East are doing instead. They aren’t making excuses, shrugging their shoulders, or giving up before even trying. Nor are they fixated on fads and issues of relatively little import compared to the overarching necessity of slaking their people’s collective thirst into the far future.

They’re banking on their intimate connection with the sea for thousands of years. That same ocean, Californians, lies off your own shores too.