The Age of Perpetual Drought - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 114

highest on record since the 1950s. It was so hot that railroad tracks buckled, wildfires
sparked and burned out of control, power plants were idled due to a lack of water, and,
unable to rely on air-conditioning, people resorted to wearing clothes they had cooled
in the freezer.
Communities in the outback were devastated. Livestock markets were overwhelmed
by ranchers trying to unload sheep and cattle that they could no longer afford to feed.
Production of Australia's three main crops —wheat, barley, and canola—was cut by 60
percent. Rice, a thirsty crop that Australia usually produced at a rate of 720,000 tons a
year, for export to Asia, was almost wiped out: farmers harvested only 18,000 tons of
rice in 2008. In some areas of the country, the price of water increased sevenfold.
Between 2001 and 2006, 10,500 families quit farming. Others succumbed to even
darker despair. “Every four days a farmer in Australia is committing suicide,” said
Charlie Prell, a fourth-generation Goulburn farmer. “I haven't contemplated that my-
self, but it destroys the soul.”
The Murray-Darling River Basin is known as Australia's “food bowl.” The Murray-
Darling is also the country's most important river system, transecting the country's
southeast and drawing from a watershed roughly the size of Spain and France com-
bined. In the winter of 2006, tributaries of the Murray-Darling stopped flowing alto-
gether. Although flows resumed late the following year, some fifty thousand farmers
were affected, food prices skyrocketed, and inflation loomed.
By early 2008, rains returned to parts of eastern Australia and even threatened to
flood some towns. But the Murray-Darling remained in drought, and experts fretted
over the long-term repercussions. Some climate models predicted that the trend will
continue, and that rainwater flowing into the basin will decline 70 percent by 2030.
Many Australians feared that their hot, arid decade, what they call the Big Dry , was “the
new normal.”
The Big Dry may have been caused by a combination of shifting weather patterns,
such as El Niño and La Niña, and the southern oscillation (changes in air surface pres-
sure). In 2010, Australian researchers blamed climate change, writing in the journal
NatureGeosciencethat the Big Dry was likely due to “anthropogenic [man-made] cli-
mate shift.”
Whatever the precise cause, the effects of the drought were greatly worsened by poor
planning, outdated infrastructure, and an unwillingness to adapt to changing condi-
tions. Industry was reluctant to change its practices, and rural irrigators vied with city
dwellers over water rights. Aborigines feared a “cultural genocide” if the drought forced
them out of the bush.
In 2002, farmers were using so much water from the Murray River that it no longer
reached two big lakes that flow into the Indian Ocean. As a result, the lake levels