CONCLUSION - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 300

dwarf the construction of Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams. Mulroy suggests the project
be funded with some of the billions of federal stimulus dollars earmarked for infrastruc-
ture improvements.
While the Colorado River carries about 13 million acre-feet of water annually, the
Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers carry 436 million acre-feet a year where they converge.
“You could take six million acre-feet out of the Mississippi, and they wouldn't even
know it's gone,” said Mulroy.
Flipping the Mississippi is a wildly ambitious idea that critics say may be technically
feasible but politically impossible, and that Mulroy's hometown antagonists—such as
Bob Fulkerson, of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada—worry is a Trojan
Horse that Mulroy could use to convince Washington to spend “billions of dollars to
dry out rural Nevada.” (Mulroy said she has no intention of using her Mississippi plan
to influence the Nevada pipeline debate.) It would certainly be expensive, environment-
ally disruptive, and politically fraught. And with global warming changing conditions in
unpredictable ways, such a project could prove to be a multibillion-dollar boondoggle.
Yet Mulroy remains committed. “If you want to reallythink outside the box, and really
solve our water problems? Then we need to talk about solutions we've never had the
courage to talk about before,” she insists.
Give Mulroy credit for asking the right questions and pushing for new, sometimes
disconcerting answers. But at heart Flipping the Mississippi is a flashback to the costly,
grandiose projects championed by Floyd Dominy and the Water Buffaloes. While con-
ceptually intriguing, the scheme doesn't provide a realistic answer to the nation's new
water challenges.
A cheaper, less risky, though no less ambitious, alternative is to adopt a new approach
to managing water that emphasizes conservation and working with nature, rather than
constantly trying to bend it to human will.
According to the proponents of this new water ethic, such as the British environ-
mental writer Fred Pearce , the best way to ensure a healthy water supply and enough
food, while protecting people from floods and droughts, is to undo many of the “im-
provements” people have made to natural water systems in the last century, and to re-
embrace certain traditional methods of water management.
This approach requires people to stop building giant dams, allow artificially
straightened rivers to reassert their natural courses, replenish aquifers and wetlands,
and disassemble old levees and dams. These measures will occasionally be disruptive
and expensive, but their backers say they will ultimately provide a more dependable, af-
fordable, and sustainable supply of water than gargantuan concrete and pipe structures.