Opinion: We might have to pump the Great Lakes to California to feed America
… The Central Valley of California supplies a quarter of the food on the nation’s dinner tables. But beneath this image of plenty and abundance, a crisis is brewing — an invisible one, under our feet — and it is not limited to California. … What happens to the nation’s food production if the groundwater runs out altogether? Unless we act now, we could soon reach a point where water must be piped from the wetter parts of the country, such as the Great Lakes, to drier, sunnier regions where the bulk of the nation’s food is produced. No one wants unsightly pipelines snaking across the country, draining Lake Michigan to feed the citrus groves of the Central Valley. But that future is drawing closer by the day, and at some point, we may look back on this moment and wish we’d acted differently.
—Written by Jay Famiglietti, professor at Arizona State University and the director of science for the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative