The American West was built on a promise: that the Colorado River would always deliver. For more than a century, that promise held. Cities grew, farms flourished and a vast desert was transformed into one of the most productive agricultural regions on Earth.
But the river is shrinking, the demands on it keep growing and the reckoning is here.
In this episode, veteran science journalist Miles O’Brien travels to the sun-scorched Imperial Valley of Southern California to explore the collision of history, agriculture, politics and climate change playing out in real time.
The Imperial Valley is the single largest user of Colorado River water, and the stakes could not be higher. Two-thirds of the winter vegetables Americans eat come from this valley, fed by a gravity-flow canal system built more than a century ago by people who looked at one of the driest places on Earth and saw possibility.
O’Brien meets the farmers, water managers and negotiators caught between the legacy of that vision and the hard math of a river that no longer delivers what it once promised. In the midst of the Colorado River crisis, he finds a community that is proud, resilient and quietly worried, trying to do more with less while holding on to a way of life that spans generations.
At the center of the political fight is a young, Stanford-educated water negotiator trying to broker a deal among seven deadlocked states before a federal deadline forces a solution nobody wants.
And a visit to the Salton Sea, the vast, shrinking, accidental lake on the valley’s northern edge, offers a stark reminder that in water politics, no good deed goes unpunished.
