In my native state of Texas, prosperity hinges on extracting oil and natural gas from subterranean reserves formed millennia ago. The same goes for water, which, like oil and gas, is in limited supply; there’s only so much of it to go around. To make matters worse, the water we do have is unevenly distributed. In East Texas, moisture and storms entering from the Gulf of Mexico saturate the humid and swampy landscape. As you move north and west, the climate becomes dry to the point of being parched.
Texas is a place of extremes. Over just two days in August 2017, Hurricane Harvey dumped 51 inches—about a year’s worth of rain—on East Texas. The state is also a place of intense heat, where temperatures can soar above 100 degrees for weeks in the summer. The land is prone to both drought and flooding: Houston is routinely inundated with floods and storms of ever-increasing ferocity, while Dallas, to the north, almost ran out of drinking water during a seven-year dry spell in the 1950s, which Texans reverently call the “drought of record.” According to the National Integrated Drought Information System, approximately 13,612,000 Texans are currently living in drought conditions, the worst of which are concentrated in North and West Texas.