Mad Max: Empty Well
A green place in the desert. But for how long?
There’s been writing about Mad Max: Fury Road on a number of topics. I liked the film a great deal, and the writing I’ve seen is mostly good. But while feminism has been the main topic of interest in the writing I’ve read (for good reason), and hydrocarbon economies are another important theme of the Mad Max series that has been engaged, I haven’t read anyone writing about water.
I’m not a water expert by any means, but I have been doing a bunch of reading about water in deserts recently. Here are some quick thoughts, not by any means a coherent thesis, which occurred to me during my single viewing.
And yes, I know this is just a film, and not a hydrological hypothesis. I am perfectly capable of dispensing with reality for the purposes of entertainment. The explosions were cool, the flaming guitar was perhaps one of the best ideas I’ve seen in an action film in years, and the gun scene, the gun scene, THE GUN SCENE. But I guarantee when we get around to asking “Who killed the world?” in our own universe, the answer to the question is going to involve water. So if we might, let’s review Fury Road with our amateur water conservationist goggles on, shall we?
Stop wasting water!
A person needs a gallon of water a day to survive, and in the desert that rises to maybe a gallon and a half. If you’ve ever traveled through the desert carrying the only water you have with you, you gain a new profound understanding of how much water we waste every day, and how precious every gallon is. Every delicious, sloshingly awkward, evaporating, heavy gallon. You start to brush your teeth without water. You go without washing your hands and use alcohol sanitizer instead. You keep the lid on all containers to keep from losing liquid to evaporation, and bring some kind of a mister to wash dishes to limit the amount of water that runs off never to be useful to anyone. And, you certainly don’t have a sexy, playful hose down after getting a little dusty in a car chase! I was open-mouthed as the former wives of Immortan Joe took their baths, not because they were scantily-clad, but because gallons of freshwater were just running into the sand! Not even a greywater reclamation system, my goodness: what kind of dystopian society is this?
The lack of any plant life whatsoever does not bode well for finding water
These days, you don’t really want to drink any water you find in nature below the tree line, because more likely than not it has giardia in it. (Or worse.) Giardia is a parasite that causes horrible diarrhea, which spreads the organism when that waste contaminates a water source. All our pretty mountain streams have giardia in them these days, because it is spread by deer, which now are everywhere, all the time, because we’ve killed all the predators.
However, if you are about to die of thirst you drink the water first, and then worry about dying from diarrhea later. So where do you find water in the desert? You look for plant life. The first thing most people notice about a desert once they’ve gone there is how it is actually full of plants. It does rain in deserts, just not very often or much. If you find a wash with plants growing in it, you can dig down into the stream bed and usually find water there. There’s cacti as well, and other plants that keep moisture trapped underneath them.
But in Mad Max world there is no plant life whatsoever. They traverse through a road in a canyon, that because of normal drainage patterns, would surely be a wash that filled with a flash flood as soon as there was a little rain. And yet it is plantless. This doesn’t bode well for finding any water when one is nomading it across the landscape. Most deserts also have had humans living in them as well, because someone that knows the landscape can survive well enough if there are even the barebones of existence. That is the rule of our species — if we can manage to survive in a place, we will. But Mad Max Desert doesn’t look that great. It could be that all the plants were killed by radiation or something, but things seem generally unpolluted enough that humans can survive until their thirties, so one would think some plants would make it too, if there was enough water to live on. So where is all the water in this desert?
The salt flat is a sign of what is probably an endorheic basin
You typically get salt flats in a place where a lake has dried up. I’ve read a theory that the great salt flats in the film were a former ocean evaporated by nuclear war. But salt flats aren’t really from a missing sea, so much as the constant cycling between wet and dry in a desert that allows water to bring salt held in suspension off the land through erosion, and then dry up, and then come back in a more rainy season or year with more salt. This is how you get the Great Salt Lake and Salt Flats in Utah, which used to be parts of a bigger lake during the Pleistocene called Lake Bonneville, before there was a climate change that made the area far less wet and the big lake dried up. (A cataclysmic flood that poured out through the Snake River to the Pacific also helped.) One could look at the Aral Sea as well, which has dried up because the water that used to flow into it has been diverted for irrigation. Same thing with Owens Lake in California, and would have happened to Mono Lake too, if environmental law hadn’t prevented it. These are all endorheic basins — water flows in, but cannot flow out.
Australia has a number of these, but the largest by far is the Lake Eyre basin, which also has mineral and petroleum reserves within it, so that would fit with the plot of the film.
The “green place” probably got ruined due to salt build-up in the soil
We see that there is a swamp where the “green place” once was. There is moisture, which would fit with the idea of an endorheic basin, which does collect drainage from the surrounding highlands in the form of rivers, even if it is a desert. Some of these endorheic basins are often very fertile, with volcanic soil or river silt dropped by floodwater after being collected by the rivers’ erosion of the surrounding mountains. But it also collects salt in the place where the water eventually evaporates. We could imagine this area was arable until enough highly saline water came onto the formerly fertile areas building up the salt in the soil to the point where plants could no longer live. It might have, in the past, had river water flowing through it at a speed and volume that carried much of the salt through in suspension while dropping silt, but given some sort of nuclear or otherwise anthropocenic climate change, less precipitation decreased the flow, and instead of carrying the eroded salt with it onward to the sea or further into the basin, it all remained on the land along with the valuable nutrients in the silt. Or, perhaps the way they made the green place was by damming the desert river, to save water from the rainy season for irrigation all year round. Damming also slows a river, and irrigation collects more salt in the soil than would naturally.
Something similar happens along the Colorado River on account of human activities. The Colorado River is nominally fresh water, but because of the landscape it runs through it is saltier than most rivers. As the salty river water is pumped onto the land for irrigation that salt joins the soil as the water dries or seeps in. They solve this problem by pumping enough water to let it run off back to the river taking the salt with it, but then this takes more salt with it back to the river, which becomes saltier as a result. Before a treaty signed in the 1970s demanded otherwise, the Colorado River was so salty by the time it reached Mexico that it could no longer be put on crops.
An increase in salinity would also explain why there aren’t any other living plants in the swamp, even though there is standing water on the ground. It could also be the “some kind of nuclear/environmental pollution” angle, but again, that would probably kill off the humans there as well. I imagine if the humans aren’t dropping to the ground with their hair falling out, the plants could probably make it through as well.
groundwater is limited, and they are pumping it
Immortan Joe’s power came from his ability to pump good water out of the ground. Many endorheic basins have good groundwater stores, especially if the water is able to seep down into the aquifer before it evaporates away. The water gets stored deep in the rock, for thousands or millions of years. The Lake Eyre basin is like this, because the water flows so slowly across the land due to the low grade that much of it seeps into the ground. However, this is a very slow process. Even a small number of humans tapping an aquifer undo the charging that has taken thousands of years. Groundwater is just like oil in this way. It is only a renewable resource on a scale of millenia. As they refine the oil they pump from the desert in Gastown, they are also sapping the groundwater store. I doubt that this warlord has been doing his groundwater pumping in a sustainable way, with hydrological models or by re-charging the aquifer with water pumped in from elsewhere.
In Australia, they recently implemented a Great Artesian Basin Sustainability Initiative to try and manage the groundwater resources of the Lake Eyre basin. But this sort of work is very costly, and after decades of letting farmers use the water in an unsustainable way, often the choice is between continuing to tap the aquifer unsustainably, or letting them go out of business. We see this going on in the Colorado River basin, which has lost 15.6 cubic miles of groundwater, a geological treasure which took millions of years of glaciation and melting cycles to form. Despite all the river diversion projects currently trying to re-charge this groundwater in California, Arizona, and the other states of the Colorado River compact, once you have farmers in the desert, they are going to continue to pump out the groundwater when river is low, rather than stop farming.
Also, the more you pump, the deeper the water table is, and so it takes more energy to pump it out. The new matriarchy taking over Immortan Joe’s groundwater wells is going to be in a battle against the clock. And more likely than not, they will have to continue running Gastown in order to get the fuel to run the pumps. Unless there was an unmentioned Solar Panel Ville somewhere nearby. Or, a Telluriumburg, for that matter. I hope after they celebrated liberating the people by dumping all that water onto the desert floor, they remembered to shut off the tap.
all their calories come from plants?
I didn’t see any grazing cattle, which is probably good in the long term for water usage, because beef is one of the most water intensive forms of protein production around. But that means they are going to be getting their protein from plants, which is still non-trivial in a desert. There are a lot of different calculations being tossed around recently as people argue who is responsible for California’s water nightmare, but from one article it looks like probably peas, dry beans, and maybe chickens (if they still exist) are going to be the new matriarchy’s best bet to keep everyone fed.
I love back of the envelope calculations, so let’s try one. Let’s assume there are five hundred people there at the desert citadel. The first article I clicked says humans need 50 grams of protein per day. If they were getting this protein from equal portions of peas, beans, eggs, and chickens, that would take 5.3625 gallons of water per gram of protein, or 268.125 gallons per person per day. Now that one gallon to drink looks like nothing! So the water usage for bodily integrity alone for the city is 134,563 gallons per day. That’s 0.42 acre-feet a day, or 151 acre-feet a year. An acre-foot is the standard measure of large water volume in the US. It’s one acre of land, flooded to one foot. Another way to think about it is as twelve inches of rainfall over one acre. It is a good unit for farming, and a decent amount of water.
151 acre-feet is not a lot compared to modern irrigation projects. The California Aqueduct moves an average of 2.4 million acre-feet a year. But if you realize that there is far less than one acre-foot of water in one acre-foot of dirt (because the dirt and water are sharing the same space, duh) that means that pumping 151 acre-feet out of the ground will cause the water table to sink far more than a foot over a 151 acre area. Water flows through the ground, and will flow in from surrounding areas to replace this removal, but slowly. Water moving a distance of one foot per day through the ground is fast. You end up with a downward pointing cone of dryness, as you suck up the water through the well bottom at the point of the cone. And if there is no water re-charge from surface water and rainfall, and it seems that there isn’t given the complete lack of greenery around the citadel, this means groundwater is going to recede rapidly. Water from the rock is never a miracle. It is a matter of removing quickly what took a long time to come into being.
And this doesn’t even include that amount of water that Gastown is using to refine oil into fuel to run the pumps (1851 gallons of water per barrel of oil). Even after living through the end times and destroying the patriarchy, we are an extractive species, make no mistake.
greening the desert is not a good idea
Greening the desert is a nice utopian dream. It has that Jeffersonian, agrarian-society conservative feel, along with some hippie/green enthusiasm for natural organic solutions, and a touch of the techno-imaginary what-can’t-human-ingenuity-do spirit. However, the truly natural, conservative, and visionary solution is don’t farm in a desert. There is a reason that the plants don’t already grow there. Trillions of dollars have been spent in this country diverting rivers, re-engineering water cycles, and building massive pumps run on electricity from thousands of miles away to carry the runoff of entire regions over mountains. And this all happened at the peak of the United States’ economic power, not when a small group are trying to re-build things like the very basic fabric of society. No matter how successful you might be greening the desert in the near term, eventually you will use up the water, your population will rise, and/or the climate will change again. And then you are left with a lot of expensive infrastructure, and the desert is still a desert, and having a strong economy based in part on crop overproduction won’t change that. Furiosa and her cohorts have to survive in the meantime, so the new matriarchy will undoubtedly have to try their hand at irrigation farming at least until they can get everyone healthy again and come up with a plan. But that groundwater level is just going to keep sinking, and it will take your verdant utopia with it, matriarchy or no.
