This is because "Constitutional authority for water law and policy rests principally at the state level of government." (Muir, 2007) Muir notes that there has been a neglect of 'interstate water relations due to an emphasis on "interstate river basins and regulated rivers. River basin surveys were one of the earliest forms of water resource geography, dating back to the work of Phillipe Bauache in eighteen-century France, developing slowly in the nineteenth century with surveys of the upper Mississippi River by Claude Nicollet and Western basins by John Wesley Powell, and then expanding rapidly in the 1930s." (Muir, 2007) During the 1990s there was important "regional-scale research" conducted in several areas including:
(1) drought in the Southwestern and Western U.S.;
(2) River basin studies; and (3) Regulated rivers research. (Muir, 2007)
The Southwestern U.S. states are reported to still be experiencing drought.
VII. Human Adaptation
The work of Orlove (2005) entitled: "Human adaptation to climate change: a review of three historical cases and some general perspective" examines mitigation and adaptation in the area of human ecology and states that the word adaptation "has a number of different meanings" however within the IPCC framework adaptation has been defined as "adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or there effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities." (Orlove, 2005) Failure to adapt by populations is stated to results in the collapse of that population. In fact it is stated that while less conclusively "the evolution of human culture and language has also been linked...to the extensive climate fluctuations of the Pleistocene that required more complex patterns of social learning and transmission." (Orlove, 2005) One such case highlighted is the southern portion of the Great Plains in the United States (Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Colorado and New Mexico) a region with rich soils and a climate that supports deep layer of humus formations with some areas having relatively alkaline soils. As history tells it the dust bowl occurred in the 1930s and following lost crops, soil erosion and farm foreclosures a new federal program, specifically the Great Plains Conservation Program, run by the Agricultural Conservation Program Service began in 1956 and offered farmers 10-year contracts with ensured sales and credit that was subsidized that agreed to "...adopt conservation measures and to shift from agriculture to grazing." (Orlove, 2005)
This program is stated to have facilitated the expansion of irrigation and "new technologies and inexpensive energy made it possible to irrigate large areas with groundwater, chiefly from a groundwater basin known as the Ogallala Aquifer. This basin contains what is essentially fossil groundwater, accumulated in earlier, moister geological eras and drained much faster than...
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