A Hydrohistorical Evaluation of Groundwater Sustainability

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Presenter

Robert E. Mace, Ph.D., P.G.
Executive Director
The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment
Professor of Practice, Department of Geography and Environmental Science
Texas State University

Description

The concept of groundwater sustainability has existed for well over a hundred years, and from the beginning, it has been controversial in concept, terminology, and application. When I wrote Groundwater Sustainability—Birth, Development, Application, I comprehensively read the literature forward in time, from the introduction of the concept in 1912 to about 2000 (the literature becomes practicably unfollowable after that) to “re-live” the development of the concept over time. This re-living of groundwater sustainability’s development allowed me to explain the difference between safe yield and sustainability (there is none), understand the angst about the concept (engineers and hydrogeologists not recognizing that sustainability is, in large part, a policy decision), poke fun at economists (potential pumpers do not consult their favorite economist before drilling wells), and explain that sustainability, like a diamond, is forever. More recent definitions inadvisably attempt to bake equity and environmental justice into the definition resulting in the nonsensical case of an aquifer that is technically managed sustainably but definitionally is not (equity and justice [and all other non-scientific aspects] are best kept in the policy side of the definition). Finally, this study shows that a historical analysis of a concept can explain why things are the way they are today and how misunderstandings perpetuate through time.