Summary
"In New Mexico, we don't have many sources of income," he says. "Oil and gas is declining. Tourism is a big part of the economy, and it requires the state to be somewhat green. If you kill agriculture, you're going to kill our traditional communities. That's not good for tourism. You're going to have people driven off the land and into cities. That's not good."
Pumping water drains the bank accounts of farmers in [Gary Walker]'s seeding area. "We have 90,000 acres of irrigated land in Yoakum County. If you put a pencil to that, it's $ 18 million that's spent just in pumping costs. If I'm only effective in reducing their pumping by 5 percent, that's $900,000," Walker says. "Your banker will buy that all day long.""Cloud seeding ain't the silver bullet. It ain't gonna - ain't? Isn't. It isn't going to fix our water problems," Walker says, fixing his Texas grammar. "It's one piece of the puzzle. We've got to conserve all we can."See the full content of this document
Extract
Silver Lining
In the skies near the border of Texas and New Mexico, a small white airplane speeds toward a promising cloud. A young pilot handles the controls. He must work quickly.
The plane's wings each carry a row of 24 flares. They look like shotgun shells. (In fact, the company that sells the casings also makes police ammo.) Each flare costs $35 to manufacture, but carries invaluable potential.The flares are packed with silver iodide, a chemical that looks like a yellowish powder. Under the microscope, it looks like an ice crystal. The resemblance is significant.The flares alight, and a trail of smoke follows the plane through the cloud. Minutes pass, and the pilot watches the cloud swell. Miles away on the ground, a meteorologist monitors the situation on a TITAN radar screen, the kind used by television weathermen.A chemical masquerade plays out inside the cloud. Tiny droplets of water bind to the silver iodide as though it really were ice. The drops fatten. Rain falls.But, to the frustration of farmers on the wrong side of the border, it does not fall so much over New Mexico.This is a scene that has played out scores of times o...See the full content of this document
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