Opinion | The future of America’s water cannot be won without changing America’s farms

By David Von Drehle Columnist|Follow

August 26, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

Water from the Colorado River diverted through the Central Arizona Project fills an irrigation canal in Maricopa, Ariz., on Aug. 18. (Matt York/AP)

The Rev. William Dodd was not above making the occasional fraudulent loan application, which is how he wound up in London’s Tyburn Prison in 1777 under sentence of death. An unusually eloquent plea for mercy, supposedly of his own composition, failed to save his life. Later, the great English writer Samuel Johnson, who had secretly written the appeal, tried to insist that Dodd was capable of such elegant prose. After all, Johnson reasoned, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”