The Tamarisk Hunter by Paolo Bacigalupi (A glimpse of the future?)

[YankeyMCC]

This story reminded me of the "Grapes of wrath" right down to the scene with the local boy working as a guardie (like the locals taking $3/day to bulldoze homes in Grapes of Wrath)

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(snip)
A big tamarisk can suck 73,000 gallons of river water a year. For $2.88 a day, plus water bounty, Lolo rips tamarisk all winter long.
(snip)

(snip)
When California put its first calls on the river, no one really worried. A couple of towns went begging for water. Some idiot newcomers with bad water rights stopped grazing their horses, and that was it. A few years later, people started showering real fast. And a few after that, they showered once a week. And then people started using the buckets. By then, everyone had stopped joking about how "hot" it was. It didn’t really matter how "hot" it was. The problem wasn’t lack of water or an excess of heat, not really. The problem was that 4.4 million acre-feet of water were supposed to go down the river to California. There was water; they just couldn’t touch it.

They were supposed to stand there like dumb monkeys and watch it flow on by.
(snip)

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The rest at: http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=16378