Peak Water Out West?

Peter Gleick thinks so (h/t nc links).  A few of his data points:

• Groundwater is disappearing in California; the Great Plains; Texas (tables in this report (pdf) show continuous and often massive declines in almost all Texas groundwater systems); and elsewhere in the West, because our laws and policies ignore the fact that surface and groundwater are connected. Contributing the problem, water managers and legislators typically put no restrictions on groundwater pumping, leading to inevitable, and inexorable, groundwater declines.
• In the Lower Tule Irrigation District in California, demand for water has grown over the past two decades from 250,000 AF/year to 450,000 AF/year, much of it supplied by overpumping groundwater. In parts of the district, the average depth to groundwater in 1983 was 50 feet. In 2003, groundwater levels had declined to 75 feet. Today it is 125 feet, and some wells 300 feet deep are going dry.  In April 2013, John Roeloffs, a farmer and member of the Lower Tule Irrigation District Board, noted “Some guys are drilling wells 800 feet deep.”
• There is more and more and more evidence of declining snowpack in the western US as the climate warms.

I would anticipate that we have peak combined population and agriculture out there.  I'm not sure what will happen, but I think he's right about this:

 Maybe it is time to grow less rice, alfalfa, cotton, and pasture with flood irrigation. It is past time to retire the green lawn as an acceptable landscape option in arid climates.

Yeah, growing alfalfa in Arizona doesn't make much sense to me.  Putting on inches of water between cuttings just doesn't seem like the thing to do in the desert.  I would say some of those acres will be going fallow pretty soon.