Americans are moving to a region plagued by a 22-year drought

“WEATHER WAS the ultimate arbiter in the American West,” Marc Reisner wrote in “Cadillac Desert”, his book on water there, published in 1986. Reisner was musing about the great white winter of 1886, which devastated cattle ranching, and the blistering drought that followed. But 135 years later the sentiment still rings true. The West is in the grip of a 22-year that is the second-worst in the past 1,200 years.