Some places in the west are running out of water.

So in California's Central Valley, they're pumping it out of aquifers hundreds of feet underground.

That's what you see and hear, right alongside fields and orchards that feed a good part of the US.

To keep production running, farmers have pumped billions of tons of water from their wells.

And that means the water table has fallen so much that hundreds of smaller wells have gone dry.

I see how the big pumps are pumping a lot of water and I don't have water.

So it's something so sad for me.

Esther Espinoza told NPR that she and her family outside the town of Riverdale now depend on water from a big black tank in their front yard.

And a local nonprofit fills it up each week.

We don't have water for nothing for the bad room or my kitchen.

So it's something that is necessary but we don't have.

In California and across large portions of the western US, it's been abnormally hot and dry for so long that reservoirs are running low.

Cities and towns are mandating conservation.

And the drought is threatening a lot of places where America's food is grown and raised.

No matter what we do, we have a lot of stress ahead of us, a lot of climate and water stress.

Christine Klein is a water rights lawyer.

She started her career working for the Attorney General's Office in Colorado.

If you've ever been in Denver, underneath the golden dome of the Capitol,

it's just what I think of as a cathedral to water and it has a poem and it starts with here as a land where life is written in water.

So it just cannot overstate the importance of water in the west.

Consider this with climate change fueling heat and drought.

The most valuable resource in the west is becoming more scarce.

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