There have been six times in recorded history Jacob's Well stopped flowing. All six in the last 23 years, which, by any measure, points directly to the effects of humans moving into the Hill Country.
Overwhelming natural resources is a human--and particularly American--trait. Early white settlers in America saw a vast landscape unlike anything they or their own ancestors had ever seen, and considered the unfathomable land west of the early Colonies as incapable of being properly filled, much less overwhelmed, by our inhabitation.
We’ve long known that was untrue. We’ve long known many of our impositions onto the land—from agricultural methods to thoughtless housing construction and infrastructure, to using products (plastics, but also recyclable materials) that contaminated the land and water—are harmful, but having no immediate blowback we can negatively measure, we persist.
Around 48 years ago I first wrote an observation that Americans seemed to still have the "Ever Westward" view that when we despoiled where we were, we could always move west, where land was plentiful and clean and we could start new. And we persisted with that view almost a hundred years after we were already bouncing back from the West, already finding limitations to our visions of infinite resources.
Despite the science, the social and political facts; despite the religious ramifications of so-called Christians imposing their selfish visions onto a natural landscape that had easily sustained Original Americans for tens of thousands of years, who lived within the natural envelop rather than felt compelled to impose a delusion of God-granted omnipotence; we continue to view the future as ensured we are self-limiting because we won't limit ourselves now.
One might instead consider how Jacob's Well is a direct reflection of human folly, of the proof that humans were not granted by their god to dominate--to "dominion"--Nature. And while many are seeing The Well as irrefutable proof that Nature is finite, and natural resources cannot be sustained without the human factor that we find it vital to sustain Nature because we simply realize it has dominion over us, and we were wrong all along to think otherwise.