CALIFORNIA WATER RESOURCESASSIGNMENT 2

An Overview and History of CaliforniaWater Resources Development

“The history of California in the twentieth century is the story of a state inventing itself with water. The principal centers of urban settlement and industrial and agricultural production in California today were in large part arid wastelands and malarial bogs in their natural condition. The modern prosperity of the state has consequently been founded upon a mas-sive rearrangement of the natural environment through public water development.”

William L. Kahrl, Water and Power (1982)

“California's water system might have been invented by a Soviet bureaucrat on an LSD trip.”

Peter Passell, Economic Scene: Greening Cali-fornia, New York Times, Feb. 27, 1991

Readings:

Floods, Droughts, and Lawsuits: A Brief History of California Water Policy, Chapter 1 of Ellen Hanak, Jay Lund, Ariel Dinar, Brian Gray, Richard Howitt, Jeffrey Mount, Peter Moyle & Barton Thompson, Managing California’s Water: From Conflict to Reconciliation (PPIC 2011), which is available on the Assign-ments page.

Selected Drought Articles, also available on the Assignments page.

Notes:

1. We begin with a brief discussion of western water resources develop-ment and then turn to a more detailed look at California. The story begins with the native landscape and waterscape of the west and continues with the history of the development of water resources. We will consider both aborig-inal water use and the creation of pueblo and rancho water rights under Spanish and Mexican law. The California portion of the story proceeds with the local use of water by the miners and early farmers in the Sacramento Valley and leads to regional water development by irrigation districts in the San Joaquin Valley and the Imperial Valley at the end of the 19th Century.

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The first large transbasin developments were the City of Los Angeles' Owens Valley project, the City of San Francisco's Hetch Hetchy project, and the East Bay's Mokelumne River project, all of which were constructed in the early 20th Century.

The history then turns to the great conflicts between riparians and ap-propriators during the late-19th and early 20th Centuries that led to the con-stitutional amendment of 1928 that added what is now Article X, Section 2 to the California Constitution, Article X, Section 2, which contains both the rea-sonable use and beneficial use doctrines, is the foundation of modern Califor-nia water law. The middle part of the 20th Century is dominated by the con-struction of the two largest water projects—the federal Central Valley Project and the State Water Project—that supply water to about two-thirds of the California’s population. These projects are the hallmarks of what Norris Hundley has called the “hydraulic society.” They have made modern Califor-nia (both for better and for worse) possible.

Since the late 1960s, the history of California water policy is largely the story of efforts to restore and protect the environment from further degrada-tion caused by the large water projects. The focal points of the environmen-tal response have been the Owens Valley and Mono Basin on the east side of the Sierra Nevada, the Klamath River and the other wild and scenic rivers of the north coast, the federal reclamation program, and (most importantly) the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and San Francisco Bay estuary. The modern era of California water law has seen Congress, the California Legisla-ture, and the courts significantly limit and modify the water rights system through laws such as the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, their state law counterparts, the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, the Delta Reform Act, the public trust doctrine, water efficiency regulations, water transfer laws, and other incentives to conservation and reallocation.

We also will study California's water supply and demand balance, the existing water allocation, current shortages and projected changes in supply and demand, points of conflict between instream and consumptive uses, and other sources of stress on the system. These stress points are the result of overuse of the state’s rivers, estuaries, and groundwater basins where exist-ing demands exceed the sustainable carrying capacity of the ecosystem that is the source of supply. All of California’s water controversies—from the Kla-math River endangered species crisis, to the court-imposed limits on exports of water from the Delta, to the on-going groundwater adjudications in central and southern California, to the water shortages caused by the current drought—share this feature. As described more fully below, these problems will be exacerbated by global climate change as we move into the middle part of the 21st Century.

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2. As you read through the assignment, please try to learn the following ways of measuring water and water flows, as we will refer to them through-out the course:

Acre Feet (af) This is the most common way of measuring standing water. An acre foot is the quantity of water that would cover one acre to a depth of one foot. One acre foot is 325,851 gallons. A family of four or five uses approximately one acre foot of water per year.

Acre feet annually This is the most common way of measuring the quantity of water

(afa) present in a river system, or diverted and used for consumptive purposes, each year. For example, we will learn that the average annual runoff in the Sacra-mento River basin is approximately 22.4 million afa; and the average annual water use by State Water Project contractors is approximately 2.2 million afa.

Cubic feet per This is the most common way of measuring the flow of water in a

second (cfs) river or aqueduct. One cubic foot of water is 7.48 gallons. One cfs is 448.8 gallons per minute, or 646,317 gallons per day, or 1.98 acre feet per day.

Source: CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF WATER RESOURCES, CONVERSION FACTORS FOR WATER.

3. Another view of commonly used terms may be found is offered by Ed Quillen, What Size Shoe Does an Acre-Foot Wear?, in HIGH COUNTRY NEWS, WESTERN WATER MADE SIMPLE 190-92 (ISLAND PRESS 1987):

Acre Foot The amount of water required to cover one acre, which is about the size of a football field, or 0.40468564 hectare, to a depth of one foot, about the length of a football shoe, or 30.48 centimeters--that is, about 325,848.882718339 gallons or 1,233.43773084702 steres. Most popularly ex-plained as the amount of water an average family of four uses in one year, but this definition is too fluid, only in desert regions is it appropriate.

For example, in a wet state like Minnesota, the aver-age family of four consumes only 0.44 acre-feet of treated water in a year, and in Oregon it's all of 0.34 acre-feet. But in dry Colorado, it's 0.93 acre-feet;

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arid Wyoming, 0.96 acre feet; thirsty Arizona, 0.99; desert Nevada, 1.12; and parched Utah, 2.46. These dull figures (given the topic, they can't be dry statis-tics) demonstrate that treated water is unlike other commodities: The less gasoline there is available, the less people consume, but the less water there is, the more people consume.

Beneficial Use Any use of water which (1) takes water out of a natu-ral channel, and (2) benefits a bank account. Thus courts have held that keeping water in rivers so that fish might swim in it is not a beneficial use, whereas using water to carry silt into collection impound-ments (often called reservoirs) is a beneficial use.

CFS Colorado writer Lewis Newell once discovered an in-teresting similarity between the CFS and the UFO; many people believe in both, but no reliable witness has ever seen either.

Diversion An entertainment. For instance, a popular metropoli-tan diversion is to dry up high mountain valleys by piping water to the cities below. Then the metropolis invites immigrants by promoting both its ample wa-ter supply and its proximity to pristine mountain val-leys with sparkling fishing streams.

Reclamation In standard English, "reclamation" means to return something to a former use. In water English, "recla-mation" means converting land that has always been desert into farmland, a use it never had.

Uphill The natural direction that Western water flows, pro-viding there is money uphill.

Water Right A property right to certain quantities of water in cer-tain locations, depending upon the use of the water and the priority of the water right. Water rights are either very valuable, because men have given their lives in battles over water rights, or else of little value, because, unlike other forms of real and per-sonal property, water rights are not taxed.

4. Perhaps the most important characteristic of California water policy is hydrologic variability. The variations in water supply take three forms:

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a. Geographic Disparities. More than 70 percent of California’s wa-ter supply originates north of San Francisco, principally in the Sacramento River basin and in the North Coast. Yet, approxi-mately 75 percent of the demand for water is to the south of this hydrologic divide. As we will see, much of the water supply engi-neering is designed to move water from the north, where it is abundant, to the south, where it is scarce.

b. Seasonal Variations. On average, 75 percent of California’s an-nual precipitation falls between November and March, with ap-proximately 50 percent occurring between November and Febru-ary. Yet, urban and agricultural demand for water is relatively low during this period and peaks in the summer and late fall months when precipitation is usually nonexistent.

c. Annual Variability. Finally, water supplies vary dramatically from year-to-year. For example, annual water run-off in the state is approximately 71 million acre feet. This average includes a record low of 15 million acre feet in 1977, which was the second year of the worst acute drought on record, and the historic high of 135 million acre feet in 1983, which was part of the El Niño phenomenon. During the 20th Century, California has suffered serious droughts in 1912-13, 1918-20, 1922-24, 1929-34, 1947-50, 1959-61, 1976-77, 1987-92, and 2007-2010, and 2012-present.

All of these variations render water resources management highly un-certain.

Source: CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF WATER RESOURCES, CALIFORNIA WATER PLAN UPDATE 2013 (BULLETIN 160-13) (Public Review Draft), Chapter 3.

5. These contemporary hydrologic uncertainties pale in comparison to re-cent estimates of the worst droughts in California’s geologic history:

William K. Stevens, Severe Ancient Droughts: A Warning to CaliforniaN.Y. Times, July 19, 1994

Beginning about 1,100 years ago, what is now California baked in two droughts, the first lasting 220 years and the second 140 years. Each was much more intense than the mere six-year dry spells that afflict modern Cali-fornia from time to time, new studies of past climates show. The findings suggest, in fact, that relatively wet periods like the 20th century have been the exception rather than the rule in California for at least the last 3,500 years, and that mega-droughts are likely to recur.

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The evidence for the big droughts comes from an analysis of the trunks of trees that grew in the dry beds of lakes, swamps and rivers in and adjacent to the Sierra Nevada, but died when the droughts ended and the water levels rose. Immersion in water has preserved the trunks over the centuries. Dr. Scott Stine, a paleoclimatologist at California State University at Hayward, used radiocarbon dating techniques to determine the age of the trees' outer-most annual growth rings, thereby establishing the ends of drought periods. He then calculated the lengths of the preceding dry spells by counting the rings in each stump.

This method identified droughts lasting from A.D. 892 to A.D. 1112 and from A.D. 1209 to A.D. 1350. Judging by how far the water levels dropped during these periods--as much as 50 feet in some cases--Dr. Stine concluded that the droughts were not only much longer, they were far more severe than either the drought of 1928 to 1934, California's worst in modern times, or the more recent severe dry spell of 1987 to 1992. In medieval times the Califor-nia droughts coincided roughly with a warmer climate in Europe, which al-lowed the Vikings to colonize Greenland and vineyards to grow in England, and with a severe dry period in South America, which caused the collapse of that continent's most advanced pre-Inca empire, the rich and powerful state of Tiwanaku, other recent studies have found.

Does Tiwanaku's Fate Await Modern California?

Dr. Stine, who reported his findings last month in the British journal Nature, says that California, like Tiwanaku, presents "a classic case of people building themselves beyond the carrying capacity of the land," which is deter-mined not by wet times but by dry ones. "What we've done in California is fail to recognize that there are lean times ahead," said Dr. Stine, "and they are a lot leaner than anything we've come up against" in the modern era.

How far ahead that reckoning might lie is, of course, uncertain. But one ominous sign may be that the earth's climate as a whole is now warming up, whether from natural causes or because of heat-trapping atmospheric gases emitted by industrial society. Any significant global warming would probably cause changes in atmospheric circulation and precipitation patterns, and the new findings suggest that "during much of medieval time the plane-tary ocean-atmosphere system operated in a mode unlike that of modern time," Dr. Stine wrote in Nature. This alteration of the system could well have been caused by a natural global warming, he said. He believes that one long-term effect was to steer storm tracks and rainfall away from California. If this pattern was indeed brought about by a medieval global warming, he said, a future global warming--whether natural or human-induced--might bring back the decades-long droughts of yore.

Dr. Stine's findings, combined with similar evidence he turned up in Patagonia, strengthen the case of those who believe that the earth experi-enced a general warming at the time of the Middle Ages, Dr. F. Alayne Street-Perrott, a paleoclimatologist at Oxford University in England, wrote in a com-

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mentary accompanying Dr. Stine's report in Nature. Other experts maintain that the medieval warming was not global but instead affected only some parts of the world. "I'm not prepared to believe that the whole world was warmer," said Dr. Malcolm K. Hughes, a paleoclimatologist who directs the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Nor is it possible to say for sure that future global warming would bring back the large-scale droughts of the past. "We've not done the work on the actual mechanisms," he said. But he said that Dr. Stine's findings, coupled with sim-ilar conclusions that can be drawn from other tree-ring studies by scientists in his laboratory, are a "serious cause for concern." There appears to be little doubt that the epic dry spells of the past did occur, he said, adding that "what has happened can happen."

The findings also emphasize the importance of precipitation changes, rather than simply changes in temperature, when weighing the potential im-pact of future global climate change, Dr. Stine wrote in Nature.

Periods of “Epic Drought”

The Sierra Nevada, where Dr. Stine conducted his study, is California's most important area for the collection of water. Runoff from the Sierras pro-vides two-thirds of the state's surface-water supply for cities and farms. The study involved trees at four places: Mono Lake, Tenaya Lake, the West Walker River and Osgood Swamp. Dr. Stine's tree-ring analysis found that live trees had covered dry beds of lakes, streams and swamps for overlap-ping periods of 50, 100, 141 and 220 years and that these "lowstand" periods were clustered in two major dry spells separated by a century-long wet pe-riod. "Epic drought," he wrote in Nature, is "the only plausible explanation for the site-to-site contemporaneity of the stumps." In the period separating the two long droughts, Dr. Stine said, the water in Mono Lake rose to a level higher than any in the last 150 years, suggesting that the California climate was even wetter then than it is today. The last century and a half, Dr. Stine found, has been the third wettest period in the last three millenniums. But, he said, "the vast majority of years during the past 3,500 years have been much drier than what we've come to expect to be normal in California."

The evidence for the medieval drought periods is especially strong, Dr. Hughes said, because the lake basins are closed, with no natural outlets; con-sequently, their water levels are influenced only by inflow and evaporation, making them ideal gauges of drought. And even though radiocarbon dating is somewhat imprecise, he said, it is good enough "to show two major phases of tree growth and lowstands; there's no doubt about that." This, he said, shows that "often, for sure, there have been periods of 100 years or more" that have been "markedly drier" than the 20th century. The 10th to the 14th centuries, encompassing the prolonged droughts reported by Dr. Stine, saw "dramatic changes" in Western Hemisphere civilizations, Dr. Street-Perrott wrote in Nature, and some have been attributed by archeologists to changes in rainfall. One example is the sudden decline of the Anasazi cliff-dwellers in the American southwest at about the year 1300. Another, even more striking, is the collapse of Tiwanaku.

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Tiwanaku was a flourishing empire that lasted seven centuries and reached its zenith near the end of the first millennium A.D. It commanded an area about the size of California, extending from the Andean plateau around Lake Titicaca to the Pacific Coast and covering parts of present-day Bolivia, Chile and Peru. The empire's economy was based on intensive agriculture carried out on raised fields: acres of end-to-end rectangular platforms created by digging the dirt from areas between them. The dug-out areas became canals from which silt was taken to provide fertilizer. This highly productive and environmentally sound system dominated Latin American agriculture for centuries.

Death of a Civilization

But several lines of evidence, including analyses of fossilized pollen grains and isotopes of oxygen in lake sediments, make it clear that an ex-tended drought afflicted the region starting between A.D. 950 and A.D. 1000 and continuing, with fluctuations, until 1410, concluded a study last year by Charles R. Ortloff, a fluid-mechanics specialist at the FMC Corporate Technol-ogy Center at Santa Clara, Calif., and Dr. Alan L. Kolata, an archeologist at the University of Chicago. That period mostly overlaps the one in which the California mega-droughts occurred. The South American drought was of "hor-rendous proportions," said Dr. Kolata, and it destroyed Tiwanaku's agricul-tural base. The empire's cities were abandoned by about 1000. Dr. Kolata believes that the raised fields could no longer support the cities, and archeo-logical evidence shows that the fields were abandoned between 1000 and 1100. The political state collapsed, the population dispersed and, with agri-culture no longer possible, the people relied on raising alpacas and llamas. Tiwanaku's agricultural system had been able to adjust to the less drastic cy-cles of drought and inundation that were thought to be normal, but "Ti-wanaku agro-engineers were incapable of responding to a drought of un-precedented duration and severity," Mr. Ortloff and Dr. Kolata wrote in a 1993 paper in The Journal of Archeological Science.

Like Tiwanaku's engineers, those who draw up California's water-man-agement plans do so on the basis of what are believed to be normal droughts but in fact are not nearly as severe as what has occurred in the past and can occur again, said Dr. Stine. "The assumption they've made for a long time--that California is subject to droughts of a maximum of seven years--could be harmful in the long run," he said, because "they have doled out water on that assumption. "This could be destructive if you get hit with a 9th or a 10th or a 15th year of severe drought."

In gauging the length and frequency of droughts for planning purposes, California officials rely on a tree-ring study extending back to about 1560. Over that period, the 1928-1934 drought was the longest and worst. The problem, said Dr. Stine, is that the study period includes not only the wet 19th and 20th centuries, but also the even wetter 16th and 17th centuries. "They're using the wettest period of the last 3,000 years to define the dura-tion and severity of the droughts we can expect in the future," he said.

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Maurice Roos, the chief hydrologist of the California Department of Wa-ter Resources, said he had not read Dr. Stine's report in Nature. But he did acknowledge that a mega-drought of the kind described in the report would probably cause much of the state's lush irrigated cropland to cease produc-ing. The cities would probably have the money and political power to appro-priate enough water to get by, he said, adding, "There will always be some water; there is not going to be no water." He said he would not expect farm-ing to cease altogether, or cities to be deserted. Modern California has at least one coping weapon that Tiwanaku did not: the ability to turn sea water into fresh water. The 1987-92 drought did, in fact, prompt Santa Barbara to build a desalinization plant, Mr. Roos said, though he was quick to point out that this solution at present would be "enormously expensive."

At the very least, Dr. Stine wrote in Nature, a recurrence of the me-dieval droughts "would be highly disruptive environmentally and economi-cally." Planning for a mega-drought now, while heads are a little cooler, would help, he says. The planning might include, for example, deciding which crops are to be taken out of production first, what restrictions to place on the pumping of groundwater and how cities are to obtain water. But in the end, he said, a reprise of the medieval droughts would simply overwhelm California's efforts to cope. And he said: "We don't need 200 years of drought to bring us down. At some point, in the 9th year, or the 15th year or the 19th year, the damage is done and it doesn't matter any more."

Glen M. MacDonald, A La Niña on Steroids:It Happened Before, It Could Be Happening Again.

L.A. Times, July 13, 2007

If you like it hot and dry and live in Southern California, you could be in luck. Our combination of an arid winter, scorching summer and host of wild-fires may not be a short-term aberration. Consider the possibility of decades of dry, hot weather, stretching from Southern California to the headwaters of the Sacramento and Colorado river systems—the lifelines that allow us to flourish in our arid to semi-arid landscape. That is the nature of a "perfect drought," and new research regarding a past episode of climate warming tells us we could be on the brink of a new one.

Historical climate records show that such prolonged droughts can and do occur. The last one began in the late 1980s and ended in the early 1990s. California dried at the same time that the flow of the Colorado River declined by almost 40%. Oceanic and atmospheric measurements tell us that this blast of hyper-aridity was associated with depressed temperatures in the eastern Pacific, sort of a persistent La Niña condition. In 1992, the rain and snow returned. However, during 1990 and 1991 alone, the drought cost Cali-fornia an estimated $2 billion in agriculture losses, increased energy costs and damage to the environment. What if that drought had spanned decades?

Two interlinked phenomena are looming that could provide the ingredi-ents needed to produce droughts lasting decades. A recent study led by Rich

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Seager of Columbia University examined the results of 19 climate models and found one very consistent and alarming result: Warmer temperatures are producing increased uplift of air masses in the tropics. As the air rises, it cools, the water vapor condenses and produces more tropical precipitation. Eventually, though, that air descends, warms and becomes drier.

This is bad news for those places where the air descends. Unfortu-nately, Southern California and the Southwest are such places. Seager and his colleagues have concluded that we are experiencing the "imminent transi-tion to a more arid climate in Southwestern North America."

There is more bad news. A number of recent studies allow us to look at what happened during the last major episode of natural global warming. Dur-ing the medieval period between about 800 AD and 1350 AD, there was a slight increase in solar radiation coupled with a decrease in volcanic activity. The result was widespread warming. Recent research by Connie Millar of the U.S. Forest Service suggests that annual temperatures in the Sierra may have increased by almost 6 degrees Fahrenheit during this time. Meanwhile, a warming climate in the tropical Pacific led to higher temperatures in the west-ern Pacific and cooling in the eastern Pacific.

Think of this as La Niña on steroids, unusually strong and capable of persisting for decades to centuries. Western North America got a double whammy from the atmosphere and oceans and experienced widespread drought, decreased flows from the Sacramento River, the Colorado River and the Saskatchewan River in Canada, falling lake levels and increased fire activ-ity.

Sound familiar? It gets worse. New independent research from the Uni-versity of Arizona and UCLA indicates that during the 12th century, a particu-larly severe drought in Southern California was coupled with persistent low flows in the Sacramento and Colorado rivers, and this situation lasted about 60 years.

Could we now be facing another such arid span? Given the climate warming of the past decades and the projected warming over the next cen-tury, it is possible that we are already in one. So, even if this current dry spell breaks and we dodge the bullet for a few years, it is beginning to seem un-likely that we will avoid another protracted drought if the climate continues to warm as predicted.

What can be done? According to the recent U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it seems little can derail the global-warming ride we are on. It would therefore be prudent for local water districts, planning bodies, state officials and federal agencies to systematically consider some prolonged scenarios. Through such efforts, combining input from climate models and studies of past droughts, we can at least come up with a range of potential strategies. For us in California and the Southwest, the most pressing threat from climate warming may well be the next perfect drought.

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6. Droughts have both economic and political consequences as they shape public attitudes on policy questions such as the need to construct new water projects and the desirability of allocating additional water to environ-mental uses. Indeed, some observers believe that political and regulatory decisions on issues such as these have created, or at least contributed to, re-cent water shortages. The following articles, written during and just after the 1987-1992 drought, tell the story:

Marc Reisner, The Big ThirstN.Y. Times Magazine, Oct. 28, 1990

Nineteen-ninety has turned into the fourth dry year in a row for Califor-nia--the longest dry period since the 1930's--but the residents of this nor-mally semiarid and now utterly parched state can still pluck a few sprigs of humor, or irony at least, from their exfoliating forests and expiring gardens. In Santa Barbara, Mayor Sheila Lodge may be the first American politician who has sought popularity by going unwashed; last winter, she vowed to bathe only twice a week until the rains returned. Some of Lodge's con-stituents, prohibited from watering their lawns, were so traumatized by their dead grass that they painted it green. This spring, the most unpopular man in town was a fly-in resident named Harold Simmons, a corporate raider from Texas who bought himself the sort of Babylonian estate that Santa Barbara used to feature in its tourist brochures: when he refused to stop irrigating his 24 acres, the city threatened to put him in jail.

Farther south, a Los Angeles County official said it was a sin for the Co-lumbia River, 1,000 miles away, to flow out to sea instead of down to South-ern California in a pipe. He was promptly anointed the Great Satan in the Pa-cific Northwest. And the San Francisco water department, with its reservoirs running low, meekly decided to tap into the California Water Project, a gar-gantuan network of dams and aqueducts that diverts a lot of Northern Califor-nia water hundreds of miles south to Los Angeles. Until then, hatred of the water project was almost a condition of residency in San Francisco.

No one is really laughing at the drought. It has already caused a lot of economic pain, especially around Santa Barbara, where a fire fueled by thou-sands of acres of dying vegetation incinerated more than 400 houses in June. Thus far, mandatory rationing--except around Santa Barbara—hasn't been draconian yet.

Most farm fields in the Central Valley, a continuous 500-mile expanse of ir-rigated agriculture, were abloom with orchards and crops this rainless sum-mer. But California can hold on only so long as the reservoirs and ground wa-ter hold out. It is mesmerizing to watch the state's largest artificial body of water, Shasta Reservoir, near the Oregon border, transformed week by week into more acres of mud flats. Some of its water has been siphoned--through tunnels, pipes and concrete ditches--to urban Southern California, but most of it went to agriculture.

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If California were to be starved for rain as long as it was during the seven-year Great Drought of the 1930's, it could bring calamity to the world's sixth-richest economy. By the end of the 1990's, according to a San Francisco con-sulting company, Spectrum Economics, a severe shortage could cost South-ern California 400,000 jobs and $25 billion in lost revenues. "We're looking at a potential catastrophe unlike any this state has seen," says Carl Boronkay, the general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern Califor-nia. But some residents of this environmentally avant-garde state fear some-thing worse, as they see it, in the form of huge new dams on whatever rivers on the California northern coast still run free. Rivers closer to civilization, like the Stanislaus and San Joaquin, are already little more than stair-step reser-voirs.

And yet some Californians, for reasons that differ wildly, feel a sneaking satisfaction that a historic drought has finally descended over a state that has gone to extravagant lengths to deny that it is a desert. Some believe California will have no choice but to build some long-delayed new dams and aqueducts. Others pray that premonitory doom will discourage people from moving there. And some are vaguely hopeful that Los Angeles and Northern California, which have been at war over water for decades, will bury the hatchet and declare war on agriculture instead, because it consumes 85 per-cent of the state's water while producing less than 5 percent of its wealth. Whatever happens, and whoever is right, when the drought is over--assuming it ends--California will be an altered place.

The United States west of the 100th meridian, which runs through the middle of the Plains states, really amounts to a distinct civilization, an empire grafted onto a landscape profoundly hostile to human habitation. If many Americans still do not fathom how arid the West is, that is because the graft has taken so successfully. In a normal precipitation year, which California hasn't seen since 1986, Los Angeles receives 14 inches of rainfall. Tripoli and Kabul get about the same. San Francisco sees less precipitation than Tel Aviv, and almost all of it falls in the winter; from mid-May through mid-October, the city, like most of California, is usually bone-dry.

In California, as in Arizona and Colorado and Idaho and even Oregon and Washington east of the Cascades, everything depends on the manipulation of water: moving it from places where it presumably isn't needed to where it presumably is needed. Most precipitation falls in the high Rockies, the Cas-cades and the Sierra Nevada; it ends up in mountain-fed rivers like the Col-orado, the Owens and the Trinity, which tend not to flow where people have settled. Flying over the region, you see hundreds of reservoirs in the moun-tains and pencil-line aqueducts striking off in all directions, moving water hundreds of miles across foothills and deserts to the hot, low-lying basins.

The Los Angeles area over-tapped its ground water and ghost rivers 80 years ago; it has 14.3 million inhabitants and produces twice as much wealth as Africa, but still lies in its desert bed as helpless as a patient in intensive care, hooked to tubes called aqueducts. These concrete ditches and pipes bring water from the Colorado River, which is more than 200 miles distant,

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from the Owens River and Mono Lake 300 miles away and from the Feather River, which is nearly 600 miles away in Northern California.

Desert civilizations have always been vulnerable to droughts; despite ob-sessive efforts to make themselves secure, many have disappeared. The Western United States foresaw its own doom during the Dust Bowl of the 30's, when tens of thousands of farmers went bankrupt and whole Plains counties emptied out. But the Great Drought, coinciding with the Depression, created the modern West that is so vulnerable again today. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt and a long succession of New Deal Democrats who ruled Congress, so-called water development, which has always been a kind of secular reli-gion in the arid West, became a holy crusade. The Federal Government's ri-val engineering behemoths, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, built hundreds of dams that cities and states couldn't have fi-nanced themselves, and people flocked into regions where they may have had no business living, at least in such numbers.

One could probably say the same of Manhattan, but something is funda-mentally different about millions of people and tens of millions of acres of cropland in arid basins that receive 10 or 15 inches of annual rainfall--or, in the case of Las Vegas, Nev., four inches in a very wet year. And New York City's water, from the Catskills, flows downhill; much of Los Angeles's water, after flowing hundreds of miles, has to be pumped 3,000 feet over the Tehachapi Mountains.

For better or worse, the westward migration happened and is still happen-ing. Southern California's population has increased fiftyfold since the inven-tion of the machine that formed it--the automobile--and the region is still gaining an astonishing 350,000 people each year. In scarcely a half-century, Las Vegas grew from nothing into a city of almost a million people; it is ex-pected to double in the next 40 years.

No immigration policy limits the influx of people into places that may not be able to sustain them, and few migrants packing their belongings in Mexico or Taiwan or Ohio ask whether there is enough water for them. Everyone just comes. Who can blame them? The Disneyland state they see on television really exists, a glorious self-indulgence of cows grazing in soggy pastures, opalescent golf courses spreading into the desert and fountains shooting wa-ter into 110-degree skies.

Water is a problem for all the Western states in the sense that everyone is always fighting over what little there is. But Southern California, a 20th-cen-tury Nineveh, is breathtakingly vulnerable. Though the drought has estab-lished a persistent pattern of much-below-normal precipitation across a good section of the interior West, Southern California has been hardest hit.

This year, Santa Barbara saw barely 25 percent of its normal precipitation, which, at 20 inches a year, isn't much. In sharp contrast to the rest of South-ern California, Santa Barbara has considered growth an abhorrent word for a hundred years. Therefore, it has deliberately limited its water supply. In the

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1960's, when the California Water Project was being built, the city signed up for water to be delivered through a branch aqueduct across the coastal mountains. But in the late 1970's, the city decided in a referendum that it didn't want the water after all. Santa Barbara depends entirely on ground water, which has been severely depleted, and a couple of nearby reservoirs, one of which is stone-dry as the other shrinks toward 25 percent of capacity; it may also be empty by 1992.

Besides heroic water conservation, the city's other options are few and frightfully expensive. It is hopefully estimated that sea water desalinization would cost $1,950 to $2,300 an acre-foot, even if a desalting plant could be built in time. (Santa Barbara normally paid about $250 for that amount from its current sources. An acre-foot—326,000 gallons—is enough to sustain two average households for a year.) A Canadian company thinks it can deliver water from British Columbia by supertanker for more than $3,000 an acre-foot. Overdrafting ground water--tapping it far beyond natural replenish-ment, as oil is extracted--is a third option, but the region could pay dearly for that choice in the future unless it finds enough water somewhere to recharge the basins.

The drought notwithstanding, Santa Barbarans recently rejected a fourth proposal: hooking into the California Water Project after all. They worried, among other things, that it would encourage growth without necessarily guaranteeing the city's water. "The California Water Project is horribly over-committed," says Bendy White, the former chairman of the city's water com-mission, which may be the only such agency in the West that really doesn't want more water. "The system has only half the water it's contracted to pro-vide in a normal year. Where's the water going to come from? I don't think it exists. If we sign up with the state we'll end up with who knows how much water and a financial burden that will make today's costs look like peanuts. I also can't believe that population growth would be held to a reasonable rate over the long haul."

White maintains that the region should "judiciously" overdraft more ground water to survive the drought; in the future, it should use more re-claimed sewage water in parks and golf courses and begin buying water rights from farmers, who still use four of every five gallons of water con-sumed in Santa Barbara County. "Agriculture uses too much water, that's all there is to say," White says. "They've got to begin living more within their means. But I'm not saying we want all that agricultural water. The cold reality is that a limited water supply has been the cornerstone of our growth limita-tion policy, which is about the only one in the entire state that actually works. To an amazing degree, Santa Barbara has staved off the awfulness urban growth has caused to the south of us."

The "awfulness" of which White speaks also goes by the name Los Ange-les. If you include San Diego and the suburbs that have sprouted up even out in the Mojave Desert, the California South Coast is now the most populous desert metropolis on earth. Los Angeles, which has aqueducts bringing in dis-tant water from three directions, is in far better shape than Santa Barbara is,

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but its water crisis could soon become far worse. A few major rainstorms would replenish Santa Barbara's reservoirs, and the city is so small and grow-ing so slowly that existing storage capacity is sufficient in normal times. But Los Angeles now stands to lose so much water that the outlook is awesomely bad.

Most urban growth in Southern California in the past 30 years has been based on an immense, quavering mirage--water the region has been borrow-ing and will now forfeit, water it has expected and may never see. The water Los Angeles is about to lose belongs to Arizona, which spent decades fighting in the Supreme Court for a larger share of the much-diverted Colorado River. Arizona won its case, and despite a Herculean effort by the California Con-gressional delegation to prevent the Bureau of Reclamation from completing the Central Arizona Project, that huge aqueduct system is now built. Arizona may soon be siphoning away 660,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water that California has always counted on.

On a much smaller scale, Los Angeles is also going to lose some water it diverts from streams feeding Mono Lake, hundreds of miles away in the east-ern Sierra Nevada, because of ecological concerns. At the same time, water the city once expected to see by now in the California Aqueduct—the aorta maxima that drains the Feather River in Northern California--has not arrived. In the 1960's, the state government promised to deliver nearly twice as much water as it could then handle, confident that the voters would eventually ap-prove a multibillion-dollar expansion. But in 1982, when a referendum on the project's expansion came before the voters, it was overwhelmingly rejected. Typically, Northern Californians, many of whom regard Los Angeles with fear and loathing, voted 9 to 1 against it. More surprising, nearly 40 percent of Southern California opposed it, too, after figures revealed that the system of aqueducts and reservoirs would cost $11.6 billion, not including interest on the bonds.

In the simplest terms, the five-county Los Angeles area, which has gained almost five million people in the past 20 years and could easily gain five mil-lion more in the next 20 years, stands to lose water for seven million people during that time. And the California Water Project, which was supposed to have compensated for that stupefying loss, has no chance of being expanded any time soon.

If Southern California's other problems weren't so mesmerizing, people might seem more panicked about all this than they do. Recently, however, according to the California Poll, an independent opinion-gathering group, wa-ter has eclipsed air pollution, the traffic nightmare and everything else except the local drug wars as the citizen's foremost concern. It is just that no one can figure out what to do. Should drastic water rationing be imposed--the Santa Barbara solution--except during very wet years, foreclosing on South-ern California's aspiration to be Florida without rain? Does the state shrug off economic and environmental considerations and dam the last of its unfet-tered sources--the distant Eel, Klamath and Smith Rivers on the North Coast--regardless of cost? Or will the drought set the stage for what many see as a

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long-overdue battle in the West between cities and agriculture over water supplies?

The person who will have to bite down on these options--and any of them will bite back--is Carl Boronkay, the general manager of the Southern Califor-nia Metropolitan Water District. Metropolitan, the world's largest supplier of municipal water, is a kind of super-agency laid down over hundreds of often warring cities and towns and smaller water agencies. Its board used to be of one mind—more water from anywhere—but now has as many dissidents as the Soviet Central Committee. Add these political difficulties to the rest of Boronkay's agenda and he has to bring off an extraordinary balancing act.

"Who's going to stop births and in-migration?" asks Boronkay, an urbane but combative former State Attorney General. "Even Santa Monica, which is full of environmentalists, doesn't have a no-growth policy. We could solve our water problem overnight by telling people they can't fill their pools and they can't have a lawn--or at least they can't water it. Half of a homeowner's consumption in Southern California is outside his home. But life style is very important to people here, or anywhere, for that matter. Northern Californians say we have to learn to live within our means, but they don't live within their means. San Francisco draws its water from Yosemite National Park. Does liv-ing within your means mean that we don't import any more foreign oil? It isn't realistic or fair to tell Southern Californians that no matter how many people decide to move here, or be born here, their only option is to conserve more and more."

Boronkay, like many Californians living south of Big Sur, still believes the California Water Project ought to be expanded to capture winter flows in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers that otherwise spill out to the Pacific dur-ing the rainy season. "In 1986, during two weeks of heavy rainfall, a year's worth of water for Los Angeles went under the Golden Gate Bridge," Boronkay says, over lunch in a Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles. "You can't convince me that diverting some of that water would cause irreparable harm to the bay." Yet, mindful of his region's relentless growth, he refuses to rule out the prospect that more rivers might "have to" be dammed, and his equivocation makes a lot of Northern Californians uneasy, to say the least.

"Expanding the California Water Project is like pointing a loaded gun at the rivers of the North Coast," says Tom Graff, a senior attorney with the En-vironmental Defense Fund in Oakland. "It's a potential threat to the salmon in the Sacramento River and to all life in San Francisco Bay." Graff and other environmentalists say 60 percent of the fresh water that once nourished the San Francisco Bay is already diverted south—a point Boronkay's agency dis-putes. But it is a fact that the once-prolific salmon and striped bass in the Sacramento River and San Francisco Bay have declined alarmingly in recent years, and water diversions are widely believed to be the main cause.

Los Angeles's problems as it seeks more water from Northern California, or anywhere else, are not just the costs of transporting it or the vehement op-position many northerners feel, but its own imperial-mindedness in years

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gone by. Someone standing in the desiccated Owens Valley below Mount Whitney would find it hard to believe that there were once tens of thousands of acres of irrigated fields and orchards in the area, and a natural lake, miles across, that swarmed with waterfowl; since Los Angeles began diverting the Owens River 77 years ago, nothing green remains.

It's almost universally accepted that the city stole the Owens River in the early 1900's, a view planted in the popular mind by the movie "Chinatown." (The movie didn't tell enough of the story. When Los Angeles first moved on the Colorado River in the 1930's, Arizona brought out its machine gun-toting National Guard.) But Angelenos might argue that they stole the Owens Val-ley's water fair and square: the rights were all paid for, even if they were ac-quired by subterfuge.

Things seem different today. In people like Carl Boronkay and Mayor Tom Bradley, Los Angeles has the most gracious and Solomon representatives it has ever sent forth to try to snatch another region's water. But then, in their midst, appears a longtime county supervisor, Kenneth Hahn, who complained this spring that the Snake and Columbia Rivers, far away in Idaho, Washing-ton and Oregon, were "sinfully wasting" and ought to be relocated to South-ern California by aqueduct. Many Southern Californians now regard such Brobdingnagian schemes as crackpot—they were taken very seriously until the 1970’s—but Hahn's remarks rekindled wariness in the Pacific Northwest of the mighty desert civilization to its south.

Conditioned as they are to viewing water famine as their state's apoca-lypse-in-waiting, even most Californians fail to understand how solvable--in theory--the problem really is. Without a redistribution of the available water, California will soon be in serious trouble. But because its mountains wring a lot of precipitation out of winter weather fronts, and because it has built 1,470 major dams, the state has a vast amount of available water in most years; it is mainly a matter of who gets it.

If California's farmers, who get most of it, used just 10 percent less, an ad-ditional three million acre-feet of water would be at everyone else's disposal, enough for decades of urban growth with some left over to restore the plun-dered salmon streams and wetlands. Politically speaking, however, achieving that goal now appears so difficult that the Metropolitan Water District seems more inclined to pursue options like desalinization and an expansion of the California Water Project.

Western water is allocated through an antediluvian tangle of ironclad an-cestral rights, Federal subsidies and obstacles to more efficient use that has yielded little beyond despair to two generations of reformers. Water sold to farmers by the Federal Bureau of Reclamation is so cheap that many farmers cannot afford to conserve; it costs more to save water than it does to waste it. Some irrigation districts still buy it for a dollar and a half an acre-foot, when urban users pay two hundred times more. (The state's hot Mediter-ranean climate raises 250 crops and supports a $17 billion farm industry, but virtually nothing of value could grow without irrigation.)

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It is illegal for Los Angeles to buy water from the Bureau's Central Valley Project, which produces enough to supply 80 million urban users and which has a surplus in normal times. And many farm areas have bylaws prohibiting sales of water beyond their boundaries, a legacy of the Owens Valley episode.

Cynics also say most farmers don't want a market in water rights to ap-pear anyway. They need more dams to rescue them from their habit of over-drafting ground water: they use at least a half-trillion gallons more than na-ture replenishes each year, a figure that may rise to two or three trillion gal-lons during this critically dry year. The cynical theory is that the farmers, who know that only Los Angeles has the votes to authorize and build new dams, want Southern California to develop a desperate thirst.

The most outspoken member of the current crop of critics is Phillip L. Isen-berg, a Democratic State Assemblyman from Sacramento. Isenberg argues that if Federal crop and water subsidies, which he calls "criminally outra-geous," were phased out or reduced, a lot of low-value crops or marginal farmland would go out of production and an immense quantity of water would become available. In that event, he says, the farmers would have so much unused water on their hands that they would clamor for a water market.

"The four biggest water users in California are irrigated pasture for live-stock, irrigated alfalfa for livestock, subsidized cotton and subsidized rice," Isenberg says. "All of urban Southern California ranks fifth. "Most people down there don't even know that. They think they're the villains. They're not. I'm not even talking about retiring all that acreage --just a relatively small portion of it. All those crops can be grown somewhere else, where it rains. Why do we give three times more water to cows than we give to peo-ple, when cows are a $2 billion economy and urban California is nearly a $700 billion economy? What passes for enlightened water policy in California has become lunacy."

The growers are so inflamed by such criticism that they have created a new lobby, called the California Farm Water Coalition, to rebut the attacks. "The argument that pasture doesn't contribute much ignores the fact that milk and cheese are essential food products," says its executive director, Stephen Hall. "Why do we want to eliminate irrigated pasture? So we can in-stead use that water to make possible the creation of yet another housing de-velopment or to run another few cars through the local car wash?"

The growers have won converts among people whom one might imagine on Assemblyman Isenberg's side. Urban growth is consuming California so inexorably that even some environmentalists would rather see the farmers take all the water they want. Irrigated pasture, they say, is free open space. Not exactly free, but water subsidies are a small price to pay for it.

Others counter that if Los Angeles cannot buy agricultural water rights--or at least finance the farmers' conservation efforts, as the Metropolitan Water

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District is now doing in the Imperial Valley, an area near the Mexican border that uses more water than all the state's households--it will have no choice but to build more dams.

But schisms on issues like water and growth run deep among environmen-talists, and only a few groups have embraced water marketing without quali-fications. If raising a surplus of a monsoon crop like rice on subsidized water in a semi-desert can be called inefficient, it nevertheless seems unlikely that the institutions propping up such inefficiency will be taken down soon, drought or no drought.

How long the drought will last is anyone's guess. The Great Drought of the 1930's, which lasted nearly eight years, is the water planners' worst nightmare, but evidence from tree rings suggests that far longer dry periods have occurred in Western states. In any case, no one is predicting that tree-core samples, or even apocalyptic portents, will stop people from moving to California.

"Usually there's plenty of water for everyone, and that's the whole prob-lem with California," Assemblyman Isenberg said. "My fear is that they're all going to come, and then the climate will change and there won't be enough water for everyone."

David Margolick, As Drought Looms, Farmers In California Blame Politics N.Y. Times, June 24, 1994

A few hundred yards from the Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Aqueduct, an old cotton trailer sits alongside Interstate 5, which slices through the parched hills and verdant rectangles of California's San Joaquin Valley. The wire mesh wagon is empty, and over it is draped a large green banner. "NO WATER, NO FARMING. NO FARMING, NO FOOD," the sign says. It is one of several along the highway between Los Banos and Bakersfield, in letters large enough to be seen by motorists on the Interstate, the main artery between Northern and Southern California.

This year, as the sign suggests, the rains have once again stopped falling on California, the nation's largest producer of fruits and vegetables, and a drought watch has been declared in what water officials say will be one of the century's driest years. But the members of the Central Valley Family Farm Alliance, which is responsible for the banners, are not imploring the heavens for rain, though that would be nice. What frustrates them are not the acts of God but those of politicians, bureaucrats and environmentalists.

California's mountain reservoirs remain nearly 90 percent full, a reflection of last year's heavy rains and conservation efforts. But farmers in the Central Valley, particularly on its more arid western side, are receiving only a fraction of the water they generally receive from Federal and state sources, in some cases only one-third, and their livelihoods are drying up along with the land. The state's farmers have always received the largest portion of California's limited water supply, usually about 80 percent of it. But recent Federal envi-

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ronmental regulations have mandated that billions of gallons of water be withheld in rivers and streams to protect the dwindling supply of winter-run salmon, delta smelt and other fish decimated by the dams and water diver-sions of the Federal Central Valley Project. The Endangered Species Act stip-ulates that large amounts of water be released from reservoirs into rivers and allowed to flow out to sea, and the Central Valley Improvement Act of 1992 will commit more water to restoring fish and wildlife and their natural habi-tats.

The farmers contend that the Government has broken its covenant to pro-vide them with the water they need and has thus produced a man-made drought, impervious to natural cycles. "A drought is O.K.; we can handle a drought," said Jim McLeod, 65, who has grown apricots and walnuts in Tracy, 65 miles east of San Francisco, for most of his life. "But this new drought is an environmental drought, a political drought, not a Mother Nature drought. The Government wanted a good, reliable source of food, and we did it. We're eating better than anybody in history. And now we're destroying it."

To conservationists, however, the changes in water allocation corrected a long-term imbalance that allowed farmers to waste heavily subsidized water on some crops and to grow other crops ill-suited to the arid terrain. The newly struck balance, these people believe, atones for environmental hubris in California--a state that "has gone to extravagant lengths to deny that it is a desert," Marc Reisner, the author of "Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water" (Penguin Books), has written. Fishermen said the historical imbalance has crippled the state's once-thriving fishing industry. "A lot of us feel the water was stolen," said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. "Fish is a food prod-uct, too."

Officials say the tug of war is a reminder of the political complexity of wa-ter, an issue that historically pitted farmers and cities against conservation-ists but over which farmers now stand largely alone.

Few Signs of Drought

"The pendulum has shifted quite abruptly, and they've not had the time to make the adjustment," said Douglas P. Wheeler, the state secretary of re-sources. Farmers concede their power is eroding. "The scary thing is the transition between now and then, and the number of people's lives that get trampled in the process," said Jason Peltier of the Central Valley Project Wa-ter Association, a growers' group in Sacramento.

Driving into Firebaugh, a sun-baked agricultural community of 5,000 about 120 miles southeast of San Francisco, there are few signs of any drought, natural or legislated. Fields of onions and garlic destined to become powdered condiments and fields of tomatoes earmarked for ketchup and pizza sauce shimmer in the late afternoon sun, nourished by sprinklers spit-ting out what was once the mountain snow pack. But here and in surround-ing towns on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, where only five-and-a-

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half inches of rain fall in an average year, hundreds of thousands of acres that once produced cotton, tomatoes and cantaloupes have reverted to sage-brush and tumbleweed.

Chris Hurd, who grows almonds, onions and cotton, said that 600 of his 2,000 acres near Firebaugh lie fallow this year, and that his property has lost half its value since 1989. "I'm only hiring the minimum amount of people be-cause I don't want to turn around and lay them off," he said. "I have no long-range plans, except three things: no risk, no debt, no growth." Asked to pre-dict the area's future, Mr. Hurd, 43 years old, replied: "More and more de-pressed. More and more foreclosures. People migrating out."

In Firebaugh, named for the Scotsman whose ferry forded what was once the San Joaquin River and is now a riparian corpse, unemployment, mainly of migrant workers, stands at 43 percent. At least a third of that is attributable to diminished water, contended Dr. Marcia Sablan, the town's Mayor. A riot broke out last summer when hundreds of job applicants descended on the N. T. Gargulio tomato-packing plant in Firebaugh.

Last year, for the first time, federally financed housing for migrant workers did not fill up. Fifteen years ago, the town had 20 bars; now there are 3. And as Louis Thomason, the John Deere dealer, and John West, who handles Case-International tractors, are having trouble selling equipment, Firebaugh is los-ing a major source of sales tax. "I don't think the town will ever go back to the boom era of the 60's and 70's," Dr. Sablan said.

An Urban Shift

For California agriculture, the mid-20th century was a time of plenty. There was plenty of political power, plenty of profits and plenty of water, once Federal and state authorities channeled it from one end of the state to the other. The Central Valley Project, begun in the 1930's, evolved into an in-tricate network of dams, reservoirs, pumping stations and canals: 600 miles of silver ribbons bringing water to 20,000 farmers and three million acres of once arid land.

But agriculture's influence here has diminished greatly. The state is in-creasingly urbanized, with fewer financial or sentimental attachments to the land, particularly to the huge agribusiness holdings of the Central Valley. As Californians have concentrated in cities, they have come to care more about the country. Urban interests, which once joined with farmers to build more dams, now align themselves with conservationists. "We concluded that the environmental problems are real, and that you don't have to ruin the Califor-nia economy to solve them," said Timothy H. Quinn of the Metropolitan Water District, which serves Los Angeles. "We don't think the core of the problem is that we haven't poured enough concrete."

The Fish Story

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Nowadays, the pumps that once lifted water over the hills of Central and Southern California are running at only partial capacity; horsepower has been replaced by fish power. The Central Valley Project Improvement Act of 1992, signed by President George Bush over heated opposition by Gov. Pete Wilson of California, will channel between one-fifth and one-sixth of project water to rivers, estuaries and habitats in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta for the restoration of fish and wildlife.

Still more could be diverted under more stringent water quality standards promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency last December that will require that additional fresh water be flushed through to reduce salinity in the delta. Mr. Wilson denounced those standards, which he said threatened the state's agricultural economy, and asked state officials to devise an alter-native.

Over the last 10 years, 100,000 acres in the Central Valley have been con-verted from grains, barley and other water-thirsty crops to more efficient row crops like tomatoes or melons. Farmers have also improved irrigation. Phillip L. Isenberg, a Democratic state assemblyman from Sacramento and an au-thority on water policy, called the dispute "one of last gasps of an agriculture-dominated society." "The world that they, their grandfathers and great-grandfathers knew," he said, "isn't around anymore—and can never return."

7. The last drought, which lasted from 2007 until the abnormally high rains and snow that fell in late winter and early spring 2010, and the current drought (fall 2011-present) have highlighted and exacerbated all of the strains in California’s water policies. Please read the articles set forth on the Assignments page for a sampling of these problems.

8. Finally, the water shortages caused by cyclical drought and environ-mental mandates are likely to be dwarfed by the effects of global climate change. According to the California Climate Change Center, mean tempera-tures in California will rise between 3 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit between now and the end of the century. The temperature changes will be most se-vere in the summer months, thus causing an increased demand for energy in the cities and suburban areas and an increased demand for water for irriga-tion of crops and landscaping. Although some models predict a slight in-crease in average annual precipitation and others predict a 10 to 20 percent decrease, the warmer temperatures will cause more of the state’s precipita-tion to fall in the form of rain; and the snowpack of the Sierra Nevada will melt faster and earlier. This means that the precipitation we can capture and use for water supply will diminish over the next decades. Indeed, the average annual snowpack could be reduced by 70 to 90 percent; and the Cli-mate Change Center predicts a decline in late spring stream flows of up to 30 percent.

Based on these hydrologic models, the Center estimates that Califor-nia’s average aggregate water supplies will be reduced by approximately 25

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percent. The authors of the report emphasize, however, that these water shortages would be exacerbated if the predicted one-half to three foot rise in sea levels occurs, because even a marginal rise would increase saltwater in-trusion into the Delta Estuary during the more extended conditions of low outflow. Increased salinity in the south Delta would, of course, put even greater stresses on the state’s drinking water supplies, irrigation uses, and the Delta Smelt and other species. Higher tides and increased flooding also threaten the Delta levees, breaches of which could render the Delta water supplies interruptible at best and, under a worst case scenario, unsuitable for agricultural and domestic uses for years to come. CALIFORNIA CLIMATE CHANGE CENTER, OUR CHANGING CLIMATE: ASSESSING RISKS TO CALIFORNIA 3-13 (2006).

On top of all this, the Colorado River basin—and hence a significant percentage of Southern California’s water supply—is likely to suffer similar effects from global warming. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in a 2007 report:

Warming, and changes in the form, timing and amount of precipi-tation, will very likely lead to earlier melting and significant reductions in snowpack in the western mountains by the middle of the 21st century. . . . In projections for mountain snowmelt-dominated water-sheds, snowmelt runoff advances, winter and early spring flows increase (raising flooding potential), and summer flows decrease substantially. . . . Over-allocated water systems of the western [United States] . . . that rely on capturing snowmelt runoff, will be especially vul-nerable.

Indeed, the IPCC predicts that the diminished water supply reliability will have acute effects for our state: “By the 2020s, 41% of the supply to Southern California is likely to be vulnerable to warming from loss of Sierra Nevada and Colorado River basin snowpack.”INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE, CLIMATE CHANGE 2007: IMPACTS, ADAPTATION, AND VULNERABILITY, WORKING GROUP II CONTRIBUTION TO THE IPCC 4TH ASSESSMENT REPORT 627, 633 (2007).

The only good news, perhaps, is that there will be much work for water lawyers.

Additional Reading:

If you are fascinated by all of this, you may want to consider two gen-eral overviews of California and western water policy, both of which were in-cluded in the recommended supplemental readings in Assignment 1:

• Marc Reisner's CADILLAC DESERT (VIKING 1986) is a panoramic look at the history of western water policy that ranges from John Wesley Powell's famous (but largely

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ignored) Report on the Arid Lands to Los Angeles' taking of the waters of Owens Valley to the construction of the federal reclamation program to the California State Water Project and the Peripheral Canal to the Central Arizona Project to the tragedies at Teton Dam and Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge. Although it is nonfiction, the book reads like a novel. Reisner provided an update in Deconstruction in the Arid West: Close of the Age of Dams, 1 Hastings West/Northwest 1 (1994).

• Norris Hundley Jr.'s THE GREAT THIRST: CALIFORNIANS AND WATER, 1770S-1990S, 2D ED. (UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 2002), takes the reader through the history of the development of California's water resources from aboriginal times through the mod-ern era of conflict between consumptive users and environmental pro-tection. Hundley's accounts of the 19th Century history of irrigation in the Central Valley and the development of the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project during the 20th Century are essential reading.

For detailed information about California’s hydrologic conditions, water diversion and transportation facilities, and urban, agricultural, and environ-mental demands, see CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF WATER RESOURCES, CALIFORNIA WATER PLAN UPDATE 2009 (BULLETIN 160-09), CHAPTER 4.

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