Who needs water, how much water do they need, what do they need it for, and where is it going to come from?
—Dr. Peter Gleick, the Pacific Institute, 2009
Central to the production of food, energy, and minerals, water is considered an “axis resource.” As the demand for goods and services rises exponentially this century, competition for limited supplies of water will grow intense. Governments, industry, and individuals will be confronted by difficult questions, such as, how much water can, or should, man take from the ecosystem? How will we use limited water supplies—for food, power, or manufacturing—and what will the result be? Who makes these decisions; who benefits, and who doesn’t? In short, who controls the tap? These are knotty questions, and their answers will have significant, long-term consequences for man and the planet.
Worldwide, irrigated agriculture, which accounts for about 70 percent of water withdrawals, is by far the greatest water user. In California, the number is probably closer to 80 percent. In 2000 (the latest data available), California farmers used 34.3 million acre-feet of water, about four times as much as the state’s residential, commercial, and industrial users combined.
Under the West’s “law of beneficial use,” it is legal for farmers to divert water from rivers, or pump it from aquifers, without paying for it as long as it is used “beneficially,” a vague term that essentially sanctions water takings. Irrigation wells are rarely equipped with meters, so there is little information about how much water is being used, and irrigators, leery of “government intervention” in their affairs, resist attempts to find out.* But without that essential information, it is difficult to manage water responsibly.
Many Western irrigation districts impose a flat rate, which allows farmers to use as much water as they want. The Bureau of Reclamation subsidizes water, charging farmers a small percentage of the actual cost of providing it. In the Imperial Irrigation District of Southern California, farmers pay $15 per acre-foot, or $0.0006 per gallon, with no cap on how much they use and no surcharge for higher use. With no financial incentive to conserve, irrigators grow thirsty, low-value crops such as cotton, rice, and alfalfa in conditions better suited to cactus or scrub brush.
Even in the face of serious drought, irrigators resist any hint of government oversight, fearful of rationing or higher water prices. The result is the overpumping of groundwater in California and other agricultural states such as Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. This water mining, the technical term for pumping water from aquifers faster than nature can replenish it, lowers water tables, causes sinkholes, leads to wasteful runoff and evaporation, and, near coastlines, causes the saltwater pollution of drinking supplies. Furthermore, aging aqueducts and canals cannot deliver water to farmers in an efficient “on-demand” way, while overlapping bureaucracies and emotional, politicized water debates have left numerous states in hydrological gridlock. Nowhere is this more apparent than in California, the largest and thirstiest state in the Pacific West, and a bellwether for water issues.
Three-quarters of California’s water is located in the north, but three-quarters of its population is in the south. The Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta—the vast marshy area ringed by crumbling levees that Bob Bea fears are at risk of catastrophic failure—is the link between the two. You cannot separate a discussion of water in California, and thus the West, from a discussion of “the Delta.”
In the blunt vocabulary of local politics, the Delta pits farmers versus cities versus fish. But in reality, the situation in the Delta is complex.
In the mid-1800s, farmers began to drain the Delta’s marshlands, rolling back spongy peat and uprooting marsh grasses to create islands, and erecting about eleven hundred miles of levees to keep the water at bay. In this way, 450,000 acres of fertile land was “reclaimed” by the 1930s, and the Delta became one of the most productive farming regions in the world, with crops ranging from corn to alfalfa, grain, hay, tomatoes, asparagus, pears, and wine grapes.
Two vast water systems, the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project, use canals, aqueducts, pipes, and giant water pumps to move Sierra Nevada snowmelt from the northern end of the Central Valley to the southern end, and then south to Los Angeles. While these projects are efficient at moving water from remote sources in the mountains to human communities on the dry coast, they were not built with an eye to protecting the environment. Dams, pumps, and other man-made waterworks have decimated the Delta’s once thriving salmon and smelt populations, along with other aquatic species, raising the ire of conservationists and, lately, the courts. A series of rulings in the first decade of the twenty-first century limited the amount of water irrigators could take from the Delta, thus protecting the aquasystem. This provoked a fight between farmers, fishermen, and politicians.
Waterworks are not the Delta’s only problem. Natural gas is being extracted by drill rigs from beneath marshland, which adds to the Delta’s pollution. With land in the Delta much cheaper than in Sacramento and San Francisco, towns have grown into small cities, and subdivisions have risen behind the old levees, in floodplains, without much regulatory oversight. In a catch-22, cities and counties have the authority to approve development but bear no legal responsibility for flood protection. State agencies are responsible for flood protection yet have no legal control over construction permits. When levees fail or floodplains flood, property owners have successfully sued the state (i.e., taxpayers) for compensation. This has set off another legal tussle.
Each of these constituencies—farmers, cities and counties, energy companies, industry, environmentalists—has laid claim to the Delta’s water in an ad hoc way over the years. The result is an unholy mess. As the population expands and demand for water rises, competing claimants are fighting over a resource that is badly deteriorating.
The Delta’s levees are aging and leaky; they have drained tidal marshes and exposed peat to oxygen; as the peat decomposes, the land subsides and releases carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas). Most of the Delta has sunk below sea level, rendering the levees unstable and allowing salt water to intrude. Diversion of about 48 percent of the Delta’s freshwater—to supply farms and cities—has profoundly impacted the region’s twenty-two fish species. Moreover, CALFED, a federal-state consortium founded in 1994 to handle disputes and monitor the Delta’s environmental health, is facing insolvency. As a result, the environmental group American Rivers declared the Sacramento Delta the nation’s most endangered waterway in 2009.
Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, describes the warring constituencies as “hardly monolithic blocs.” Consider agriculture: “The reality is that you not only have farmers against developers and environmentalists, you have Northern California farmers versus Southern California farmers in the Delta. San Joaquin farmers versus Sacramento farmers. Cotton versus rice. Northern rice growers versus southern rice growers. It goes on and on. Every stakeholder has a strong interest in what happens to the Delta’s water, but how do you get beyond the impasse? So far, we haven’t.”
In 1980, as California was recovering from its longest drought since the Depression, state legislators proposed building a Peripheral Canal to route water around the Delta, which would protect the area’s sensitive ecology while delivering more water to Los Angeles and the south. The plan was to tap into the Sacramento River below the capital and channel water 43 miles around the Delta into the Cliton Court Forebay, the reservoir that primes the giant water pumps that shoot Sierra snowmelt south. But the Peripheral Canal plan was grandiose and became entangled in a water dispute between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Discussions broke down, and in 1982 the Peripheral Canal proposal was rejected by 62.7 percent of voters in a ballot initiative; in San Francisco, the vote was 95 percent against the canal.
Governor Schwarzenegger revived the plan in 2006 and began to push for a revised Peripheral Canal. But farmers worried that routing large amounts of freshwater around the Delta would turn their fields to dust. Despite record agricultural production in the Central Valley in 2007, farming losses were estimated to be as high as $245 million in 2008. Farmers worried that a Peripheral Canal could remove a further half million acres of farmland from use.
Environmental groups, which split bitterly over the 1982 debate—with some arguing for a Peripheral Canal, to protect the Delta’s ecology, and others against it—reached a consensus in 2008 that a Peripheral Canal would siphon too much freshwater from the estuary and destroy habitats and aquatic life.
By mid-2010, California’s twenty-nine water agencies had yet to reach agreement about how best to manage the Delta, and the Peripheral Canal, which was estimated to cost some $3–$4 billion, at a time when the state was facing bankruptcy, was politically unpopular.
“We have bad hydrology, compromised infrastructure, and our management tools are broken,” observed Timothy Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA). “All that paints a fairly grim picture for Californians trying to manage water in the twenty-first century.”
While in some ways the gridlock over the Delta is specific to California, it exemplifies the kind of complicated multiparty water disputes that are popping up everywhere. As in other parts of the country, where debates over mining, energy, and the “rights” of the ecosystem have flared, the battle over the Delta represents a competition between resources in which water is the focal point. Such “resource wars” will be a signature issue of this century.
With this scramble for water in mind, I invited Peter Gleick to join me on a driving tour, to see the Delta mess from a smelt’s-eye view.
As I parked my rented Prius behind his Prius, Gleick bounded out of his house in Berkeley with a large pair of serious birder’s binoculars slung around his neck. He folded his rangy body inside, and the hybrid whirred quietly out of Berkeley, heading northeast. It was alternately sunny and overcast as we slipped past rolling hills, a wind farm with huge spinning blades, and across the bridge at Suisun Bay, where the Sierra snowmelt flows out into San Francisco Bay. Around a sweeping bend, the Delta suddenly spread wide ahead: a biologically rich zone that is home to 500,000 people, 300,000 acres of agriculture, and 750 species of flora and fauna. It is the largest estuary on the West Coast. Five major rivers, and many smaller tributaries, feed into it. It is California’s most important, and vulnerable, freshwater resource.
Since 1940, the Delta has served as the nexus of the federal Central Valley Project (CVP), a water system run by the Bureau of Reclamation that consists of twenty dams, eleven hydroelectric generators, five hundred miles of canals and aqueducts, and countless pumps, pipes, and ditches. The CVP moves Sierra Nevada snowmelt from the northern end of the Central Valley to the southern end, to Los Angeles. The system irrigates 3 million acres of farmland and provides freshwater to 2 million consumers a year. The region’s other water system, the State Water Project (SWP), diverts water from the Feather River across the Delta to the Harvey O. Banks pumping plant, in Tracy.
“It all sounds like it makes sense, but the Delta system is really a giant Rube Goldberg–esque machine,”* Gleick said, gesturing out the window at a tangle of muddy canals. “They’ve twisted so many knobs and pulled so many levers here that no one really knows how the Delta’s plumbing works anymore. It just goes on and on, somehow. You can’t honestly describe the Delta as a natural system anymore.”
Before the human plumbing system siphoned off most of its water, the Delta carried 25 million acre-feet of water a year; now it gets about 8 million. Grizzly bears—the ones featured on the California state flag—used to roam here but are now gone. Enormous herds of tule elk once thrived around the marsh, but few remain.
During the gold rush of 1848 to 1855 in the Sierra Nevada, prospectors used hydraulic mining—high-pressure streams of water to wash away rock and uncover gold—which led to the mass erosion of the Yuba, Sacramento, and other rivers, with thousands of tons of silt flowing downstream and into San Francisco Bay. The rivers have still not fully recovered.
“It’s hard for me not to dream of what it used to be like,” Gleick said.
We arrived in Tracy, once a quiet agricultural town that has morphed into an exurb of San Jose. Sprinklers were whirling in the midday heat, turning brown patches into bright green grass and evaporating thousands of gallons of water up into the sky.
Two sets of giant pumps near Tracy suck up the Delta’s water and propel it south: the federal Tracy Pumping Plant, which serves Central Valley farmers, and the Harvey O. Banks Delta Pumping Plant, which is state-run, and before the gates of which we now stood.
At the Banks pumps, Delta water flows into the Clifton Court Forebay, through a set of fish screens (which are supposed to keep fish away from the pumps), and finally into the pumps, which shove the water 245 feet up a hill and into the California Aqueduct. The aqueduct carries the water 444 miles south, to the Perris Reservoir between Los Angeles and San Diego. It is a magnificent system for moving water, but the pumps are at the heart of a long, bitter controversy over the Delta.
Inside a metal shed, eleven thundering pumps were lined up in a row, the largest of which use eighty-thousand-horsepower engines. “With everything working, we can move 6.7 billion gallons of water per day,” said our guide, Doug Thompson. The State Water Project is the single biggest user of electricity in California. Prices are cheaper at night, so the temptation is to do most of the pumping then. But the Delta smelt, Hypomesus transpacificus—a small, silvery fish endemic to the Delta that is listed as threatened—prefers to spawn at night, along the channel’s edges. In an effort to prevent the fish from being sucked into the pumps’ spinning impellers, the Banks plant is mostly run during the day.
Smelt live for about a year, travel in schools, feed on zooplankton, and are an “indicator species,” meaning that they act as a natural gauge of the health of the ecosystem. Delta smelt were once one of the most plentiful fish in the estuary, but the Banks and Tracy pumps have been blamed for pulverizing millions of smelt and pushing the fish close to extinction.
Upstream from the Banks pumps, the John F. Skinner Delta Fish Protection System is basically a giant screen that, according to the DWR, diverts an average of 15 million fish a year away from the pumps. The facility consists of an intake channel, a series of V-shaped, louvered blue gates that push away or collect smaller fish, and holding pens for fish. Once enough fish are gathered, they are loaded into silver tanker trucks, which take them to a release point near Antioch.
“The system is effective but not flawless,” notes a DWR pamphlet. Not only do the smelt get into the pumps, but big fish and sea lions have figured out how to corral them near the screens and gobble them up.
I could see that Gleick, who had remained preternaturally calm as we toured the pumps, was growing agitated. Back in the Prius, he vented about the pumps and the fish screen: “This thing is the Achilles’ heel of the whole Delta system! It’s what an engineer would design to move water efficiently, which it does very well, but it doesn’t screen fish well at all.”
The pumps were built in the 1960s, when DWR’s mandate was to supply water. But water managers now have to satisfy a much broader set of needs, including the ecosystem’s. “The world has changed,” said Gleick, “but the infrastructure hasn’t.”
In the early twentieth century, the Delta boasted a healthy fishing industry, noted for its chinook (king) salmon. Canneries processed 5 million pounds of salmon a year, plus other valuable fish such as flounder, herring, sardines, and anchovies. By the 1960s, however, overfishing, agricultural pollution, and dams had destroyed fish stocks. Hatcheries introduced new species, such as striped bass, for sport fishermen, which feasted on native species. The Delta’s fish populations continue to decline for reasons not fully understood, but scientists worry that if the trend persists, the region’s aquatic food chain could crash.
In the spring of 2007, a California court ruled that the DWR had violated the state Endangered Species Act by failing to protect salmon and smelt. US district court judge Oliver Wanger threatened to shut down the pumps altogether. Farmers were outraged, and the decision was appealed. But in May 2007, a survey found only twenty-five smelt—the smallest number ever recorded in the Delta, and 93 percent fewer than the previous year. The pumps were shut down for ten days to allow the fish to recover. Bill Jennings, the executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, called the pumps “the smoking gun” in the smelt’s demise, quipping, “There are so few smelt out there now that you might as well name them instead of counting them.”
The pumps deliver water to some 25 million people, and the court order was met with deep concern in the region, especially by irrigators, who rely on timely water deliveries to sustain their crops.
In August 2007, Judge Wanger ordered water exports from the Delta cut by 6 to 30 percent between December and June 2008. “The evidence is uncontradicted that these project operations move the fish,” wrote Wanger.
The decision outraged Governor Schwarzenegger, who declared, “This federal biological opinion puts fish above the needs of millions of Californians…. [It is] a devastating blow to our economy.” Hundreds of farmers marched through the Central Valley, chanting, “Water! Water! Water!” and carrying signs that read NO WATER, NO JOBS, NO FOOD. (Some of them were allegedly paid by wealthy farm-owners to march.)
Too many people have been competing for a finite amount of water in the Sacramento Delta, and perhaps inevitably the fishermen and farmers began to throw elbows at each other, as they have done around the Chesapeake Bay. California fishermen have pushed Central Valley farmers to shift to less water-intensive crops; they have demanded that officials regulate pesticides and fertilizer runoff; and they have lobbied state regulators to take conservation and recycling more seriously. It was no mistake, fishermen say, that as water diversions from the Delta increased, peaking at more than 6 million acre-feet in 2005, fish stocks began to decline. That year, almost eight hundred thousand mature salmon returned to spawn in the Sacramento River and its tributaries. By 2009, the number had dropped to about thirty-nine thousand, which Paul Johnson, founder of the Monterey Fish Market, called “far too few to support fishing.” California’s salmon runs are “collapsing,” he wrote, thanks to the water withdrawals by “powerful corporate agricultural interests.”
But farmers vociferously disagree, saying there is no proof that water diversions to their fields led to fish kills. Restricting how much water they could use, farmers said, forced them to fallow hundreds of thousands of acres of arable land and led to a 40 percent unemployment rate in towns such as Mendota. By diverting into the ocean billions of gallons of water the farmers desperately need, said Representative Tom McClintock (R–Granite Bay), federal regulators aim “to indulge the environmental let’s pet project, the Delta smelt.”
In the summer of 2009, farmers erected signs in the west side of the San Joaquin Valley bemoaning a CONGRESS-CREATED DUST BOWL. The Fox News personality Sean Hannity flew into the valley with a camera crew to say, “The government has put the interests of a two-inch minnow before [farmers]!” And Representative Devin Nunes, who was trying to persuade federal regulators to ignore the Endangered Species Act when allocating water to farmers, declared, “The radical environmental groups have … been trying to turn this into a desert.”
But this argument is specious. Commenting on Hannity’s proclamation, Jon Stewart noted on The Daily Show, “The government should stop meddling in the business of the farmers, who would actually still be living in a desert if not for government meddling.”
The west side of the Central Valley did face drought and unemployment in 2009, but it was not facing anything close to Dust Bowl shortages. While Fresno County officials described 2009 as a “dire year” for agricultural production, that was only in comparison to 2008, a record year, when the county produced $5.7 billion worth of products, representing a nearly 6 percent increase over 2007. Mendota suffered unemployment, but that was not new: according to state statistics, the town’s unemployment rate has fallen below 25 percent only twice between 2000 and 2010. Perhaps Hannity’s most disingenuous argument is that Washington is “sacrificing farmers for fish.” There is no question that the many dams, pumps, and aqueducts, and the wasteful use of Delta water by irrigators has destroyed the region’s fisheries and those who make their living from them.
“We’re looking at an ecosystem that’s in severe peril,” said Rodney R. McInnis, regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service. “It’s not just the Delta smelt that are affected, but the salmon runs and killer whales and coastal communities.”
The West Coast fishing season runs from May to October and results in an average harvest of eight hundred thousand fish, from California to Oregon. In April 2008, federal regulators canceled the fishing of chinook salmon for the first time since the birth of the industry 150 years earlier. When state regulators closed the salmon fishery for a second year, in 2009, about twenty-six hundred jobs and $270 million were lost. (The Monterey Fish Market’s Paul Johnson calculates that the two-year closure cost the fishing industry some twenty-three thousand jobs and $2.8 billion in revenue.) The commercial salmon fleet dropped from five thousand boats in 1985 to four hundred boats by 2010. A tightly restricted fishing season was open in the spring of 2010, but catches were anemic.
Dave Bitts, a Stanford University graduate who forsook an academic career to fish out of Humboldt Bay, said he wasn’t surprised by the bans: “Fishermen are born with an extra helping of hope. But I never had much hope for this season,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2008. “Going fishing this year would be like a farmer eating his seed corn. For a sliver of a season and a tiny catch, it’s not worth it…. It’s painful to watch what’s happening to the fish, and the fisherman.”
On our second day in the Delta, Gleick and I were standing on top of Friant Dam, just north of Fresno, which impounds the once powerful San Joaquin River and creates a fifteen-mile-long reservoir called Millerton Lake. We were here to look at the dam that had destroyed the San Joaquin’s chinook salmon fishery and investigate the site of Temperance Flat Dam, which Governor Schwarzenegger wanted to build at Miller-ton’s northern end. If it is built, Temperance Flat will dwarf the dam we stood on.
Friant Dam is a vast concrete crescent, 319 feet high, that bisects the San Joaquin Valley. On either side of the dam, a smooth concrete-lined canal sluiced water to irrigators far away. On the left, the Friant-Kern Canal angled south; to the right, the Madeira Canal bore water to the north. Running from the dam’s spillway, the San Joaquin River flowed tamely along a narrow channel in the wide valley, where big rocks had been pockmarked and sanded smooth by centuries of unconstrained torrents. Since the dam was built in 1942, the valley has grown lush with trees and bushes.
The San Joaquin begins as Sierra Nevada snowmelt, pools in three lakes near Yosemite National Park, gathers momentum as it tumbles past Fresno, turns north across the Central Valley, and empties into the Delta, which carries it out to the Pacific. At a length of 350 miles, it is the second-longest river in California and once boasted one of the state’s richest ecosystems.
The river’s chinook salmon fishery was one of the biggest on the West Coast, and the fish were once so plentiful that farmers used salmon as hog food. But when Friant Dam was completed, and its two irrigation canals began diverting up to 95 percent of the river’s water to irrigate about a million acres of agriculture, the salmon run was decimated. By the early 1950s, river diversions were so great that in some places the San Joaquin ran completely dry. The chinook were wiped out.
In September 2006, after an eighteen-year legal campaign led by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental advocacy group, a historic agreement was announced to restore San Joaquin River flows to a sixty-mile stretch of river. Under the agreement, river diversions will be reduced by fifteen percent during the spring, chinook (now listed as a federal endangered species) will be reintroduced to the river, fish ladders and screens will be built, and levees will be repaired. NRDC attorney Hal Candee hailed the restoration as “unprecedented in the American West.” The project is estimated to cost $250–$800 million (to be shared by the federal government, the state, and the agricultural industry) and is slated to be completed by 2014.
The agreement attempts to protect farmers, as well. It allows irrigators to buy discounted water in wet years, and to buy water from other irrigation districts. But those not covered by the settlement worry that they will be forced to sacrifice more water and incur costly upgrades, and will have less hydroelectric production. The Modesto and Merced irrigation districts have taken their concerns to Congress, decrying the project as “a potential disaster.”
A crosswind blew over Friant Dam, ruffling Gleick’s beard as we stared at the placid reservoir. In a normal year, this basin can store up to 520,500 acre-feet of water, though on the day of our visit it looked at least a quarter empty; by October, the lake would hold about 40 percent of its capacity, which was lower than average. Even so, it was a serene and beautiful scene, and the dam and its canals were remarkable pieces of engineering. “It’s hard not to be impressed,” I ventured.
“True,” Gleick replied. “I’ve always said that these dams brought enormous benefits.” He paused a beat, then added, “But that doesn’t mean we need to build any more of them!”
If the Temperance Flat Dam is built in a gorge just north of Millerton Lake, it will dwarf Friant and create a vast new reservoir holding 1.26 million acre-feet of water, which is close to three times the size of Millerton. Standing on Friant, it was difficult to imagine the size and scope of the proposed structure. Dam proponents said water from Temperance Flats would cost $300 to $400 an acre-foot. But as they hadn’t decided on a site or design, or how the dam will be operated, those numbers were merely guesstimates.
“I’m in favor of designing dams—that’s cheap,” said Gleick. “Basic dam design hasn’t changed much over the years, although today you have to integrate climate change into your design. But building dams is horribly expensive. It always costs more than they say it will. Who is going to pay for Temperance Flat? The people who really use this water, the farmers, never buy water at full cost [it is subsidized by federal and state programs]. And now the state is bankrupt. So where is all of this money supposed to come from?”
Gleick says that agricultural water use in California is unsustainable, although he sympathizes with farmers. “Agriculture uses about eighty percent of the Delta’s water, while urban use represents just eight to ten percent. The agriculture industry hates that comparison and always says that ‘California produces a big percentage of the world’s food.’ But the issue is not ‘food versus no food.’ The issue is, can we grow the same food with less water, and without crashing our ecosystem? My answer is yes, unequivocally.”
If California farmers used more efficient irrigation technology, they could save enough water each year to fill Hetch Hetchy Reservoir sixteen times, the Pacific Institute found. If growers could be persuaded to conserve just 10 percent of the water they use, Gleick said, that would be equal to the total volume of water used by the residential sector.
To accomplish such savings, Gleick recommends three basic improvements. First, crop shifting: grow fewer low-value and water-intensive crops such as alfalfa, rice, and cotton, and grow more high-value, water-efficient crops such as fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Second, smart irrigation: use technology and information to schedule irrigation for key moments, and replace wasteful flood irrigation with sprinklers and drip irrigation. Third, short-term fallowing of crops: if California fallows 10 percent of field crops during a drought, it would save an estimated 1.7 million acre-feet of water and provide revenue for capital improvements.
“Farmers are smart,” says Gleick, “and I believe I’m on their side. Given the right signals, they do the right thing.”
A common lament, he says, is that “farmers can’t change what they grow.” But when provided with incentives, farmers are perfectly able to shift from one crop to another. Consider the shift from cotton to corn production in recent years: in 2009, cotton production in California dropped 27 percent, and it dropped 20 percent nationwide, compared to 2008, but corn production rose 83 percent in California and 26 percent nationwide. Why? Because of government incentives to grow corn for ethanol fuel.
What if we provided a similar incentive for planting water-efficient crops and provided farmers with tax credits for using efficient irrigation technologies? I asked. “There’s no question we’d save water,” Gleick replied.
I asked if he’d proposed the idea to actual farmers. “I’ve tried,” Gleick sighed. “But I can’t have that discussion. It depends a lot on who the messenger is. Growers don’t want to be told by an academic with a beard what to do. Frankly, I’m happy not to tell farmers what to do. They do the best they can.”
Mike Wade, of the California Farm Water Coalition, wrote, “The assertion that farmers can conserve 4 million acre-feet of water is absurd and borders on pie-in-the-sky reasoning. Most often, flood-irrigation is the only avenue to irrigate these crops. In addition to providing water for the plant to grow, the water also seeps into the underground and provides a recharge to the groundwater.” Pointing to the suggestion that farmers switch from field crops to vegetable crops, Wade added, showed a lack of understanding of how the market works. “If we follow the Institute’s suggestion, then grocery stores would be glutted with more vegetables than anyone would want to buy. Prices would collapse, and the crops would be wasted…. You can’t just wave a magic wand. There are consequences.”
At the northern end of Millerton Lake, we inspected one of the canyons where Temperance Flat Dam could be built. The lake and its surroundings are gorgeous. With dramatic beige hills rising around the sun-spangling lake, this is prime vacation country. Some of the older homes were modest, but the newer houses were large and expensive-looking. Yet something was vaguely wrong with the postcardlike view. As we drove along a winding road called Sky Harbor Drive, high above the lake, nearly every house had a FOR SALE sign in the driveway.
“What’s going on here?” I asked.
“Well, if you suddenly discovered that your vacation getaway was about to be turned into a horrible construction site for the next ten years while they built a seven-hundred-foot-tall dam in your face, you’d probably try to sell, too!” Gleick muttered.
It was bright at noon, and the heat was rising. We drove up and over the ridge, passed a few remote ranches, and eventually nosed the Prius down a hairpin road to a tributary of the San Joaquin. It was stultifyingly hot down there, especially on the river’s edge, where wide water-sculpted rocks radiated solar energy next to a venerable pumping station. Gleick and I glanced around, then stripped off our clothes and plunged into the stream. It was so clear and cool that it refreshed me down to my bones. If the new dam is built, this entire valley will be submerged.
Farmers, environmentalists, politicians, engineers, water managers, and citizens are in broad agreement that the Sacramento Delta system is broken, but almost no agreement exists on how to fix it. In 2008 Governor Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency, convened experts into a Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force, and provided millions of dollars’ worth of state funding for levee repair. But at least 220 government agencies have jurisdiction in the Delta; its massive technical problems are further complicated by politics and years of enmity between constituents. Washington has dithered, local politicians have bickered, cities and farmers have demanded more water, and environmental activists have declared war on the salmon- and smelt-killing pumps and the proposed Peripheral Canal. The result is a circular argument that leads nowhere.
“It’s the ultimate Gordian knot. There’s no other system in the world as complex as the Delta,” said UC Berkeley professor Ray Seed, who is studying the Delta with his colleague Bob Bea. In 2009, the state legislature passed a broad water package that created the Delta Stewardship Council as a central authority on the matter. But veterans of Delta battles questioned whether anything will change.
In July 2010, California faced a $19.9 billion budget deficit, and Governor Schwarzenegger pushed his $11.1 billion water bond—$3 billion of which was slated for the new dams in the Central Valley and $1.5 billion for the Peripheral Canal around the Delta—back to the 2012 ballot, which may signal its demise. (Schwarzenegger was succeeded by Jerry Brown, a Democrat, in 2011.)
“We’ve had a sixty-, seventy-year stalemate,” said Seed. “The biggest change now is the conjugate level of desperation from all parties. No one is winning, and people are finally realizing that if we all keep fighting each other, we eventually will all lose together.”
To Gleick, the central question presented by the Delta—and, by extension, water use in general—is “Who needs water, how much water do they need, what do they need it for, and where is it going to come from?”
Farmers, cities, residents, industry, and aquatic species all have claims on the estuary’s limited resources. The dispute over the Delta is about how to satisfy as many of those water users as possible. But perhaps we have been looking in the wrong direction for answers.
“We don’t really want water, per se,” said Gleick. “We want to grow our alfalfa or tomatoes, to make our semiconductors, to clean our clothes, to be happy fish. Large amounts of water is what we have been using to accomplish those things. But we need to rethink that.”
The Delta’s conveyance system grew ad hoc, over a century, with the undergirding supply-and-demand question being, how do we move water from Point A to Point B? Today, the demand question is, what is the minimum amount of water that will satisfy our needs? The supply questions are, do we have enough water to accomplish those goals? Where should our water supply be, and how do we design a system to move it?
“We need to change the mind-set away from an engineering mentality —‘Let’s find the water we need’—to a management mentality—‘Let’s manage the water we have more wisely,’ ” Gleick said. “It’s difficult. But it’s not impossible.”
Late in the afternoon, we rolled through slanting light and shadows and billowing fog to Gleick’s house, in Berkeley. He showed me his low-flush toilet, his front-mounted washer and dryer, and his gray-water irrigation system for the garden. The house was like a living laboratory for his work, a glimpse inside his mind. It is tasteful but modest, water-efficient, surrounded by greenery, and inhabited by a family that treads lightly on the earth. This environment is very much like the ideal Gleick imagines for the entire state of California, and perhaps the world beyond it.
“Ahhhh,” he said, after gulping down a tall, cool glass of Hetch Hetchy water drawn from the kitchen tap. “That tastes really good. You get thirsty out there!”