Ending the Water Wars
By Steve Evans
One of the few things that most people can agree on when it comes to water in California is this: much of it falls as rain and snow in the northern part of the state, but most of the demand emanates from the large corporate farms and sprawling cities in the south. Those farms and cities are constantly seeking more water, and their latest effort to get it, a water bond slated for the 2012 ballot, could lead to the drowning of some important and gorgeous parts of California.
Although most of our population began near the life-giving rivers in the north, the turn-of-the-century saw a steady stream of immigrants preferring the more temperate weather and vast tracts of agricultural land in the south, tilting the balance of California’s water needs to the drier part of the state. To correct God’s poor planning, government agencies built a massive system of more than 1,400 major dams and hundreds of miles of canals to capture water in Northern California for export, much of it through the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, the West’s largest estuary. State and federal canals carry water pumped from the Delta hundreds of miles to endless farmlands in the south—most of them owned by large corporations—along Interstate 5. What isn’t used by agribusiness is pumped over the Tehachapi Mountains to supply urban development in the Inland Empire, including the Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Diego metropolitan areas.
As more freshwater has been exported from the Delta over the decades, the estuary’s water quality began to suffer, and fish populations began to decline. Fifty years after Delta exports became a reality, salmon and other native fish that reside in or pass through the Delta on their way to spawn in upstream rivers are on the verge of extinction. So much water gets sucked out of the south Delta by the huge federal and state pumps that water flows backwards in many of its channels, instead of out into the San Francisco Bay and through the Golden Gate to the Pacific Ocean.
Despite the severe degradation of the Delta ecosystem, corporate farmers and developers now want even more freshwater from the estuary. This water would bring them increased profits by enabling them to plant even more land with crops and continue to build endless subdivisions. Of course, they’d prefer the public pay for the infrastructure needed for them to get more water, and they launched a well-funded lobbying blitz to achieve their goals. In response the California Legislature passed a water policy and funding package last year that sets the stage for a new era of big dam and canal building in the state. The package includes an $11 billion bond, now scheduled for a public vote in November 2012. Although the water bond funds many programs that are needed in California to improve water conservation and recycling, the largest single component of the bond will provide $3 billion to build new water storage infrastructure in the northern part of the state, including new or enlarged dams on the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers.
The plan proposed by state and federal water contractors to boost Delta water exports also includes the construction of a new canal or tunnels that will allow water to bypass the Delta altogether, routing it straight from the Sacramento River down to the southland instead.1 While this new infrastructure would eliminate the need for the fish-killing pumps that currently suck water out of the southern end of the Delta, it would also mean less freshwater would make it into an ecosystem that desperately needs more. Millions of dollars are included in the bond for Delta habitat restoration, but how we can restore an ecosystem that has been degraded by freshwater diversions by increasing those diversions hasn’t yet been answered.
One thing is certain, though. During the campaign for the bond, we can count on large-scale agribusinesses and urban developers to enthusiastically promote the idea that taxpayers should fund the planned infrastructure and habitat restoration. They won’t mention, however, that these corporate interests would make an enormous profit off the additional water the bond will provide them, and that most taxpayers in California will receive few if any direct benefits from this lopsided deal.
This is an excerpt of “Ending the Water Wars”