Geography lesson helps clarify drought
By George Skelton, Los Angeles Times
Many of us could use a refresher course in California geography as we debate how to manage the drought and prepare for an uncertain water future.
For starters, calling the hardest-hit farm region the Central Valley is much too simplistic.
Second, agriculture per se is not the issue — not the culprit guzzler. Rather, it’s the location of the agriculture, which gulps 80% of California’s developed water. Almonds, for example, make a lot of sense in some areas; a lot less in others.
Too often we try to wrap it all into convenient, simple packages — Central Valley and nut orchards — when more specificity is required to grasp the nub of the problem.
What part of the vast Central Valley? How dry is it and what’s being grown there?
Shipping fresh northern water south to deserts where millions choose to live without their own water is as crazy as Moonbeam’s money hole train to nowhere and his proposed billions of wasted dollars Delta water tunnels. So far the only idea to combat the drought is to raise water rates and hire water patrols and have demands for huge cuts that aren’t working. Nearly everything in lower California is unsustainable based on population and resources alone. The idea to drain the north state and eastern Sierra and ship water hundreds of miles for millions living in a desert environment was a bad idea to begin with and not only causes numerous serious problems, it creates drought and desert from the areas the water is removed and makes areas that once were green into dust bowls and dry like the Owens Valley.
No one can argue that the water policy and practices have been a real actual crime in some instances and simply misguided in others.
We go from the problems of flood control to the problems of drought alternately, and no matter what is done it is “too little too late” in some minds, in others minds any action is wrong if it upsets what they personally want.
Instead of building population where the water is, for various financial and political reasons the water has been taken to where people want to live for the weather, or to irrigate a desert. A bad thing from the beginning. It takes billions of dollars to pull that off and decades of time to build the infrastructure to do it.
Farmers ultimately will grow crops where it is the best place based on the weather, water and land availability. The only reason they were farming in drier areas in the first place was the various governments made water available. The combined great valley agri business is really an offshoot of the collective decision to allow building a mega city in the southern California desert with Las Vegas not far behind.
All humans were of the opinion that what you see is what you get, forever. This has been patently disproven. No matter what side of the causational equation you stand on, looking out your windows proves that climate change is real. And running on its own time frame at that.
We have learned nothing in California about managing water. All our efforts have been based on the assumption that nothing has changed.
Only in the last year or so has Calif instituted any controls or even inventory of underground water resources. Most other states in the west have been doing this for decades. Calif. has known of huge areas of land subsidence for years, and just ignored the obvious cause by over pumping.
We are throwing money at controlling use in populated areas, (a minor user at that). At the same time we are allowing development in areas where the long term supply of water is questionable or even unidentified.
We allow blocking of large water retention and storage projects by decades of environmental lawsuits and protests.
In summary, for the better part of 100 years, California has been chronically guilty of using short term programs to manage long term problems. Now, it is possible that nature has trumped all of them by limiting the one thing more important than air to California’s survival, a predictable supply of water sufficient to support many activities that arguably should not have been pursued in the first place.