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<BLOCKQUOTE class=cite cite="" type="cite"><I>The Economist</I> //<A
href="http://www.economist.com" eudora="autourl">
www.economist.com</A><BR><BR>OF FARMS, FOLKS AND FISH<BR>Oct 22nd 2009
<BR><BR><BR>A truce in California's long and bitter fight over water at
last<BR>appears possible<BR><BR>IN 2007 Oliver Wanger, a federal judge in
California, ordered the huge<BR>pumping stations of the Sacramento Delta, the
largest estuary on the<BR>west coast of the Americas, to reduce by a third the
water they<BR>delivered to two aqueducts that run south to the farms of the
San<BR>Joaquin Valley and onward to the vast conurbations of
southern<BR>California. His reason was the delta smelt, a translucent fish
less<BR>than eight centimetres (three inches) long that lives only in the
delta<BR>and is considered endangered under federal law. The pumping plants
were<BR>sucking in the fish and grinding them up. The next year, a
"biological<BR>opinion" by the federal Fish and Wildlife Service reinforced
Judge<BR>Wanger's order. Pumping from the delta remains restricted.<BR><BR>The
consequences of these restrictions, which coincided with a drought<BR>that is
now in its third year, reach far beyond one small population of<BR>fish. About
two-thirds of Californians get at least some of their water<BR>from the delta,
so with the stroke of a judicial pen the entire state,<BR>the world's
eighth-largest economy and America's "fruit basket",<BR>entered an economic
and political crisis.<BR><BR> Water has divided Californians since Mark
Twain remarked that<BR>"whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting over."
But this latest<BR>conflict comes as America's largest state is politically
gridlocked and<BR>holding back a national economic recovery. From Australia to
Israel,<BR>parched places all over the world are now looking to California to
see<BR>whether, and how, it solves one of the most intractable problems
of<BR>thirsty civilisations in dry regions.<BR><BR>The pumping restrictions
were a huge victory for environmentalists, who<BR>fill the ranks of one of the
three armies in California's perennial<BR>water wars. With increasing success
since the 1970s, greens have argued<BR>that the delta in particular, and
California's dammed rivers and<BR>wetlands in general, are on the verge of
ecological collapse and must<BR>be saved. <BR><BR>For the other two armies,
the restrictions amounted to a stinging<BR>defeat. One army consists of urban
consumers in the dry south,<BR>represented by the Metropolitan Water District,
which supplies water to<BR>about 19m people, over half the state's population,
and gets 30% of its<BR>supply from one of the two delta aqueducts. The
authority has had to<BR>pay farmers in the Central Valley to give up their
allocations and let<BR>their fields lie fallow, says Jeffrey Kightlinger, its
boss. This year<BR>it also had to impose mandatory conservation measures.
<BR><BR>The pain has been far worse, however, for the third force:
agriculture.<BR>The farmers and farm workers who have been hardest hit live in
the<BR>western San Joaquin Valley, which is supplied by the Westlands
Water<BR>District, America's largest irrigation authority. Westlands
has<BR>contracts to draw water from the other (federally financed)
aqueduct.<BR>Tom Birmingham, its boss, says that, because of the drought and
the<BR>pumping restrictions, it is receiving only 10% of its entitlement
this<BR>year. <BR><BR>The result, says Mr Birmingham, is fallow land, farm
workers being laid<BR>off and "people standing in food lines for hours". In
some areas<BR>unemployment runs at 40%. There are scenes reminiscent of
John<BR>Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath", though most of the poor and
jobless<BR>are not white "Okies", but Latinos. Just as the "dust bowl"
swept<BR>across the Great Plains in the 1930s, so in the San Joaquin
Valley,<BR>fields are reverting to desert and signs read, "Congress created
this<BR>dust bowl". <BR><BR>"All my almond trees are going to die," says Shawn
Coburn, a farmer in<BR>the area. He began farming in 1992 and has done
everything he can to<BR>use water more wisely. He has planted fewer tomatoes
and melons and<BR>more almonds and wine grapes because these crops drink less
and yield<BR>more. He says he has conserved all he can with technology. Like
other<BR>farmers, he has also dug wells to tap the shrinking aquifers,
even<BR>though he knows he is making the entire valley floor sink. In
one<BR>place, he says, the ground around a telephone pole has dropped by
six<BR>feet (nearly 2 metres). <BR><BR>The environmentalists are not denying
that their victory has cost<BR>agricultural jobs. But Jonas Minton of the
Planning and Conservation<BR>League, a Californian non-profit outfit, thinks
that a public-relations<BR>firm paid by the farmers has been exaggerating
their misery. In any<BR>event, he says, the problem is not a court ruling but
a system in which<BR>the state has pledged eight times as much water to
title-holders as<BR>exists in nature and therefore cannot, of necessity, give
everybody his<BR>due. <BR><BR>Jim Metropulos, a lobbyist at the Sierra Club,
another environmental<BR>group, agrees. "I cannot control a drought," he says.
Westlands' Mr<BR>Birmingham can complain, he says, but, "Why do we have to
give him more<BR>water?" It so happens that Westlands' water rights rank below
those of<BR>other title-holders and "there is simply not enough water to go
around."<BR><BR>Angry and bitter words are thus flying on all sides, which is
as it has<BR>always been in California. But this time the crisis has become
so<BR>severe that the state's legislators in Sacramento,
notoriously<BR>incapable of agreeing on anything serious, including a punctual
budget,<BR>appear on the brink of a breakthrough. A complex package of
legislation<BR>was almost passed in September and failed only because time ran
out in<BR>that session. The legislators are now talking again. A deal
could<BR>emerge for a vote within weeks.<BR><BR>PEACE AMONG
COEQUALS?<BR>Timothy Quinn, director of the Association of California
Water<BR>Agencies, which represents the suppliers of about 90% of the
water<BR>consumed in California, credits the pumping restrictions for
this<BR>progress. He says Judge Wanger forced all sides to acknowledge
the<BR>seriousness of the situation. His decision was the "equivalent of
an<BR>earthquake" whose shock was severe enough to shake
California's<BR>democracy. Therein lies, perhaps, the opportunity.<BR><BR>The
details of the legislation negotiated so far are complex, but its<BR>main
feature is a phrase, "coequal goals"--though how coequal goals<BR>differ from
equal ones is not clear. For most of the previous century,<BR>says Mr Quinn,
California and the entire West had an "extraction<BR>mindset" according to
which man was meant to subdue and exploit nature.<BR>In water matters, this
meant ever more dams, reservoirs and aqueducts.<BR>However, over the past four
decades the environmentalist mentality grew<BR>up as an alternative,
emphasising "sustainable" use of nature. <BR><BR>California's water policy in
the past has swung "like a pendulum"<BR>between these two principles,
depending on which lobbyists have won the<BR>latest victory, says Lester Snow,
the director of California's water<BR>department. Enshrining the objectives of
both sides as "coequal" in<BR>state law would thus mean progress, by requiring
all factions to<BR>consider both fish and farms, both nature and the economy,
both<BR>sustainability and reliability.<BR><BR>"It's a huge step," agrees Mr
Kightlinger of the Metropolitan Water<BR>District. In practice, most water
managers in the state already take<BR>sustainability seriously, but making
equality official would force all<BR>sides to "play nicely", he thinks. The
old rivalry between urban and<BR>agricultural water use has already faded, he
says, and today's<BR>animosity between both of them and the greens may also
subside. <BR><BR>Westlands' Mr Birmingham says that, in practice, water usage
has<BR>already become equal. Whereas agriculture used to consume 80% of
the<BR>state's water supply, today 46% of captured and stored water goes
to<BR>environmental purposes, such as rebuilding wetlands. Meanwhile 43%
goes<BR>to farming and 11% to municipal uses.<BR><BR>The environmentalists, as
today's top dogs, are less excited about<BR>equal goals. At present the
state's water infrastructure is run with a<BR>single goal, which is to protect
nature, and this, says Mr Metropulos<BR>of the Sierra Club, provides complete
clarity of purpose. Equality, he<BR>thinks, will only lead to new conflicts
and litigation. When the time<BR>comes for trade-offs, he asks, "Who's going
to make the decision? It is<BR>undefined." He is lobbying against the
legislation, although he is<BR>unlikely to prevent it.<BR><BR>DEALING WITH THE
DELTA<BR>The next layer of legislative proposals will concern the
Sacramento<BR>Delta, the inland network of streams and rivers, many contained
by<BR>dykes and levees, that form the hub of California's
water<BR>infrastructure. Californians hate rain but love water,
so<BR>three-quarters of them live in the arid south, spurn the wet
north<BR>where three-quarters of the rain falls, and expect water to come
to<BR>them by pipe, canal or aquifer, preferably courtesy of the taxpayer.
<BR><BR>The Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and their tributaries,
carrying<BR>the rain from the north and the melting snowpack from the Sierra
Nevada<BR>in the east, meet in the delta and flow out through San
Francisco's<BR>Golden Gate. The trick has always been to intercept the fresh
water in<BR>the delta before it gets salty and to send it south as well as
west to<BR>the San Francisco Bay area. <BR><BR>Those in the south get it
through two huge infrastructure networks. The<BR>federal Central Valley
Project, dating from 1937, uses 20 upstream<BR>reservoirs and two pumps to
take water to the southern Central Valley,<BR>largely for farmers. The State
Water Project, begun in 1960 by Pat<BR>Brown, a visionary governor, uses
another 22 upstream dams and<BR>reservoirs and its own pumping plant to send
water into the other<BR>aqueduct, largely for urban use. <BR><BR>By pumping
fresh water south, however, these two projects wreak<BR>ecological havoc.
Sceptics like to inveigh against the unprepossessing<BR>delta smelt, which
George Radanovich, a Republican congressman, has<BR>called "a worthless little
worm that needs to go the way of the<BR>dinosaur". But other fish species such
as the Chinook salmon, the<BR>steelhead and the longfin smelt are also
threatened, and each species<BR>is a part of a complex food chain. About 25%
of the state's sporting<BR>fish and 80% of its commercial fish live in or
migrate through the<BR>delta. <BR><BR>PUMPS KILL, LEVEES LEAK<BR>The pumps
kill fish and other species, and not just by grinding them<BR>up. They also
change, and occasionally reverse, the water flow of the<BR>small rivers in the
delta's vast labyrinth of streams, creeks, sluices,<BR>islands and marshes. In
natural circumstances, the delta is brackish<BR>and its salinity changes with
the tides. The pumps, by drawing in river<BR>water, keep the delta water
artificially fresh. Native species die,<BR>invasive species
thrive.<BR><BR>Beyond that, the ageing delta's levees are a human disaster in
the<BR>making. The delta sits on top of seismic faults that may rupture,
and<BR>many of the islands that make it up are below sea level. A
large<BR>earthquake could disrupt the state's water supply and inundate
the<BR>delta itself.<BR><BR>The best answer, says Ellen Hanak, a water expert
at the non-partisan<BR>Public Policy Institute of California, is to build
either a canal or a<BR>tunnel around the delta. Fresh water could then be
tapped upstream on<BR>the Sacramento River and conveyed round the delta to the
aqueducts<BR>without grinding up fish, reversing river flows or changing the
delta's<BR>salinity, which would again fluctuate with the tides. The water
going<BR>south would be fresher too. A canal would thus "separate the water
for<BR>the fish from the water for the economy and the people," says Mr
Quinn.<BR><BR>The trouble is that such a peripheral canal is a political hot
button.<BR>In 1982 Jerry Brown, Pat Brown's son and California's governor at
the<BR>time, put a canal on the ballot but the voters rejected it. Even
now,<BR>many people are passionately against it. Farmers and residents in
the<BR>delta itself fear that a bypass would mean that politicians and
public<BR>money would abandon them amid their disintegrating levees, and
others<BR>would grab their water. The Sierra Club is against a canal because
"it<BR>is not going to make new water" and "we want to reduce exports from
the<BR>delta" rather than reroute its flows, says Mr Metropulos.<BR><BR>The
legislation under negotiation is therefore taking a different<BR>approach.
Instead of decreeing a bypass canal or tunnel outright, it<BR>seeks to
establish a new authority with the power to take this decision<BR>itself. This
is sorely needed. Mr Snow at the water department has<BR>counted more than 200
entities, from cities and counties to fisheries<BR>and reclamation or
irrigation districts and even mosquito-abatement<BR>boards, that share
responsibility in such a way that nobody has any. A<BR>new and nimble "Delta
Council" would seize authority from all of them<BR>and actively manage the
delta for the first time. And it could do this<BR>by building a
canal.<BR><BR>DAM MONEY<BR>One sign of progress by Californian standards is
that, if the deal gets<BR>stuck, it will be largely over relatively banal
issues such as money.<BR>The legislation is likely to mandate investment in
new dams and<BR>reservoirs, which appeal to Republicans, and also in
waste-water<BR>recycling, desalination and groundwater storage, which are
the<BR>environmentalists' and Democrats' preferred sources of water.
But<BR>Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor, has said that he
will<BR>veto any legislation that does not include billions of dollars in
new<BR>bonds to pay for these new projects.<BR><BR>State Republicans, allied
to farmers, are pushing for<BR>"general-obligation" bonds that would be put to
the voters on a ballot<BR>and, if approved, paid out of general state tax
revenues. Democrats are<BR>concerned that the interest on such bonds would
aggravate California's<BR>continuing budget dispute and come at the expense of
education, health<BR>care and other things they mind about. They prefer bonds
that would be<BR>repaid by the users of new dams, ie, the water agencies that
can pass<BR>costs on to their customers. Water thus trumps ordinary
politics.<BR>Republicans, who usually claim to be against big government,
want<BR>taxpayers to pay; Democrats, generally accused of being big
spenders,<BR>want to match infrastructure costs with water revenues to send
the<BR>right price signals.<BR><BR>The legislation is likely to encourage
water conservation by setting<BR>targets for reducing consumption. One guess
is that it may call for a<BR>cut of 20% per person by 2020. That cannot be a
bad idea. On the other<BR>hand, little progress is being made on monitoring
groundwater levels,<BR>even though many aquifers are shrinking. Some of the
state's water<BR>districts voluntarily measure groundwater levels, but
Republican<BR>legislators have opposed making such reporting mandatory on the
ground<BR>that it would mean trespassing on private property. "California is
the<BR>last bastion of the Wild West when it comes to groundwater," says
Ms<BR>Hanak. It may stay that way. <BR><BR>Whatever happens, the legislation
will not deal with the long-term<BR>threats to California and its neighbours.
Climate change is already<BR>showing up "in the data", says Mr Quinn. The
snowpack of the Sierra<BR>Nevada, California's most reliable water-storage
system, is shrinking<BR>and may stop yielding predictable run-off in the
spring and start<BR>producing sporadic and unusable, not to mention
disastrous, floods. The<BR>delta is already below sea level and, as the sea
rises, it may be<BR>submerged. Even today the south is a desert wherever
irrigation does<BR>not reach. It will become even drier.<BR><BR>For
professional water managers such as Mr Kightlinger, this makes
the<BR>continuing talks in Sacramento frustrating. "'I'm for screwdrivers
but<BR>not for hammers': that's how they talk," he says. But he thinks all
the<BR>tools are needed if California's population and economy are to
keep<BR>growing.<BR><BR>Of those tools, water recycling, a euphemism for
cleaning up sewage, is<BR>perhaps the most promising. Recycled water is local
and does not<BR>disappear in a drought. But many consumers continue to
struggle with<BR>the idea that what they are drinking today someone else
restored to the<BR>water system yesterday. Desalination, which removes
minerals from<BR>seawater or, more often, brackish groundwater, is an
alternative. But<BR>it takes a lot of energy to push water through the dense
filters that<BR>remove unwanted salts and other molecules. Water markets,
which allow<BR>those with too much water to trade it easily with those who
have too<BR>little, could also help.<BR><BR>If there is to be any progress,
however, Californians first have to<BR>bury their hatchets. If the talks
stall, the political fallout will be<BR>big. Tom Campbell, the most thoughtful
Republican candidate for<BR>governor in next year's election, thinks water is
by far the most<BR>important issue facing the state. Willie Brown, a former
speaker of<BR>California's Assembly and mayor of San Francisco, believes "a
political<BR>earthquake is rumbling in the Central Valley over water, and it
could<BR>cause a real tsunami for the Democrats in the 2010 elections if
they<BR>don't handle it well," since Democrats are more associated
with<BR>environmentalists and several of them face re-election.<BR><BR>A
CHANCE TO MAKE HISTORY<BR>For the same reason, if the negotiations succeed,
even a mediocre deal<BR>would amount to the most important water legislation
since the era of<BR>Pat Brown, says Mr Quinn. Westlands' Mr Birmingham feels
that many<BR>environmental groups, such as the Natural Resources Defence
Council and<BR>the Nature Conservancy, have become "genuinely interested in
working<BR>with water agencies", even though others are "using water as a
means to<BR>limit housing development". <BR><BR>"I am very optimistic for the
long term," says Mr Birmingham. "The real<BR>question is how are we going to
survive between now and the time when<BR>new conveyance facilities become
available," which could be a decade or<BR>more. "If we continue to live under
the existing biological opinions,<BR>irrigated agriculture in the western San
Joaquin Valley cannot be<BR>sustained," he says. For farmers such as Mr Coburn
and his 26 Latino<BR>workers, never mind his almonds and wine grapes, the help
may arrive<BR>too late. This is perhaps the only thing they have in common
with the<BR>delta smelt.<BR> <BR><BR><BR>See this article with graphics
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