Longish piece from the Atlantic on Jerry Brown's proposed solution to California's water problems. Or, perhaps more precisely, southern CA's water problems, since the north really doesn't have any, or wouldn't have any if the south didn't have a big straw sucking up water from the Sacramento Delta in the north.
American Aqueduct: The Great California Water Saga
A $25 billion plan, a small town, and a half-century of wrangling over the most important resource in the biggest state
Alexis C. Madrigal February 24, 2014
theatlantic.com
excerpt:
But for now, California’s water story is all about tradeoffs, and the writer behind the On the Public Record blog would like the public to be more aware of them. “I wish we made explicit societal choices. Say, 'Yes, I would rather we supplied pistachios to the world than had a San Joaquin River' or 'No, I don't actually want my lawn as much as I want to know there are salmon in our rivers.' We can manage our water system to do a very large range of things, but we can't do them all well,” she emailed me. “I wish we were guided by actual explicit choices, rather than by every water district manager trying to keep our status quo going just a little longer. If we knew we (all 39 million of us, overall) didn't want to use water to grow alfalfa for dairy cows, we could design a good transition for the people involved in that industry now. But we don't make those choices, so we can't design programs to make the transition to a more extreme climate more gentle for people. We just try to keep spreading the water thinner.”
I find it amazing that in this long article about water and agriculture, the writer doesn't mention drip irrigation once. And yet it is the farmers in the south who use most of the water in CA, and, based on the reports that I have read, they waste incredible amounts of water by not using drip irrigation. Kind of shocking, actually. |
