Water Education Foundation
This is just one post in the General Water Issues Category
Click here to view all posts

Blog commentary on California water: “Free-market” politics with the public trust

Posted by: Maven on February 3, 2010 at 8:36 am

From the Badlands Journal blog, this commentary:

“California is going into its fourth year of drought and its second year of high-powered water warfare. The state now lives in a state of perpetual water anxiety. We even have a monthly religious rite at the top of Echo Pass, near Lake Tahoe. A priest from the state Water Resources Department, surrounded by reporters stumbling in snow shoes, takes a magic wand onto a field of snow, plunges the wand into the snow, pulls it out, and utters predictions of the state’s water supply. Reporters return to their newspapers and write that there is not enough. Some of the older ones think of the 1974 classic, “Chinatown,” about a local water war in Los Angeles.

There is a drought but there is no long-term water shortage in California. The state’s water comes in different amounts, sometimes in floods, sometimes in drought, most often in some quantity in between. On the other hand, there is an overpopulation problem and an agribusiness problem which, combined with three light-rainfall years, has shut down the King salmon commercial fishery for two years because of over-pumping in the San Joaquin Delta.. This over-pumping the largest estuary on the West Coast has occurred from the two pumps, state and federal, side-by-side on the Delta, during a huge real estate boom and a gigantic expansion of orchards (mostly almonds) south of the Delta. Following a settlement between California and upstream users on the Colorado River, Southern California’s other main source of fresh water, this ruinous over-pumping has made extinction likely for some Delta species and is threatening the existence of a viable salmon fishery. … “

Continue reading this blog commentary at the Badlands Journal by clicking here.

February 3, 2010 · Filed Under General Water Issues, Water Quality

Comments

Leave a Reply