This is in reply to Dan *h20h20* who continues to send emails and critiques but refuses to identify himself. Dan continues to criticize me for making assumptions about his identity, but refuses to identify himself. When you have someone who refuses to reveal their identity you have to say: *consider the source.* My suspicion is Dan is an environmentalist who is afraid to ID himself on conservative websites.
Dan states that our water supply is very precarious and at historic lows. He fails to acknowledge that we’ve been through this before. There have been several 3 year or greater periods of non-peak rainfall in California. Drought is a natural state in Southern California. What we call drought is really a lack of water storage because enough water typically flows to the ocean even in dry Southern California to meet demand each year *whether wet or dry years.* So drought is man made as much as Dan and others may want to make it out as caused by *waste and unreasonable use.* A drought is really the lack of a peak rainfall or snowfall year which refills reservoirs so that we can draw them down for a few years.
Dan believes the book Cadillac Desert is an accurate depiction of the water situation in the Southwestern U.S. Even the author of Cadillac Desert, Mark Reisner, recanted what he wrote about rice farming wasting water after he wrote the book. Cadillac Desert is an apocalyptic genre book and is the secular equivalent to the Christian apocalyptical book of Revelations. Cadillac Desert is taken as gospel when it is book of myth mixed with history.
Pop environmental books gravitate to juxtaposed cliche titles: *Silent Spring,* *Cadillac Desert,* *Dead Pool.* But think about the following juxtaposition: *Palm Springs.* The words Palm Springs evokes an image of a water rich garden or oasis. Palm Springs is in the California desert and has a self-sufficient supply of groundwater. Ditto for San Bernardino County, which is in arid Southern California. So much for the thesis of Cadillac Desert.
Even in suburbs like Pasadena where this writer lives, the city meets 60% of its water need from groundwater but enough rainfall typically flows to the ocean in two weeks during the winter to supply the entire population for a year.
Dan thinks that this writer puts too much emphasis on water issues at the local level and that I don’t get the BIG PICTURE. Having worked at the largest water agency in the state for 20 years, I think I get the big picture. Cognitive elites are trying to dictate water usage at the household level, after local governments have mostly embraced smart growth and other policies which will divert population growth to the cities where water growth is unsustainable.
Both those on the political Left, such as water activist Dorothy Green, and the moderate political center, Sacramento Bee writer Dan Walters, agree that drought is not the cause of our current water crisis. In other words, it is NOT *waste and unreasonable use* of water as Dan simplistically asserts that is behind our current water situation. *Waste and unreasonble use* are terms that follow a rather Leftist world view that obscures our real water situation.
Feel free to believe what you want. You seem to have already made up your mind that I’m a sniveling environmentalist who is an insider to the great water machine. I’ll say it again. I’m not an environmentalist (I do not even donate time or money to any environmental organization) and I do not work for a water agency. I’m not even on the left of the linear political spectrum.
Everyone has a right to anonymity on the Internet, or at least some levels of anonymity (there are still ways to identify me, such as by email address -which you have- and IP address). If I choose to post anonymously, that is my choice. You and your readers can choose to take what I say with a grain of salt. I try to remain constructive with my posts, which is what matters in the end.
My point, asking you to read Cadillac Desert, is that we live in ... a Desert. Much of California qualifies as a desert. Our water is a finite source. We import it from Northern California for a reason. The farmers in the Central Valley also live in ... a desert. They import their water. Same with the San Francisco Bay Area. It too is a desert and must import water. Cadillac Desert makes the point well, I think, that we live in a desert and our state is built on moving water around. I’m not making a political point telling you to read it. I do not personally subscribe to the apocalyptic part about the end is coming soon. I usually blow by any warnings like that. Rice farms are an important stop along the Pacific flyway so I don’t have issues with them as the book did. btw: if you go duck hunting, the best ducks are in and around the rice fields.
Waste and unreasonable use are not the reason we are in the mess in which we find ourselves. I personally believe the current water crisis is the result of mismanagement of the water systems as much as it is the drought we’re currently experiencing. Why is it the water managers for DWR and CVP continued to drain down the reservoirs after dry winters instead of slowly applying the brakes on exports as a precautionary measure as you would when driving down the grapevine in a car? Shouldn’t the reserviors be managed so that water releases are based on the snow pack? Those are questions I’ve wondered but don’t have answers to. In addition, plans were made based on forecasts for water exported from the Delta but Judge Wanger’s rulings that limit Delta pumping puts a kink into those plans. And soon, when the San Joaquin river is flowing again from Friant to the Delta, less water will be available.
But now that we are here, with drought conditions and less water than we collectively need, what do we do? With that, I suggest that the argument will be made that lawns, swimming pools, alfalfa, etc. are unreasonable uses of water. The term is legal more than it is a leftist phrase meant to instill fear into the hearts of SoCal water users. It is part of the legal argument that I think will likely be made to the SWRCB and then courts about what types of uses shall be barred during years when there is not enough water to go around. Water use, according to the California Constitution must be beneficial and reasonable. Will I make that argument, no. Which gets me back to the point I made responding to your original post. The water used for iconic Pasadena lawns can be restricted by the local water agency with little recourse if it is applied during times like these when we expect to be short of water come September. It will likely be done contractually, which will get around your local preservation board or environmental ordinances. And there is always that farmer, looking enviously at the water flowing by their land saying it should water their crops, who will sue to declare lawns unreasonable use for water during such dry times.
I’m not saying that you don’t get or see the big picture. But what I’m saying is that this water crisis is local and it is statewide. It is local because, well, everything is local. It is regional. And it is statewide because 40% of your water comes from outside the aquifer underlying the San Gabriel Valley.
btw: you can at least post a correction at the bottom of your web site post saying that I claim not to be an insider. Even if you make light of that claim, you should at least post it and let your readers decide for themselves.