[yoe]

To understand how CA got her water in the first place you need to read two books:

John Jakes 1998 California Gold and Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert. Both great reads; fascinating and enlightening.

The solution to CA's water problem is that large body of water just west of that state....(desalinization.)

[Ben Ficklin]

I'll give you a Cadillac Desert Bump. But the second edition was better that the first edition.

Another good book is The Great Plains written by the Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb, and published in 1932. Its still in print today because many colleges use it as a text book.

Its not specifically about CA but the entire west, west of the 98th meridian. Its about the natural history and gives good explanations of water rights laws and range law.

What make CA so complicated is that there are 3 water rights doctrines in play: Prior Appropriation, Riparian, and Reserved.

[Conan the Librarian]

“Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert”

A fine book. Read it about 20 years ago.

That was the book that pointed out that everything west of the 100w parallel in the US is a desert, excepting coastal northern California, Oregon and Washington.

Time to desalinate or move.