“artificial raising of the water table”
That’s interesting because any place near agriciulture has seen the aquifers go down. We have an interesting aquifer over here in North Idaho / Northeastern Washington. It’s all rock and sand, so very porous. HUGE amount of water flow through it originating in the mountains.
In California’s agricultural regions, the aquifers are down hundreds of feet. Even in urban San Jose, the aquifer is way down because it was a heavy fruit-growing region in the mid- to late-1800s right up to the post WW II years. Then suburbs were built and industry came in and that was the end of ag.
Their cry has been to put the water back into the ground where they say it will benefit the salmon. They have been building culverts all over the county to connect roadside drainage ditches, streams and seasonal creeks to either the Nooksack river or the sound, so that they can claim control for waters of the world. They have had us on year around water rationing for three or four years, right through the floods and they refuse to do any dredging or dyeing to help the town of Sumas with the flooding.
Last year, the Supreme Court ruled against connecting streams and ditches to connect land to the oceans in the case of the Amish communities in the Lancaster area of PA, but I don’t know if that ruling is applicable here.
This all was in the courts in WA due to the Lummi Tribe and Democrat support. I was posting about it on the WSJ web site (back when I was a subscriber) and people replied from Australia, saying that the same thing was going on there and Africa.
What I learned from fighting them is that the activists, who actually come up with the proposals, don’t have the slightest idea of what they are doing and don’t really care about the ultimate results.
I saw property owners crying at county council meetings over the high fines that were being placed on them, that they couldn’t possibly pay. I saw a small developer cry at a meeting where they were explaining the new wetland rules, which were bing put in place, that were going to take a quarter of the land that he was trying to develop. Then there were the property owners who were not allowed to put further develop their own property, or were denied water rights for property they owned in the county.
Then, on top of that, all the trees are dying all over the county. The lake that they used as the center of their water reclamation, was reduced in depth from thirteen feet to maybe 6 feet and is now clogged with milfoil and dead fish. Oh, and the dock is rotting, so bad that a family member put their foot right through it. The whole purpose of this water control is to restrict development in rural areas, nothing else.
In Eastern WA, they have water rationing for agriculture, but agriculture now includes marijuana and hemp. I hear that in northern CA, the marijuana farming has been taken over by the cartels and Asians. Do you see that is WA?