[env-trinity] The Economist: Oct. 22

[Tom Stokely]

  The Economist // www.economist.com

  OF FARMS, FOLKS AND FISH
  Oct 22nd 2009  


  A truce in California's long and bitter fight over water at last
  appears possible

  IN 2007 Oliver Wanger, a federal judge in California, ordered the huge
  pumping stations of the Sacramento Delta, the largest estuary on the
  west coast of the Americas, to reduce by a third the water they
  delivered to two aqueducts that run south to the farms of the San
  Joaquin Valley and onward to the vast conurbations of southern
  California. His reason was the delta smelt, a translucent fish less
  than eight centimetres (three inches) long that lives only in the delta
  and is considered endangered under federal law. The pumping plants were
  sucking in the fish and grinding them up. The next year, a "biological
  opinion" by the federal Fish and Wildlife Service reinforced Judge
  Wanger's order. Pumping from the delta remains restricted.

  The consequences of these restrictions, which coincided with a drought
  that is now in its third year, reach far beyond one small population of
  fish. About two-thirds of Californians get at least some of their water
  from the delta, so with the stroke of a judicial pen the entire state,
  the world's eighth-largest economy and America's "fruit basket",
  entered an economic and political crisis.

   Water has divided Californians since Mark Twain remarked that
  "whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting over." But this latest
  conflict comes as America's largest state is politically gridlocked and
  holding back a national economic recovery. From Australia to Israel,
  parched places all over the world are now looking to California to see
  whether, and how, it solves one of the most intractable problems of
  thirsty civilisations in dry regions.

  The pumping restrictions were a huge victory for environmentalists, who
  fill the ranks of one of the three armies in California's perennial
  water wars. With increasing success since the 1970s, greens have argued
  that the delta in particular, and California's dammed rivers and
  wetlands in general, are on the verge of ecological collapse and must
  be saved. 

  For the other two armies, the restrictions amounted to a stinging
  defeat. One army consists of urban consumers in the dry south,
  represented by the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies water to
  about 19m people, over half the state's population, and gets 30% of its
  supply from one of the two delta aqueducts. The authority has had to
  pay farmers in the Central Valley to give up their allocations and let
  their fields lie fallow, says Jeffrey Kightlinger, its boss. This year
  it also had to impose mandatory conservation measures. 

  The pain has been far worse, however, for the third force: agriculture.
  The farmers and farm workers who have been hardest hit live in the
  western San Joaquin Valley, which is supplied by the Westlands Water
  District, America's largest irrigation authority. Westlands has
  contracts to draw water from the other (federally financed) aqueduct.
  Tom Birmingham, its boss, says that, because of the drought and the
  pumping restrictions, it is receiving only 10% of its entitlement this
  year. 

  The result, says Mr Birmingham, is fallow land, farm workers being laid
  off and "people standing in food lines for hours". In some areas
  unemployment runs at 40%. There are scenes reminiscent of John
  Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath", though most of the poor and jobless
  are not white "Okies", but Latinos. Just as the "dust bowl" swept
  across the Great Plains in the 1930s, so in the San Joaquin Valley,
  fields are reverting to desert and signs read, "Congress created this
  dust bowl". 

  "All my almond trees are going to die," says Shawn Coburn, a farmer in
  the area. He began farming in 1992 and has done everything he can to
  use water more wisely. He has planted fewer tomatoes and melons and
  more almonds and wine grapes because these crops drink less and yield
  more. He says he has conserved all he can with technology. Like other
  farmers, he has also dug wells to tap the shrinking aquifers, even
  though he knows he is making the entire valley floor sink. In one
  place, he says, the ground around a telephone pole has dropped by six
  feet (nearly 2 metres). 

  The environmentalists are not denying that their victory has cost
  agricultural jobs. But Jonas Minton of the Planning and Conservation
  League, a Californian non-profit outfit, thinks that a public-relations
  firm paid by the farmers has been exaggerating their misery. In any
  event, he says, the problem is not a court ruling but a system in which
  the state has pledged eight times as much water to title-holders as
  exists in nature and therefore cannot, of necessity, give everybody his
  due. 

  Jim Metropulos, a lobbyist at the Sierra Club, another environmental
  group, agrees. "I cannot control a drought," he says. Westlands' Mr
  Birmingham can complain, he says, but, "Why do we have to give him more
  water?" It so happens that Westlands' water rights rank below those of
  other title-holders and "there is simply not enough water to go around."

  Angry and bitter words are thus flying on all sides, which is as it has
  always been in California. But this time the crisis has become so
  severe that the state's legislators in Sacramento, notoriously
  incapable of agreeing on anything serious, including a punctual budget,
  appear on the brink of a breakthrough. A complex package of legislation
  was almost passed in September and failed only because time ran out in
  that session. The legislators are now talking again. A deal could
  emerge for a vote within weeks.

  PEACE AMONG COEQUALS?
  Timothy Quinn, director of the Association of California Water
  Agencies, which represents the suppliers of about 90% of the water
  consumed in California, credits the pumping restrictions for this
  progress. He says Judge Wanger forced all sides to acknowledge the
  seriousness of the situation. His decision was the "equivalent of an
  earthquake" whose shock was severe enough to shake California's
  democracy. Therein lies, perhaps, the opportunity.

  The details of the legislation negotiated so far are complex, but its
  main feature is a phrase, "coequal goals"--though how coequal goals
  differ from equal ones is not clear. For most of the previous century,
  says Mr Quinn, California and the entire West had an "extraction
  mindset" according to which man was meant to subdue and exploit nature.
  In water matters, this meant ever more dams, reservoirs and aqueducts.
  However, over the past four decades the environmentalist mentality grew
  up as an alternative, emphasising "sustainable" use of nature. 

  California's water policy in the past has swung "like a pendulum"
  between these two principles, depending on which lobbyists have won the
  latest victory, says Lester Snow, the director of California's water
  department. Enshrining the objectives of both sides as "coequal" in
  state law would thus mean progress, by requiring all factions to
  consider both fish and farms, both nature and the economy, both
  sustainability and reliability.

  "It's a huge step," agrees Mr Kightlinger of the Metropolitan Water
  District. In practice, most water managers in the state already take
  sustainability seriously, but making equality official would force all
  sides to "play nicely", he thinks. The old rivalry between urban and
  agricultural water use has already faded, he says, and today's
  animosity between both of them and the greens may also subside. 

  Westlands' Mr Birmingham says that, in practice, water usage has
  already become equal. Whereas agriculture used to consume 80% of the
  state's water supply, today 46% of captured and stored water goes to
  environmental purposes, such as rebuilding wetlands. Meanwhile 43% goes
  to farming and 11% to municipal uses.

  The environmentalists, as today's top dogs, are less excited about
  equal goals. At present the state's water infrastructure is run with a
  single goal, which is to protect nature, and this, says Mr Metropulos
  of the Sierra Club, provides complete clarity of purpose. Equality, he
  thinks, will only lead to new conflicts and litigation. When the time
  comes for trade-offs, he asks, "Who's going to make the decision? It is
  undefined." He is lobbying against the legislation, although he is
  unlikely to prevent it.

  DEALING WITH THE DELTA
  The next layer of legislative proposals will concern the Sacramento
  Delta, the inland network of streams and rivers, many contained by
  dykes and levees, that form the hub of California's water
  infrastructure. Californians hate rain but love water, so
  three-quarters of them live in the arid south, spurn the wet north
  where three-quarters of the rain falls, and expect water to come to
  them by pipe, canal or aquifer, preferably courtesy of the taxpayer. 

  The Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and their tributaries, carrying
  the rain from the north and the melting snowpack from the Sierra Nevada
  in the east, meet in the delta and flow out through San Francisco's
  Golden Gate. The trick has always been to intercept the fresh water in
  the delta before it gets salty and to send it south as well as west to
  the San Francisco Bay area. 

  Those in the south get it through two huge infrastructure networks. The
  federal Central Valley Project, dating from 1937, uses 20 upstream
  reservoirs and two pumps to take water to the southern Central Valley,
  largely for farmers. The State Water Project, begun in 1960 by Pat
  Brown, a visionary governor, uses another 22 upstream dams and
  reservoirs and its own pumping plant to send water into the other
  aqueduct, largely for urban use. 

  By pumping fresh water south, however, these two projects wreak
  ecological havoc. Sceptics like to inveigh against the unprepossessing
  delta smelt, which George Radanovich, a Republican congressman, has
  called "a worthless little worm that needs to go the way of the
  dinosaur". But other fish species such as the Chinook salmon, the
  steelhead and the longfin smelt are also threatened, and each species
  is a part of a complex food chain. About 25% of the state's sporting
  fish and 80% of its commercial fish live in or migrate through the
  delta. 

  PUMPS KILL, LEVEES LEAK
  The pumps kill fish and other species, and not just by grinding them
  up. They also change, and occasionally reverse, the water flow of the
  small rivers in the delta's vast labyrinth of streams, creeks, sluices,
  islands and marshes. In natural circumstances, the delta is brackish
  and its salinity changes with the tides. The pumps, by drawing in river
  water, keep the delta water artificially fresh. Native species die,
  invasive species thrive.

  Beyond that, the ageing delta's levees are a human disaster in the
  making. The delta sits on top of seismic faults that may rupture, and
  many of the islands that make it up are below sea level. A large
  earthquake could disrupt the state's water supply and inundate the
  delta itself.

  The best answer, says Ellen Hanak, a water expert at the non-partisan
  Public Policy Institute of California, is to build either a canal or a
  tunnel around the delta. Fresh water could then be tapped upstream on
  the Sacramento River and conveyed round the delta to the aqueducts
  without grinding up fish, reversing river flows or changing the delta's
  salinity, which would again fluctuate with the tides. The water going
  south would be fresher too. A canal would thus "separate the water for
  the fish from the water for the economy and the people," says Mr Quinn.

  The trouble is that such a peripheral canal is a political hot button.
  In 1982 Jerry Brown, Pat Brown's son and California's governor at the
  time, put a canal on the ballot but the voters rejected it. Even now,
  many people are passionately against it. Farmers and residents in the
  delta itself fear that a bypass would mean that politicians and public
  money would abandon them amid their disintegrating levees, and others
  would grab their water. The Sierra Club is against a canal because "it
  is not going to make new water" and "we want to reduce exports from the
  delta" rather than reroute its flows, says Mr Metropulos.

  The legislation under negotiation is therefore taking a different
  approach. Instead of decreeing a bypass canal or tunnel outright, it
  seeks to establish a new authority with the power to take this decision
  itself. This is sorely needed. Mr Snow at the water department has
  counted more than 200 entities, from cities and counties to fisheries
  and reclamation or irrigation districts and even mosquito-abatement
  boards, that share responsibility in such a way that nobody has any. A
  new and nimble "Delta Council" would seize authority from all of them
  and actively manage the delta for the first time. And it could do this
  by building a canal.

  DAM MONEY
  One sign of progress by Californian standards is that, if the deal gets
  stuck, it will be largely over relatively banal issues such as money.
  The legislation is likely to mandate investment in new dams and
  reservoirs, which appeal to Republicans, and also in waste-water
  recycling, desalination and groundwater storage, which are the
  environmentalists' and Democrats' preferred sources of water. But
  Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor, has said that he will
  veto any legislation that does not include billions of dollars in new
  bonds to pay for these new projects.

  State Republicans, allied to farmers, are pushing for
  "general-obligation" bonds that would be put to the voters on a ballot
  and, if approved, paid out of general state tax revenues. Democrats are
  concerned that the interest on such bonds would aggravate California's
  continuing budget dispute and come at the expense of education, health
  care and other things they mind about. They prefer bonds that would be
  repaid by the users of new dams, ie, the water agencies that can pass
  costs on to their customers. Water thus trumps ordinary politics.
  Republicans, who usually claim to be against big government, want
  taxpayers to pay; Democrats, generally accused of being big spenders,
  want to match infrastructure costs with water revenues to send the
  right price signals.

  The legislation is likely to encourage water conservation by setting
  targets for reducing consumption. One guess is that it may call for a
  cut of 20% per person by 2020. That cannot be a bad idea. On the other
  hand, little progress is being made on monitoring groundwater levels,
  even though many aquifers are shrinking. Some of the state's water
  districts voluntarily measure groundwater levels, but Republican
  legislators have opposed making such reporting mandatory on the ground
  that it would mean trespassing on private property. "California is the
  last bastion of the Wild West when it comes to groundwater," says Ms
  Hanak. It may stay that way. 

  Whatever happens, the legislation will not deal with the long-term
  threats to California and its neighbours. Climate change is already
  showing up "in the data", says Mr Quinn. The snowpack of the Sierra
  Nevada, California's most reliable water-storage system, is shrinking
  and may stop yielding predictable run-off in the spring and start
  producing sporadic and unusable, not to mention disastrous, floods. The
  delta is already below sea level and, as the sea rises, it may be
  submerged. Even today the south is a desert wherever irrigation does
  not reach. It will become even drier.

  For professional water managers such as Mr Kightlinger, this makes the
  continuing talks in Sacramento frustrating. "'I'm for screwdrivers but
  not for hammers': that's how they talk," he says. But he thinks all the
  tools are needed if California's population and economy are to keep
  growing.

  Of those tools, water recycling, a euphemism for cleaning up sewage, is
  perhaps the most promising. Recycled water is local and does not
  disappear in a drought. But many consumers continue to struggle with
  the idea that what they are drinking today someone else restored to the
  water system yesterday. Desalination, which removes minerals from
  seawater or, more often, brackish groundwater, is an alternative. But
  it takes a lot of energy to push water through the dense filters that
  remove unwanted salts and other molecules. Water markets, which allow
  those with too much water to trade it easily with those who have too
  little, could also help.

  If there is to be any progress, however, Californians first have to
  bury their hatchets. If the talks stall, the political fallout will be
  big. Tom Campbell, the most thoughtful Republican candidate for
  governor in next year's election, thinks water is by far the most
  important issue facing the state. Willie Brown, a former speaker of
  California's Assembly and mayor of San Francisco, believes "a political
  earthquake is rumbling in the Central Valley over water, and it could
  cause a real tsunami for the Democrats in the 2010 elections if they
  don't handle it well," since Democrats are more associated with
  environmentalists and several of them face re-election.

  A CHANCE TO MAKE HISTORY
  For the same reason, if the negotiations succeed, even a mediocre deal
  would amount to the most important water legislation since the era of
  Pat Brown, says Mr Quinn. Westlands' Mr Birmingham feels that many
  environmental groups, such as the Natural Resources Defence Council and
  the Nature Conservancy, have become "genuinely interested in working
  with water agencies", even though others are "using water as a means to
  limit housing development". 

  "I am very optimistic for the long term," says Mr Birmingham. "The real
  question is how are we going to survive between now and the time when
  new conveyance facilities become available," which could be a decade or
  more. "If we continue to live under the existing biological opinions,
  irrigated agriculture in the western San Joaquin Valley cannot be
  sustained," he says. For farmers such as Mr Coburn and his 26 Latino
  workers, never mind his almonds and wine grapes, the help may arrive
  too late. This is perhaps the only thing they have in common with the
  delta smelt.
   


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