You Never Miss the Water till the Well Runs Dry: Crisis and Creativity in California

Abstract

Water resource management in California is a complicated business. The San Francisco Bay Delta in northern California supports the state’s largest habitat for fish and wildlife and provides a nursery and migration corridor for two-thirds of the state’s salmon. It also contains Suisun Marsh, the largest contiguous salt-water marsh in the United States. The systems that were built to serve California’s increasing population — dams, canals, pipelines, and so on — attempt to regularize and borrow water from these natural systems.¹ Indeed, two-thirds of California’s residents, the majority of whom are in southern California — some 600 miles away — receive some or all of their drinking water from the San Francisco Bay Delta, and its waters irrigate over 200 types of crops which, between them, produce 45 per cent of the United States’ fruits and vegetables. Huge quantities of water are also moved (by federal, not state, projects) across the desert from the Colorado River. In addition to all these transfers, water that originates in the Owens Valley comes east through the mountains to Los Angeles, and some of southern California’s water comes northwards from Mexico.