My So-Called Drought
Can Southern California get off the North’s water?
By Judith Lewis
It was perhaps not the best time to chant for rain. The 1,100 or so people who participated in Sunday’s March for Water had already braved a steady drizzle on the three-mile walk from one state park along the Los Angeles River to the next. As the day warmed, kids crowded around food trucks and drummers gathered on the grass. Politicians took the stage to pitch their projects; community organizers handed out flyers.
And then Caleen Sisk-Franco came along.
The spiritual leader of the Northern California-based Winnemem Wintu tribe, Sisk-Franco, dressed in traditional buckskins with four feathers gathered at the back of her head, had come to pray for an end to California’s water wars, the century-long battle over who owns the state’s most basic natural resource.
At the moment, however, the situation is complicated. Governor Schwarzenegger insists we’re in the middle of a “drought emergency” that necessitates construction of a $5 billion “water conveyance system” to import more water from the North. Local environmentalists, including march coordinator Conner Everts of the Southern California Watershed Alliance, say the water shortage is man-made: “We’ve created a drought crisis by mismanaging our water,” he said in a press release for the event.
Everts’ long-time ally, the late environmental activist and Heal the Bay founder Dorothy Green, would have put it more plainly. Shortly before her death in October, she insisted that the drought had been flat-out “manufactured” for the sake of corporate agricultural interests maneuvering to get into the water business.
But there’s no Winnemem Wintu prayer to address a drought that may or may not have been trumped up to maintain the water-squandering status quo of California’s corporate agriculture – which sucks up 80 percent of the state’s water. So Sisk-Franco worked with what she had. Humming in the rhythmic tones of her native tongue, she prayed for rain.
Sure enough, it worked. Soon after she began, dark clouds swirled overhead, depositing sharp drops whipped by the wind into vicious little projectiles. Drummers, dancers and kids ran for cover; enviros packed up their educational pamphlets. No one complained. Rain in Southern California is a blessing. Especially for this crowd.
Too bad, then, that rain in Southern California actually does little to quench the state’s raging thirst. It recharges aquifers in the San Fernando Valley, but as L.A. Department of Water and Power general manager David Nahai reminded Sunday’s crowd, those aquifers are too contaminated to use for drinking water. Local rain fills rain-capturing cisterns, such as the one in the Coldwater Canyon Park headquarters of the environmental nonprofit TreePeople, a 216,000 gallon “nature-mimicking” underground tank that has freed the nonprofit from city water for a year.
But mostly what rain does for Los Angeles is deliver the litter in our streets to the beach. The only place where precipitation really matters to a statewide drought is in the Sierras, whose spring snowmelt flows into our aqueducts and fills our reservoirs. And it’s unclear whether Sisk-Franco’s miracle chant would matter up there.
The man who organized Sunday’s march, Miguel Luna, director of the grass-roots environmental organization Urban Semillas, had meant for the event to address several intertwined issues, from worldwide scarcity of potable water to the increasing corporate control of this most basic natural resource. But on a more local level, Luna wanted people to wake up to a situation many leaders of nonprofits like his consider a regional environmental injustice: While lawmakers wrangle billions to shore up half-century-old dams and build new conveyance pipes to bring water from the North, water projects in the South go wanting.
“Importing water creates a need,” says Luna. “You’re providing the pipe and the crack for free and then you have to pay for it. But we know locally that local infrastructure works. We just need the investment to do it.”
Think about it: With the $5 billion Schwarzenegger wants to invest in his canal, Los Angeles could build 10 water recycling facilities the size of Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System, which makes five million gallons of sewage drinkable every day. At the march, Nahai talked up the city’s “water-supply action plan,” a wide-ranging effort to wean the city off the dwindling supply of imported water. But to live up to its ambitions, the city needs money – and in the state’s current economic crisis, money is hard to come by.
Not everyone involved with the march was happy with its organizers’ doubts about the drought. When Tim Brick, who chairs the Metropolitan Water District board, saw the event’s press release, he fired off an e-mail to seven people, calling Everts’ statements “fallacious and misleading,” and insisting that “the drought is a reality of nature . . . caused by multiple factors.” He announced he would not be coming to the march.
Brick did not respond to a request for comment, but the puzzling sensitivity evinced in his e-mail points to the tensions among water managers and some environmentalists. Brick also heads up the nonprofit Arroyo Seco Foundation, an organization whose efforts to restore the natural waterways north of Pasadena have been halted for lack of state funds. In 1982, he fought alongside Dorothy Green against a Sacramento River canal, known back then as the “peripheral canal.” Now, however, he defends it.
It may be that anyone with a hand in meeting Californian consumers’ demands for water these days simply doesn’t have the luxury of declining options to solve the region’s water-supply woes. The Met, for example, draws from the Sacramento Delta and the truly drought-stricken Colorado River to supply water to nearly 20 million Southern Californians. That includes half the water used in the city of Los Angeles; another third of the city’s water comes down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the eastern Sierras, and roughly 10 percent is drawn from local groundwater. The Sierras, where snowpack is at 90 percent of normal, are doing reasonably well this year. But Delta water is suddenly inaccessible: a 2007 federal court ruling restricted pumping from the Delta to protect the fragile estuary’s health. That means the State Water Project will have to cut back deliveries by 80 percent. Schwarzenegger’s canal plan would skirt around that issue, by taking water from the Sacramento River before it reaches the Delta.
Canal or no, water districts statewide will eventually need to adapt to stricter limits placed on water sources that perhaps never should have been so heedlessly exploited in the first place. Whether you call that a drought might depend on which side you take in the water wars. Do we continue to build more monuments to mid-century water transfers, or learn to be more locally self-reliant, painful though it might be?
“The word ‘drought’ has lost all meaning,” says Everts, the event coordinator. “It is a word the agencies use when it’s convenient for them. But unless we admit that we’re in a permanent drought – regulatory and hydrological, brought on not only by nature but exacerbated by our mismanagement of water while altering climate and groundwater by pollution – we’ll never agree on what to do about it.”
And no rain prayer in the world will save us.
Published: 03/25/2009
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Comments
Looking forward to your follow-up next week.
Evans is right -- the drought is man-made -- made by managers like Brick who have sold water for too cheap, for too long.
SoCal should plan on living off "its" water -- there may not be more coming from the North.
David Zetland (aguanomics.com)
Please check your facts before you perpetuate the myth that ariculture uses "80 percent of the state's water." According to the state Department of Water Resources Bulleton 160-05, the total amount of water coming into California from all sources in a year of average precipitation is 200 million acre feet. of that, about 82 million acre feet is the dedicated water supply of which 41 percent goes to agriculture, 11 to urban uses and 48 percent to environmental uses. The environment is the largest beneficiary of the state's water, and this has increased every year as preservation of endangered species has taken precedent over people and food. yes, this drought is man-made, because the federal courts have ordered a 30 percent reduction in outflows to the south in an attempt to save the Delta smelt. Fish or food for people? I vote for food.