By Victor Davis Hanson in PJ Media
California is not suffering one
drought, but four. Each is a metaphor of what California has become.
Nature
The first California drought, of
course, is natural. We are now in the midst of a fourth year of record low
levels of snow and rain.
Californians have no idea that their
state is a relatively recent construct — only 165 years old, with even less of
a pedigree of accurate weather keeping. When Europeans arrived in California in
the 15th and 16th centuries, they were struck by how few
indigenous peoples lived in what seemed paradise — only to learn that the
region was quite dry on the coast and in the interior.
Today, modern Californians have no
idea of whether a four-year drought is normal, in, say, a 5,000 natural history
of the region, or is aberrant — as wet years are long overdue and will return
with a vengeance. That we claim to know what to expect from about 150 years of
recordkeeping does not mean that we know anything about what is normal in
nature’s brief millennia. Our generation may be oblivious to that fact, but our
far more astute and pragmatic forefathers certainly were not.
Hubris
If one studies the literature on the
history and agendas of the California State Water Project and the federal
Central Valley Project, two observations are clear. One, our ancestors
brilliantly understood that Californians always would wish to work and live in
the center and south of the state. They accepted that where 75% of the
population wished to live, only 25% of the state’s precipitation fell. Two,
therefore they designed huge transfer projects from Northern California that
was wet and sparsely settled, southward to where the state was dry and
populated. They assumed that northerners wanted less water and relief from
flooding, and southerners more water and security from drought, and thus their
duty was to accommodate both.
Nor were these plans ossified.
Indeed, they were envisioned as expanding to meet inevitable population
increases. The Temperance Flat, Los Banos Grandes, and Sites reservoirs were
planned in wet years as safety deposits, once higher reservoirs emptied. As
population grew larger, dams could be raised at Shasta and Oroville. Or huge
third-phase reservoirs like the vast Ah Pah project on the Klamath River might
ensure the state invulnerability from even 5-6 year droughts.
One can say what one wishes about
the long ago cancelled huge Ah Pah project — what would have been the largest
manmade reservoir project in California history — but its additional 15 million
acre feet of water would be welcomed today. Perhaps such a vast project was
mad. Perhaps it was insensitive to local environmental and cultural needs.
Perhaps the costs were prohibitive — a fraction of what will be spent on the
proposed high-speed rail project. Perhaps big farming would not pay enough of
the construction costs. But one cannot say that its 15 million acre feet of
water storage would not have been life-giving in a year like this.
In any case, Ah Pah was no more
environmentally unsound than is the Hetch Hetchy Project, without which there
would be no Silicon Valley today as we now know it. One cannot say that
hundreds of millions of public dollars have not gone to environmentalists, in
and outside of government and academia, to subsidize their visions of the
future that did not include food production and power generation for others.
They are no less subsidized than the corporate farmers they detest.
One of the ironies of the current
drought is that urbanites who cancelled these projects never made plans either
to find more water or to curb population. Take the most progressive
environmentalist in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and the likelihood is that his
garden and bath water are the results of an engineering project of the sort he
now opposes.
Fantasies
The state and federal water projects
were envisioned as many things — flood control, hydroelectric generation,
irrigation, and recreation. One agenda was not fish restoration. Perhaps it
should have been. But our forefathers never envisioned building dams and
reservoirs to store water to ensure year-round fish runs in our rivers — a
mechanism to improve on the boom-and-bust cycle of nature, in which 19th century
massive spring flooding was naturally followed by August and September low,
muddy, or dry valley rivers.
Engineering alone could ensure an
unnatural river, where flows could be adjusted all year long, almost every
year, by calibrated releases from artificial lakes, ensuring about any sort of
river salmon or delta bait fish population one desired. One may prefer catching
a salmon near Fresno to having a $70 billion agricultural industry, but these
days one cannot have both. Releasing water to the ocean in times of drought was
not the intention of either the California State Water Project or the Central
Valley Project; again, it may be a better idea than what the old engineers had
planned on, but it is predicated on the idea that those living in Mendota or
working in Coalinga are an unfortunately unnatural species, at least in
comparison to river salmon and bait fish.
Population
Even with drought, cancellations of
dams, and diversions of contracted water to the ocean, California might well
not have been imperiled by the present drought — had its population stayed at
about 20 million when most of the water projects were cancelled in the
mid-1970s. Unfortunately the state is now 40 million — and growing. Illegal
immigration — half of all undocumented aliens live in California — has added
millions to the state population. And agriculture is a key route for Mexican
immigrants to reach the middle class. Either the state should insist on closing
the borders and encourage emigration out of state to no-tax states (which is
already happening at about the rate of 1000 to 2000 people per week), or it
should build the infrastructure and create the job opportunities to accommodate
newcomers in a semi-arid landscape. That would mean that the vast 4-6
million-acre west side of California’s Central Valley remains irrigated, and
that there is continued water made available to a 500-mile dry coastal corridor
to accommodate a huge influx of immigrants.
Is it liberal or illiberal to ensure
that there will be no new water for a vast new San Jose south of San Jose, or
that there will prohibitions on immigration and population growth that would
halt a new San Jose? Perhaps the liberal position would be for Silicon Valley
grandees to relocate to the wet and rainy Klamath River Basin, where it could
grow without unnaturally imported water from the Sierra Nevada. In a truly
eco-friendly state, Stanford and Berkeley would open new satellite campuses
near the Oregon border to match people with water.
One reality we know does not work:
deliberate retardation of infrastructure to discourage consumption and
population growth, in the manner of Jerry Brown’s small-is-beautiful campaign
of the 1970s. Ossifying the 99 and 101 freeways at 1960s levels did not discourage
drivers from using them. It only ensured slower commute times, more fossil fuel
emissions, and far more dangerous conditions, as more drivers fought for less
driving space.
Not building dams and reservoirs did
not mean fewer people would have water or food and thus would not keep coming
to California, but only that there would be ever more competition — whether
manifested in tapping further the falling aquifer or rationing residential
usage — for shrinking supplies.
One theme characterizes California’s
attitude about water. Liberal orthodoxy is never consistent. While it may be
seen as progressive to champion river and delta restoration or to divert
reservoir water for scenic and environmental use, or to discourage more
development of agricultural acreage, the results in the real world are hardly
liberal.
The poor and the middle classes
usually bear the brunt of these policies in terms of reduced job opportunities
and a slower economy. Exemption from the ramifications of one’s ideology
characterize what can only be called a rich man’s utopian dreams: divert San
Joaquin River water for fish, but not Hetch Hetchy water that supplies the Bay
Area; talk of bulldozing almond trees, but not golf courses from Indian Wells
to Pebble Beach to the Presidio; ensuring less water to poor foothill and
Westside communities, but not pulling out the lush gardens or emptying the
swimming pools of those who live in La Jolla, Bel Air, Carmel Valley, Woodside,
and Presidio Heights.
To paraphrase Tacitus, they make a
desert and call it liberal.
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