The Scorching of California
How Green extremists made a bad drought worse
Winter 2015
MICAH ALBERT/REDUX
The drought has threatened to turn large tracts of farmland into dust.
three years drenched California. No one knows whether the rain and snow
will continue—only that it must last for weeks if a record three-year
drought, both natural and man-made, is to end. In the 1970s, coastal
elites squelched California’s near-century-long commitment to building
dams, reservoirs, and canals, even as the Golden State’s population
ballooned. Court-ordered drainage of man-made lakes, meant to restore
fish to the 1,100-square-mile Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, partly
caused central California’s reservoir water to dry up. Not content with
preventing construction of new water infrastructure, environmentalists
reverse-engineered existing projects to divert precious water away from
agriculture, privileging the needs of fish over the needs of people.
Then they alleged that global warming, not their own foolish policies,
had caused the current crisis.
Even as a fourth year of drought threatens the state, canal water
from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir in Yosemite National Park keeps Silicon
Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area a verdant oasis. This parched
coastal mountain range would have depopulated long ago without the
infrastructure that an earlier, wiser generation built and that
latter-day regulators and environmentalists so casually deprecated. (See
“California’s Promethean Past,”
Summer 2013.) Gardens and lawns remain green in Palo Alto, San Mateo,
Cupertino, and San Francisco, where residents continue to benefit from
past investments in huge water transfers from inland mountains to the
coast. They will be the last to go dry.
I grew up in the central San Joaquin Valley
during the 1950s. In those days, some old-timers remembered with
fondness when the undammed Kings River’s wild, white water would gush
down into the sparsely populated valley. But most Californians never had
such nostalgia. Past generations accepted that California was a growing
state (with some 20 million people by 1970), that agriculture was its
premier industry, and that the state fed not just its own people but
millions across America and overseas. All of that required
redistribution of water—and thus dams, reservoirs, and irrigation
canals.
For 50 years, the state transferred surface water from northern
California to the Central Valley through the California State Water
Project and the federal Central Valley Project. Given these vast and
ambitious initiatives, Californians didn’t worry much about the
occasional one- or two-year drought or the steady growth in population.
The postwar, can-do mentality resulted in a brilliantly engineered water
system, far ahead of its time, that brought canal water daily from the
30 percent of the state where rain and snow were plentiful—mostly north
of Sacramento as well as from the Sierra Nevada Mountains—to the lower,
western, and warmer 70 percent of the state, where people preferred to
work, farm, and live.
Everyone seemed to benefit. Floods in northern California became a
thing of the past. The more than 40 major mountain reservoirs generated
clean hydroelectric power. New lakes offered recreation for millions
living in a once-arid state. Gravity-fed snowmelt was channeled into
irrigation canals, opening millions of new acres to farming and ending
reliance on pumping the aquifer. To most Californians, the irrigated,
fertile Central Valley seemed a natural occurrence, not an environmental
anomaly made possible only through the foresight of a now-forgotten
generation of engineers and hydrologists.
Just as California’s freeways were designed to grow to meet increased
traffic, the state’s vast water projects were engineered to expand with
the population. Many assumed that the state would finish planned
additions to the California State Water Project and its ancillaries. But
in the 1960s and early 1970s, no one anticipated that the then-nascent
environmental movement would one day go to court to stop most new dam
construction, including the 14,000-acre Sites Reservoir on the
Sacramento River near Maxwell; the Los Banos Grandes facility, along a
section of the California Aqueduct in Merced County; and the Temperance
Flat Reservoir, above Millerton Lake north of Fresno. Had the gigantic
Klamath River diversion project not likewise been canceled in the 1970s,
the resulting Aw Paw reservoir would have been the state’s largest
man-made reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it might have
stored 15 million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San Francisco for
30 years. California’s water-storage capacity would be nearly double
what it is today had these plans come to fruition. It was just as
difficult to imagine that environmentalists would try to divert
contracted irrigation and municipal water from already-established
reservoirs. Yet they did just that, and subsequently moved to freeze
California’s water-storage resources at 1970s capacities.
All the while, the Green activists remained blissfully unconcerned
about the vast immigration into California from Latin America and Mexico
that would help double the state’s population in just four decades, to
40 million. Had population growth remained static, perhaps California
could have lived with partially finished water projects. The state might
also have been able to restore the flow of scenic rivers from the
mountains to the sea, maintained a robust agribusiness sector, and even
survived a four- or five-year drought. But if California continues to
block new construction of the State Water Project as well as additions
to local and federal water-storage infrastructure, officials must halve
California’s population, or shut down the 5 million acres of irrigated
crops on the Central Valley’s west side, or cut back municipal water
usage in a way never before done in the United States.
When the drought began in autumn 2011, the
average Californian barely noticed. Mountain reservoirs remained full
throughout 2011 and much of 2012, thanks to ample rainfall in previous
years. Though rain and snowfall plunged to as much as 40 percent below
average in most inland counties, shortages affected only large
agribusiness conglomerates on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley—a
small group of corporate grandees with plenty of land and little public
sympathy.
During that first year of drought, quarrels over water
were mostly confined to farmers and environmentalists. Confident that
stored surface water in mountain reservoirs would remain plentiful, the
Greens insisted that the state continue to divert reservoir water away
from agricultural usage—at roughly the same rate as during pre-drought
years—in order to replenish rivers. In practical terms, however, the
diversions meant that substantial amounts of stored snowmelt were
released from mountain dams and allowed to flow freely to the Pacific
Ocean. Farmers called that wasted water; environmentalists called it a
return to a natural, preindustrial California. The Green dream was not
simply river restoration and beautification, however. Bay Area
environmentalists also believed that vastly increased freshwater inflows
would help oxygenate the San Francisco Delta, thereby enabling the
survival of the Delta smelt, a three-inch baitfish, while ensuring that
salmon could be reintroduced into the San Joaquin River watershed.
Farmers mostly lost these early diversion battles. After all, the
state’s reservoirs stood at or near capacity, previous wet years had
recharged valley aquifers, and conventional wisdom held that the drought
would probably end soon, anyway. Nevertheless, hand-painted protest
signs began sprouting along Interstate 5, amid a few abandoned almond
orchards, proclaiming a new “dust bowl” and condemning liberal Bay Area
officials, such as Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Barbara
Boxer, for supporting the river diversions. In Fresno County, the
Consolidated Irrigation District and others stopped almost all surface
deliveries to their agricultural water users from the Pine Flat dam on
the Kings River reservoir. The water masters of the Kings River had
enough stored water at Pine Flat to keep the reservoir at mostly normal
levels. By cutting off deliveries to farmers, authorities had the luxury
of releasing water to refurbish the lower Kings River for habitat
restoration.
I experienced the effects of these policies firsthand. My property
contains a 130-year-old abandoned well that my great-great-grandparents
dug by hand and lined with tin pipe. Throughout 2012, the water table in
my front yard remained about 40 feet below the surface, and all through
the drought, the well proved a reliable barometer of changing
groundwater levels. No one likes paying irrigation taxes for surface
water not delivered, but local farmers shrugged, turned on their standby
pumps, and drew from the shallow aquifer. We got by during the
drought’s first year with only moderately elevated electricity bills.
Fifty miles to the west, however, farmers and agribusinesses on the
Central Valley’s west side resorted to drilling deeper, sometimes in
excess of 1,500 feet. Pumping brackish water from great depths is an
unsustainable way to irrigate millions of acres of valuable croplands.
The entire 5 million-acre west-side agricultural project that arose from
desert scrub didn’t exist before the early 1960s—precisely because the
region had neither an aquifer nor a water project to deliver surface
irrigation water from northern and eastern California.
As the drought continued, the political debate heated up. Farmers
reminded Bay Area Greens that they had no proof that the Delta smelt was
suffering from a lack of fresh river water. Equally likely culprits for
the fish’s plight were the more than 30 Bay Area and Stockton-area
municipalities that dump oxygen-depleted wastewater into the baitfish’s
habitat. The farmers noted the irony of using artificial reservoirs to
ensure supposedly “natural” year-round river flows for salmon and smelt.
Before the construction of California’s modern dams, Sierra snowmelts
didn’t necessarily ensure continually rushing rivers. Nineteenth-century
spring floods into the valley usually were followed by a depleted
late-summer Sierra snowpack and dry August river trickles. How odd,
farmers thought, that environmentalists opposed new dams and reservoirs
as “unnatural,” and yet counted on existing reservoir water to maintain a
dependable habitat for newly introduced salmon. Before the dams, nature
simply didn’t operate that way.
In the winter of 2012, the drought entered
its second year, but record-high agricultural commodity prices tempered
the farmers’ acrimony. Newly affluent customers in China and India—in
addition to wealthy Japanese, Taiwanese, and South Korean
consumers—fueled demand for premium California dairy products, wine,
nuts and dried fruits, fresh fruits and vegetables, beef, and cotton.
Raisin prices jumped from $900 per ton to more than $1,900 per ton. Some
almond growers became millionaires overnight. When the per-pound price
of nuts tripled, and new varieties of trees and new farming practices
bolstered production to well over 3,000 pounds per acre, a
once-“inefficient” family farmer with 40 acres could suddenly net $5,000
an acre. Given that harvesting almonds is mostly mechanized and
requires little, if any, manual labor, growers embarked on planting
sprees up and down the drought-stricken valley. If 40 acres could net
$200,000, large conglomerates of 5,000 acres or more might see profits
of $25 million annually. Pistachios and walnuts proved even more
lucrative. For the first time in a quarter-century, Central Valley
farmers saw the kind of prosperity associated with the Silicon and Napa
Valleys.
By 2013, however, with snowfall scant, some northern California
reservoirs had fallen far below normal levels. Farms on the Central
Valley’s eastern side—the ones with prior privileged access to local
irrigation districts and shallow water tables—faced a second year
without surface-water deliveries. After 12 months of steady pumping,
their water tables weren’t so shallow any more. My old well dipped to 60
feet as the water table began dropping more than a foot per month. In
past years, I could count on access to canal water to replenish the
water table. Now, for the first time in the 140-year history of our
farm, nature and man had cut off the water. The well went dry.
Meanwhile, on the west side, state and local officials warned farmers
that they might receive far less than even the 10 percent of contracted
surface-water delivery that they’d been promised. Nevertheless,
environmentalists prevailed upon the courts to extend orders diverting
freshwater reserves from irrigation canals to rivers and the ocean. The
public remained indifferent: the state had survived two years of drought
before, and cities still got their water allotments from shrinking
northern and mountain reservoirs. In 2012 and 2013, man-made reservoirs
in San Francisco and Los Angeles brimmed while the northern and mountain
lakes that supplied them were just two-thirds full. Facing no threat of
rationing, coastal Californians didn’t worry if a few hundred thousand
acres of lucrative orchards simply shriveled up.
As 2013 wore on, climatologists, trying to project how long the
drought might persist, warned state officials that their records only
ran as far back as the late 1860s. California is a relatively new human
habitat, and scientists can say little with certainty about the eons of
natural history preceding the arrival of Spanish, Mexican, and American
explorers. Tree-ring evidence suggests that past droughts had lasted 50
or even 100 years. Historically, drought may be the norm rather
than the exception in California. This might explain why such a
naturally rich state could support only a small population of indigenous
people. Is coastal and central California, in its natural state, a
mostly unsustainable desert for large, settled agrarian populations?
Maybe modern Californians don’t fully appreciate the genius of their
forefathers, who were prescient enough to see that, if huge quantities
of water weren’t transferred from the wet northlands, the Sierras, and
the Colorado River, then the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles
would be little more than arid coastal villages, analogous to lightly
populated and perennially water-short Cayucos or Cambria, along Highway
1.
Californians heaved a sigh of relief after a few days of heavy rain
in November 2013, and some early snowfalls seemed to suggest that the
drought would end in 2014. But the relief was premature; the dry spells
returned. What rain and snow followed was too little and far too late.
Even the snowpack in the American River watershed—a northern river
system usually drawing on the greatest snowmelts—reached just 12 percent
of its average. Soon, the huge man-made reservoirs in both the
ordinarily wet north and the arid center of the state—Folsom, Millerton,
New Melones, Orville Pine Flat, San Luis, Shasta, Trinity—dipped below
half-full levels and, in some cases, plunged below 10 percent of
capacity. By July 2014, the average storage level of reservoirs
statewide was 13 percent. Across the state, surface-irrigation
deliveries to farms and orchards fell to near zero.
Farmers engaged in another vigorous round of groundwater pumping in
summer 2014. Water tables predictably plunged even further. Disaster
struck the west side, as large agribusiness concerns drilled new wells
to unheard-of depths of 2,000 feet and more, installing massive
300-horsepower electric pumps to bring up just enough brackish water to
trickle over their thirsty crops. Panic ensued even on the east side,
with its famous and once-shallow aquifer. Farmers complained about
six-month-long waiting lists to deepen their wells. Instead of the usual
150- or 200-foot wells, farmers drilled to depths of 300 or 400 feet,
and drew water from 150 feet. Pump installations were similarly
backlogged, and pump sizes increased from the standard 15-horsepower
models to 20- and 50-horsepower machines—all this to ensure that a
farmer’s particular straw had the best chance of siphoning every last
drop from an emptying common glass.
Such every-man-for-himself drilling came with its own attendant human
foibles—bribing drillers to cut in front of the waiting list; violating
decade-old pump-sharing easements; stealthily tapping into neighbors’
pipeline systems; or charging exorbitant rates to give dry farmers
access to working wells. Well-rig manufacturers had trouble keeping up
with demand. Some entrepreneurs, eager to gouge desperate farmers,
sought drilling machinery on the East Coast and overseas. Meanwhile,
farmers understood that, with the commodities boom, an investment in
permanent trees and vines might represent $15,000–$20,000 per acre and
annual profits of over $5,000 per year. By 2014, keeping the orchard or
vineyard alive, not just the current crop, became the aim. On the west
side, some orchard owners began bulldozing older or less productive nut
groves. Others tried to find just enough water to allow a final August
or September harvest at record prices, before the exhausted trees were
removed in the winter.
California’s huge urban reservoirs, however,
remained full. Municipalities demanded that they receive all the final
deliveries of state and federal surface water from the mountainous north
and east. The Hetch Hetchy reservoir in Yosemite National Park still
supplies almost 90 percent of the San Francisco Bay area’s daily water
supplies. In a strange paradox, that water bypasses the San Joaquin
River, into which environmentalists had diverted millions of acre-feet
of irrigation water for fish. Even in 2014, as the state baked dry,
environmentalists insisted on diverting what little mountain reservoir
water remained to river-restoration efforts. Yet no environmentalist
group has suggested that California tap Hetch Hetchy for habitat
restoration in the same manner in which it has expropriated the water of
farmers.
By late 2014, Pyramid and Castaic Lakes in southern California—part
of the vast reserves controlled by the Southern California Metropolitan
Water District—remained well above 90 percent of their capacities. But
their sources in the distant north had almost no surface water left to
give. The cities had drained and banked virtually all the state’s
existing reservoirs. Indeed, so well banked are southern California’s
project reservoirs that they have enough water to keep millions of
customers well supplied through 2015, even as northern and central
California communities dry up.
In reaction to these ongoing disasters and fearing a fourth year of
drought, the legislature and Governor Jerry Brown placed a $7.5 billion
water bond on the November 2014 ballot. It passed, but only a third of
the money will go to construction of reservoirs canceled in the 1970s
and 1980s. Most of the bond’s provisions will fund huge new state
bureaucracies to regulate access to groundwater and mandate recycling.
The bond will essentially void more than a century of complex water law
as the state moves to curb farmers’ ability to pump water from beneath
their own lands. Bay Area legislators who helped draft the bill failed
to grasp that farmers bear the huge costs of drilling and pumping, not
because they are greedy or insensitive to the environment but because
the state’s population has doubled and its water infrastructure has not
kept pace. A better way to regulate overdrafts of the water table would
have been to increase vastly the amount of reservoir surface water for
agriculture so that farmers would have no need to turn on their pumps.
But legislators and policymakers let utopianism get in the way.
Last summer, my two agricultural pumps
worked from June to late August to keep 40 acres of grapevines alive
during 100-degree days. Electricity and pump maintenance are costly. So
are the annual irrigation district taxes I’ve paid the last three years
for contracted—though undelivered—surface water from the system that my
great-grandfather and other pioneers built themselves with horse-drawn
scrapers at the turn of the twentieth century. This winter, I added my
name to the waiting list to lower the pump bowls—the impellers deep in
the well that force the water up through the casing to the surface—in
anticipation of another year of drought.
If the drought does continue, vast tracts of west-side farmlands will
turn to dust. California’s nearly $30 billion agricultural export
industry—led by dairy, almond, and grape production—is in grave peril.
Its collapse would crush the economic livelihood of the Central Valley,
especially its Hispanic community. When the 5 million-acre west side
goes dry, hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs in a part
of the state where the average unemployment rate already hovers above
10 percent. Farmers will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to deepen
their wells further and save what water they can. Everything they and
their predecessors have known for a century will be threatened with
extinction.
Water is to California as coal is to Kentucky—yet its use is being
curtailed by those least affected, if affected at all, by the
consequences of their advocacy. But environmentalists, who for 40 years
worked to undermine the prudent expansion of the state’s water
infrastructure, have a rendezvous with those consequences soon. No
reservoir water is left for them to divert—none for the reintroduction
of their pet salmon, none for the Delta smelt. Their one hope is to
claim possession of the water in the ground once they’ve exhausted what
was above it. Redistribution, not expansion of supplies, is the liberal
creed for water, just as it is for wealth.
As the Hetch Hetchy reservoir drains, Bay Area man-made storage lakes
will necessarily follow. Another year of drought will deplete even
southern California’s municipal reserves sooner rather than later. When
Stanford professors and Cupertino tech lords cannot take a shower and
find themselves paving over their suburban lawns and gardens, perhaps
they, too, will see the value of reservoir water for people rather than
for fish. The new dust bowl may soon see a different generation of Joads
abandoning California for a wetter—and more prosperous—Midwest.
Could California still save itself? New reservoirs to store millions
of acre-feet of snowmelt could be built relatively quickly for the price
of the state’s high-speed rail boondoggle. Latino voters—the state’s
largest minority—might come around to the view that the liberal coastal
elite’s obsession with environmental regulations leads to higher
electricity rates, gasoline prices, and food costs, along with fewer
jobs and economic opportunities. Barring that, there may be only two
things left for California farmers to do: pray for the recent wet
weather to continue; and, if it does, pray further that
environmentalists do not send the precious manna from heaven out to sea.
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