Food Grows where Water Flows

I have never driven down the Central Valley without seeing sign after sign that reminded me that “Food Grow Where Water Flows”. They are posted along both I-5 and Rte. 99, covering old tanks and stacks of cotton bales.


There is a truth in that statement that we all understand. California's major food producing areas are all valleys: Imperial Valley, San Joaquin Valley, Salinas Valley. They all rely on irrigation. It is mostly through irrigation that California has become the number 1 agricultural state in the country, producing $36.6 Billion in revenue in 2007.


That is a big argument for maintaining the status quo. In fact, we a growing population to feed, there is pressure to extend agriculture in to ever more lands, some of which are totally unsuitable. The environmental consequences of that are routinely ignored. -- more --

The only problem is that nothing can maintain the status quo. Things are always changing, becoming something different. That is the lesson of ecology, a lesson that Greens have learned even if others have not. We all live in a complex system of things that are created and things that die. Our hope is that we are not the ones who will die.

Currently the major change is climate. The most recent forecasts indicate that we may not be able to avoid a temperature increase of 6° C. by 2100. Such a change would entirely disrupt all of our natural systems and California's agricultural industry is rather ground zero in this

That is why I call attention to those signs. Food Grows Where Water Flows. They are no longer a simple description of California's agribusiness. They are a political slogan. Perhaps they always were. You will hear the same story repeated again and again. California's Agriculture needs water. The environmentalists think a fish is more important than people. Let's set aside the environmental laws so we can build more, develop more, pump more, grow more.

It is never that simple. There is not going to be much more water. The water that we will get will not be stored in the mountain snow pack to melt for summer use. Building more damns and more canals to store and carry less water does not make sense, but that is what almost every politician in the San Joaquin Valley wants to do.

The campaign to flush the San Joaquin Valley with Delta Water is well organized and picking up more force every week. It has now taken on the overtones of ethnic conflict. The California Latino Water Coalition are doing all that the land owners ask, showing up at organized protests as though Cesar Chavez were still leading them. This has the makings of a major split between the interests of farm workers and urban dwellers, though both are Hispanic.

California's State Legislature has failed time and again to make the substantive changes in how we deal with water. Each time the problem is recognized, they end up negotiating some compromise like Cal-Fed that solves nothing. Cal-Fed was billed as a compromise and promoted as such by Senator Feinstein. In reality, it was a capitulation to agribusiness interests.

In a similar manner, the Delta Vision process initiated by Governor Schwarzenegger was directed to define a comprehensive solution for our water needs with a concentrated focus on the Delta. Once delivered, every interest group is picking and choosing from a menu of solutions, choosing only those that they were looking for at the beginning and ignoring the rest. Schwarzenegger wanted the peripheral canal. San Joaquin Valley Agribusiness wants more guaranteed water. The Metropolitan Water District wants to keep supporting unlimited growth. We can't have it all. There is not now enough water to do that, even in a good year and we have had three dry years in a row.

Unless the people of California decide to tell their legislature to get serious about our future, we won't have a very good one. If our legislature is not ready to apply real science and ecological systems planning to the management of our watershed, then it is time to elect someone who will.

Two Green Party candidates for the State Assembly, Lisa Green (53rd AD) and Jack Lindblad (39th AD), have started their campaigns with strong positions about the changes needed in our water management systems. The California Green Party is the only option if we want to secure a future before our economy dies of thirst. Join Lisa and Jack and let's bring ecological accountability to Sacramento.

The Southeast has a drought, the Southwest has a crisis.

Just to let you know that California is not the only state where more dams are seen as the only solution, I cite the following from High Country News.

Colorado’s Cache la Poudre River tumbles 80 miles from its high-alpine headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park down to the South Platte River on the plains below. The upper Poudre is the only designated wild and scenic river in the state – but after it exits Poudre Canyon, 90 percent of its flow is siphoned off for farmers and homeowners around Fort Collins. Now, a local water district wants to tap the remaining 10 percent to fill two new reservoirs.

Municipal planners in northern Colorado say the prospect of drought combined with a booming population (predicted to increase three-fold by 2050), leaves only one solution: more water storage, in the form of the Northern Integrated Supply Project. “This is not a case of ‘if you don’t build it, they won’t come,’ ” says Carl Brouwer, project manager. “Bottom line: More people equals the need for more water.”

I would be asking the following questions:

• What will you do when the last 10% has been drained from the river?
• If you would do it then, why are you NOT doing it now.?

There seems to be some built in vision of this world where water is an inexhaustible supply and all we need to do is come up with a better method of capturing and using it. Unfortunately, we do not create any new water. That has not been new water on this earth for a very long time. We may watch it, swim in it, bathe with it, drink it, channel it, fish in it, process it, but we just don't make any more of it.

We should be asking the same questions about water in California. The stakes are high. It is not a good time to be a farmer in the Delta, as the most recent proposal from our good governor would take away riparian water rights to service those who would pay more. I am told that there was much unhappiness in the recent State Senate hearings when Restore the Delta made this a point of discussion. Last minute language inserted into a bond measure authorization that was clearly intended to be hidden.

Water Wars Continue... Politicians Hide.

We are finally beginning to see the shape of what the experts deem to be the future of water in California. The 2nd draft of A Vision for California’s Delta has been released and will be under discussion today and tomorrow in Sacramento.

Given what it is, a report put together with major input form the water agencies and not enough input form the public, it appears to me to be saying that we need to do all of the above: new dams, new underground storage, new canals, etc. It is cloaked in enough fine words that even major environmental groups are not strongly criticizing in in public... and I don't know about what they say in private.

“There’s a lot of good things in here,” said Barry Nelson, a water policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “A lot of these are issues that the agencies have been ducking for a long time.”

The Blue Ribbon Task Force will make it's recommendations by the end of November, so there is little time do much to change it, though there will be 3 rounds of public comment afterwards.

Here is a list of quick observations:

• The current firestorms in Southern California show us exactly how dependent we are on a fragile system and how interconnected all of this is. The time to view anything as other than interconnected is long past.
• Much of the rhetoric will frame this as a conflict between people and endangered species. This is a dangerous framing and far from the truth.
  
• Water agencies will never take a stand that implies any limitation to growth or demand.
  
• Neither major political party is willing to take the step of addressing the number one use of water in the State. Think "Got Milk." California agriculture is heavily invested in crops that are water intensive: cotton, alfalfa, rice. The predictions of climate change scientists are that rainfall and temperature changes will necessitate changes in agricultural practices, crop selection, etc. The time to start this is now.
  

The report does call for changes in the agricultural use in the Delta.

Specialized forms of agriculture that are particularly well suited to the Delta must be encouraged, such as subsidence-reversing crops, carbon-sequestering crops, and wildlife-friendly farming practices.

It fails, however, to recognize the need for making other basic changes, assuming that their job is only to deliver the water that agriculture needs. But then, Central Valley Water Districts help write the report.