• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1748 0

the rain-starved hills that lie disturbingly behind its emerald-and-white summer splendor, but this is the second part of the fraud, the part perpetrated by man. There was not a single tree growing in San Francisco when the first Spanish arrived; it was too dry and wind-blown for trees to take hold. Today, Golden Gate Park looks as if Virginia had mated with Borneo, thanks to water brought nearly two hundred miles by tunnel. The same applies to Bel Air, to Pacific Palisades, to the manicured lawns of La Jolla, where the water comes from three directions and from a quarter of a continent away.

The whole state thrives, even survives, by moving water from where it is, and presumably isn’t needed, to where it isn’t, and presumably is needed. No other state has done as much to fructify its deserts, make over its flora and fauna, and rearrange the hydrology God gave it. No other place has put as many people where they probably have no business being. There is no place like it anywhere on earth. Thirty-one million people (more than the population of Canada), an economy richer than all but seven nations’ in the world, one third of the table food grown in the United States—and none of it remotely conceivable within the preexisting natural order.

For all its seasonal drought, its huge southern deserts, and its climatic extremes, there is plenty of water in California for all the people who live there today. If, God forbid, another twenty-five million arrive, there will still be plenty for them. The only limiting factor will be energy: to get to where the people are likely to settle, a lot of the water has to be lifted over mountains. Take any ten of the largest reservoirs—Shasta, Bullard’s Bar, Pine Flat, Don Pedro, New Melones, Trinity, a few others—and you have enough water for the reasonable needs of twenty-five million people; enough for their homes, their schools, their offices, their industries, even (in all but the driest times) their swimming pools and lawns. As for the other 1,190 California dams and reservoirs, their purposes are threefold: power, flood control, and, above all, water for irrigation. What few people, including some Californians, know is that agriculture uses 81 percent of all the water in this most populous and industrialized of states.

California’s $18 billion agricultural industry—and it is a gigantic, complex, integrated industry—is the largest and still the most important in the state, Silicon Valley notwithstanding. That figure, $15 billion, only begins to convey what agriculture really means to California. A great proportion of its freight traffic is agricultural produce. A disproportionate amount of the oil and gas mined in the state is used by agriculture. California agriculture supports a giant chemicals industry (it uses about 30 percent of all the pesticides produced in the United States), a giant agricultural-implements industry, an unrivaled amount of export trade. Because it relies on irrigation—and therefore on dams, aqueducts, and canals—there is a close symbiotic relationship with the construction industry, which is why politicians who lobby hard on behalf of new dams can count on great infusions of campaign cash from the likes of the Operating Engineers Local No. 3 and the AFL-CIO. And, more than any other state, California has been a source of opportunities for the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers.

All of this production, all of these jobs, all of these concentric rings of income-earning activity nourish California’s awesome $485 billion GNP. It is a gross state product, obviously, but everyone seems to refer to it as the “California GNP,” as if the state were a nation unto itself—which it really is, and nowhere more so than in the example of water. California has preached and practiced water imperialism against its neighbor states in a manner that would have done Napoleon proud, and, in the 1960s, it undertook, by itself, what was then the most expensive public-works project in history. That project, the State Water Project, more than anything else, is the symbol