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By Root 1716 0

” would be as large as San Francisco Bay. It would submerge both preexisting reservoirs and a couple of small towns. There would be some contribution from Stony Creek, but not much; a tremendous amount of energy would be required to pump water uphill. A second off-stream reservoir—smaller, but still a third the size of Shasta Lake—would be created farther south, in the foothills near Mount Diablo. Below there, water was already being pumped three hundred feet uphill for storage in San Luis Reservoir—another off-stream site—and farther south it was being lifted to improbable heights by the Edmonston Pumps. If it was all built, the California Water Project would require about as much electricity as both units of the $5.4 billion Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor could produce, and Brown didn’t want that built. Where, then, would the energy come from? The DWR set loose a bewildering flurry of “soft path” proposals—geothermal plants, wind machines, solar-generating ponds. The meanest of the governor’s critics, taking note of his interest in Buddhism, said it was all going to be powered by yaks.

Brown was so sympathetic to environmentalists in other ways that a lot of them were hesitant to oppose the plan. (The California Sierra Club’s leadership first endorsed it, only to be overturned in a referendum taken to the members at large.) After all, his director of water resources was Ron Robie, a smart, elfin, fast-talking lawyer who had been instrumental, while on the Water Resources Control Board, in writing decision 1422, a decree requiring minimum fresh-water flows through the state’s most important estuary, the Delta. Robie’s assistant director was Gerald Meral, a former staff scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund. Meral, a gaunt, bearded zoologist, was a great fan of wild rivers, an expert whitewater kayaker—there was even a falls and pool on the Tuolumne River named for him. How could people like Jerry Brown, Ron Robie, and Gerry Meral propose anything really bad?

One answer came from Tom Graff, a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund and Meral’s former colleague. The centerpiece of Brown’s plan was called the Peripheral Canal, an outsize channel to be constructed around the collapsing Delta. The Peripheral Canal had been a top priority of the water interests for forty years. What Brown wanted to do to win the environmentalists’ and northern California’s support was guarantee minimum releases to the Delta from the canal—a big surge of water would be let out every few miles, turning the Brown Canal, in effect, into a giant sprinkler hose. Robie and Meral argued that their plan would mimic the primordial river inflows and eliminate the cross-flows caused by the Delta pumps; in so doing, it would help salmon and striped bass spawn and actually improve the fishery. In fact, if one listened to them long enough, the whole $11.6 billion scheme was mainly for the sake of the Delta fish. But Graff pointed out that the Peripheral Canal would remove another couple of million acre-feet of water from the Delta and San Francisco Bay, water that normally went through at high flows. Delta outflows had already been reduced from 35 million acre-feet to around 17 million, and the fresh water that still managed to escape the project pumps was needed to wash pollution out of the bay; besides, the whole bay ecosystem had grown dependent on large seasonal fresh-water flows over tens of thousands of years. Who was to say that the bay, having already seen its fresh-water outflow decline by 55 percent, wasn’t on the brink of ecological ruin?

Besides, what if the legislature, dominated by southern California and the agricultural lobby, decided to overrule the Delta outflow guarantees? And what if it decided to dam the North Coast rivers? With the canal in place—it was, after all, to be four hundred feet wide, and would be capable of containing most of the Sacramento River—the water could finally be moved. The Glenn Reservoir site, curiously, was at the receiving end of the proposed Grindstone Tunnel, which was to have carried water from Dos