Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [245]
As for the “statewide benefit” Banks wrote about, the California Water Project may have been necessary if the state was to continue to grow at its historical, breathtaking rate. But that was the point. The growth it created was not “orderly” growth, to use that buzzword of which the water developers are so fond. It was giantism. It was chaotic growth. In southern California, project water is allowing hundreds of acres to be subdivided, mailed, and paved over each week, transforming what could have been a Mediterranean paradise into one of the twentieth century’s urban nightmares. In Kern County, it created, solidified, and enriched land monopolies that are waging economic war against the small farmers who are so important to the state’s economic stability, and who give its agricultural regions what little charm they have. To drive from east to west across the San Joaquin Valley, from a pretty little palm-colonnaded city such as Chowchilla, made prosperous by the Central Valley Project and surrounding small farms, to a shabby town such as Huron, surrounded by endless tracts of irrigated land farmed by distant corporate owners, is to fathom the sorry social impact agricultural monopoly can have.
And what is worse, the State Water Project fostered growth in the desert, willy-nilly, without a secure foundation of water. Twenty million people may live between Santa Barbara and San Diego in 2010; the current outlook, according to the State Water Contractors, is that five million of them won’t have water unless some drastic conservation steps are taken and occasional surpluses are scavenged from every available source. Even if the groundwater overdraft in the San Joaquin Valley continues to increase—and the chairman of the California Water Commission said recently that it may become “intolerable” by the year 2000—a shortfall of nearly a million acre-feet looms ahead there. The likeliest “solution” to the shortages, as things now stand, will be a lot of land going out of production. The farmers who are apt to give up first are those who are wholly dependent on farming for their livelihood. The ones likely to continue are those to whom farming is a sideline to oil refining or banking or running a railroad, or a tax writeoff—a way to accumulate a little judicious financial loss.
When Pat Brown’s two terms as governor were over, he opened a lucrative law practice in Beverly Hills. One of his firm’s most important clients became the Berrenda Mesa Water District, where the lands of several of the biggest corporate growers are located. The Blackwell Land Company, for example, owns 16,000 acres within Berrenda Mesa and co-owns 4600 more; Getty and Shell both farm thousands of acres there; one company, Mendiburu Land and Cattle, controls some 250,000 acres statewide. Thanks to his beloved Oroville Dam and the Governor Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct—it was finally given that name by his son, in 1982—he had an opportunity to build up a tidy nest egg for his retirement.
But in his later years Pat Brown remained unrepentant about his firm’s client relationships, which some might have considered unseemly, and he was as proud of his project as ever. Another thing that hadn’t changed about him, curiously, was his candor. During his interviews for the Bancroft Library’s Oral History Program, he allowed himself some final thoughts about the meaning of the State Water Project in California’s history. “This project was a godsend to the big landowners of the state of California,