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By Root 1725 0

any part of the master drain to wildlife benefits. Sometime in 1982, hunters and biologists around Kesterson Reservoir began to observe that many overwintering birds seemed lethargic and sick—so ravaged by some strange malady that they could not even float on the water, and often drowned. At first, duck hunters and conservationists put forth an explanation that the farm lobby had always pooh-poohed—that pesticides and other chemical wastes in the sumpwater were making the birds die. By 1984, however, biologists were quite certain that the main cause of the ducks’ awful fate was selenium, a rare mineral, toxic in small doses, that occurs in high concentrations in southern Coast Range soils—exactly those soils which, washing down from the mountains over aeons, formed the Westlands Water District. The San Francisco Chronicle, which has carried on a long, bitter battle against water exports to the valley and southern California, has played the story for all it is worth. But none of its news stories and editorials had quite the impact of a poignant front-page photograph of a gorgeous dying male pintail duck at Kesterson Reservoir, a duck about to sink like a doomed boat to the bottom of the poisoned man-made marsh its presence is to subsidize.

Since there can be only one ultimate destination for the waste-water carried by the master drain—San Francisco Bay—the spectacle at Kesterson has infuriated many of the five million people who reside in the Bay Area. They may pollute the bay badly enough themselves, even if they do not admit it; but to have a bunch of farmers grown wealthy on “their” water, and subsidized by their taxes, sending it back to the bay full of toxic wastes, selenium, boron, and salt—that is intolerable. The farmers—who have been stuck with much of their toxic runoff since Kesterson was closed—might reject such reasoning as simplistic and emotional. But the fact is that the people of the Bay Area appear to have the political clout to prevent the drain from ever reaching there, and they seem determined to use it. It matters little that the salts in the wastewater (the selenium and boron and pesticides are another matter) would hardly affect the salinity of a great bay into which the ocean rushes every day. What matters is that the San Joaquin Valley farmers asked for water and got it, asked for subsidies and got them, and now want to use the bay as a toilet. To their urban brethren by the ocean, living a world apart, all of this smacks of a system gone mad.

The one irrigated civilization of antiquity that remained intact for thousands of years was Egypt, and we are now reasonably certain why. Every year, the Nile, the world’s most reliable river, would engorge itself in a spring flood and cover most of Egypt’s agricultural land. The floods would both carry off the salts and deposit a fresh layer of silt. The farmers would then rush to plant their crops, which grew lavishly on the residual moisture and the perfect soil. In the 1960s, however, the Egyptians, pumped up with a sense of grandiose destiny by Gamal Abdel Nasser, decided to build a high dam on the Nile at Aswan. The Soviet Union helped them do it against the United States’ advice. The result has been described as the worst ecological mistake committed in one place by mankind. The spring floods are gone; the nutrient-rich silts no longer come; the Nile sardine fishery in the Mediterranean is going extinct; bilharzia, or schistosomiasis, a gruesome disease borne by a snail that thrives in slack waters in Africa, is rampant; the reservoir is silting up quite rapidly due to erosion from primitive agriculture upriver; irrigation canals, meanwhile, are being scoured by the silt-free water released by the dam; and the salts have arrived. With their copious new supply of year-round irrigation water, the Egyptian farmers have been irrigating madly, and the water table, increasingly poisoned by salts, is rising dangerously. Recently, Egypt hired a group of American engineers and agronomists, among whom was former Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy, to