I just finished the big book (The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California) yesterday. And what a book it is, in size (528 pages) and in quality. I even read the first fifty pages to my son, but stopped because at the end of the school year he became a reader on his own, spending long periods devouring age-appropriate books. When I saw that, I knew I had to press on without him. He was a cheerleader all the way.
We saw Mark Arax at Book Passage in Corte Madera on Thursday night. We both loved it. For me, Arax is an inspiration for what I aspire to do--write a book about my dad, while weaving in and out of California history. Mark's storytelling strikes exactly the tone I'm going for--tell it like it is (or was), with a sense of humor and poetry, and connecting all the dots. For a book about water, he usually doesn't come off preachy. He is an observer of people and people's habits and actions, and draws logical conclusions that almost any reasonable person (who cares about good public policy and natural resources management) would agree with. He doesn't pull any punches, except when he treats Delta farmers with kid gloves, who are farming just as unsustainably as the San Joaquin Valley farmers. But he does briefly acknowledge that, and I don't want to be too critical, since in Corte Madera he said that it is hard to write a book about water because it makes everyone mad at you. Let's not make the perfect be the enemy of the good. Overall, I think he nailed it.
The end of the book is spectacular. Everyone should read the last chapter and the epilogue. He sums up the choices facing California in a nutshell.
I agree with 8 of his ten solutions, all of which I paraphrase here:
1. Thin Sierra Nevada forests to reduce wildfire intensity and improve retention of water
2. Stop building more dams and store water in the reservoirs we already have underground
3. Restrict groundwater pumping to safe yields
4. Retire 2 million acres of San Joaquin Valley farmland, move mega-dairies to cooler climates, and only irrigate the best soils
5. Build a scaled-down twin tunnels, flood the Yolo Bypass more often, and send a just amount of water to the Estuary
6. Remove obstacles to water marketing, and prohibit water transfers from farms to cities
7. Use urban limits to protect farming and let the state government limit growth
8. Build ocean desal plants with state bond funds
9. Tax users of water and farm chemicals and use the funds to build and maintain water treatment plants
10. Continue statewide conservation measures that encourage residents to cut their water use.
Can you guess which two I disagree with? Which two are the most "business as usual," using new expensive concrete and steel water projects as the silver bullet that will solve our water problems? Yes, that's right, numbers 5 & 8.
Number 5--build a scaled-down twin tunnels--is tricky. New water projects, if operated properly, often can be designed to have positive benefits and minimal impacts. And the smaller the better--a balance is harder to achieve the bigger and more expensive the project. I'd amend that one to go back to a process more like BDCP (Bay Delta Conservation Plan) in its initial stages, and look at the Delta and plan the best projects in a comprehensive, unbiased, science-driven way. That may end up looking like a scaled-down twin tunnels, but it is presumptuous to make that a foregone conclusion. There are a lot of problems and a lot of ideas out there, and we need to move quickly and invest in the right things. Massive billion-dollar projects are probably not the answer. But a prerequisite to this is getting the Water Board to finish its work updating the Bay Delta Water Quality Control Plan. The lack of adequate flows is killing the native beneficial ecosystem and generating uncertainty, which is encouraging water agencies to submit completely inadequate voluntary agreements that are a distraction and time delay. The Water Board needs to do its job quickly so we all can move on. Voluntary agreements will never work in this context (what if we tried voluntary agreements to stop groundwater mining? that wouldn't have worked either)--we just need a strong regulator to do its job.
Number 8--build ocean desal plants--is more of the same approach that has already failed us: Reaching out to new expensive supplies, paid for by state taxpayers. In the book, Mark Arax even says "imagine California with an unlimited water supply". Well, I can--I grew up in L.A.--and to make a long story short, we are making more and more parts of California places people don't want to live because so many people want to live there. Turning energy into an unlimited water supply is not the answer. The entire book chronicles the pitfalls of the approach of feeding unlimited growth with more and more water. We have already destroyed too much of California using that approach. The silver bullet solutions, while enticing, are never the best answer. The best approach is usually more complex, requiring a portfolio approach that doesn't fit well into a soundbite.
