Cannibal Water, Part 3

So how do we wean water users off cheap, addictive Cannibal Water?

Cannibal Fork, brought back from the South Pacific by a friend, Mike Klapp.

For urban users, it is not a problem. Urban water use has been declining for decades. Continue investing in efficiency, water recycling, stormwater capture, and groundwater recharge. Don't invest in expensive, carbon-intensive, fish-killing, polluting desalination unless you are a small isolated coastal community with no other options. Brackish groundwater desalination is okay. Avoid growth, which makes every problem worse, and eats up any water savings you achieve. But if you do plan to grow forever, then you need to make sure your long-term water strategy continues to cut water use to the point where kids will grow up not knowing what a water fight is. Not just squirt guns, I mean a really good one, with hoses and buckets. And growing forever would also require suspending some physical laws of nature, so we might as well stop growth now, while some parts of California are still nice places to live.



So what about agricultural use? When drip irrigation is installed, water use goes down and yields go up. So you can have the same economic output on less land with less water. The Netherlands grows a lot more tomatoes per gallon of irrigation water than we do, on a lot less land. Farmers are creative people, and switching technologies, crops, and practices can save a lot of water without impacting yield. Also, a lot of land that is salty, or desert, or poorly-drained, or flood-prone, should not be farmed, and reducing acreage of irrigated agriculture is a perfect opportunity to solve some other big problems at the same time. It just takes a little planning, leadership--and courage. It will also save money.

The reason why it takes courage is that no one wants to be regulated. The few enlightened individuals who ask to be regulated have seen the destroyed ecosystems we are trying to save--or maybe they remember the vast salmon runs and the flocks of birds darkening the skies--and understand the urgency for action. Things have gotten bad--really bad--so that a few people could get rich. So education is key. But for the most part, even with education, those facing additional regulation will tend to delay and complain.

We've all seen the classic "delay and complain" playbook. The auto industry, when faced with (insert here: seatbelts, airbags, higher gas mileage, zero emissions vehicles), complains that it will destroy the auto industry. The opponents to Proposition 8 on Tuesday's ballot (the dialysis clinic regulation measure) are reacting exactly in this way, and when viewed from this perspective, their complaints ring hollow. Water users do the same thing--they delay as long as possible, and complain as loudly as possible, in hopes that the regulations may never be implemented--or if they are, are watered down as much as possible.

But minimal incremental change often doesn't help water-dependent ecosystems. Ecosystems operate in various stable states, and when you shift one variable, the ecosystem shifts to another state, trying to regain stability. If you try to shift it back, just a little nudge usually isn't enough--it often takes a bigger push. And certain thresholds must be exceeded for certain riverine processes to return.

One example is in Rush Creek in the Mono Basin, where the brown trout fishery was hammered during the 2012-2016 drought due to low, warm stream flows and multiple years with no peak flows. Then it all turned around. The 5% of fish that were left in 2017 experienced cold, high flows all summer, and a huge amount of floodplain habitat that was inundated for weeks. Of course, with little competition and good conditions, these fish grew fat. The combination of the drought followed by a really good year shifted the salmonid fishery from being dominated by lots of little fish to one composed of fewer big fish--exactly what anglers prefer.

Cottonwood seedlings growing along Rush Creek in moist soil
at the end of July, 2018.

We see it in the Central Valley all the time--a wet year that exceeds the capacity of reservoirs to hold water back causes the salmon runs to rebound in a big way. Often, all they need is more water--more water in Central Valley rivers, the Delta, and flowing into San Francisco Bay. At the right times. If you aren't sure how much water and when, just ask an ecologist who has studied it--preferably one not working for a water agency.

The State Water Board is finally poised to cut back on the Cannibal Water use that is destroying our ecosystems. This week--if their courage doesn't falter--they will vote to implement the Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan updates that will for the first time, require some semblance of a natural flow regime in the lower San Joaquin River, the Stanislaus River, the Tuolumne River, and the Merced River. It isn't perfect, but it is a big step in the right direction. These rivers have great potential to flow like rivers again below the gigantic dams that strangle them. They now resemble real California rivers only in flood years, when rain and snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada overwhelms the capacity of our overbuilt and under-regulated infrastructure. So it is not surprising that iconic California species are now poorly adapted to live in them.

Fremont cottonwood along the Sacramento River. Cottonwoods
require spring floods and slow spring-summer declines in flow--
something the Water Board's current proposal only requires on the
San Joaquin tributaries February-June. In wetter years the slow
recession should last through July and sometimes even August, with
little water supply impact but tremendous benefits to the riparian
forest ecosystem.

Lets make California welcoming again to the species that call it home--for many of them, their only home. Business interests that want to maximize profits without taking care of public resources can go elsewhere. The plants and animals have nowhere else to go. California citizens have been waiting long enough.

Black cottonwood leaf in Rush Creek. Where the Water Board
courageously acted 24 years ago, the ecosystem is rebounding.