But many people are so disconnected from nature, and ignorant of where their water comes from and the impacts of those water-gathering activities, that these horrifying questions might not sound unreasonable. In fact, the Great Lakes question, or some other silver-bullet sound-bite water solution like ocean desalination, always seems to come up in casual conversations about California's water problems. An overwhelming problem must require a big overwhelming solution. The ironic thing is, the very thing causing the problems--too much water demand, satisfied by imported water from far away, with destructive impacts on ecosystems in both the supply areas and the delivery areas--is the very solution that people want to try in order to solve the same problems. Another helping of expensive destruction, please. Bigger, more expensive dams, bigger canals, usually paid for by the taxpayer and often benefiting a few wealthy agribusiness interests, while ignoring the cause of the problem, with mitigation after mitigation enabling the problem to get supersized beyond the point of reversing course. Not to mention the farmers in the wetter areas of the country who could grow the same crops sustainably, but can't compete with California's water-subsidized unsustainable agriculture (that their tax dollars helped fund, until the ecological and groundwater disaster eventually puts a stop to it).
People want something simple to solve the problem, and billion-dollar infrastructure projects sound simple. But the same kind of thinking that got us into this mess will not get us out. The biggest cause of problems are solutions--especially when one bad decision after another compounds, and we try to mitigate the last bad solution by doubling-down on the badness. No one likes to go back and admit mistakes, and reverse the last bad decision. Entrenched interests only get stronger. So on we go down the road to ecological perdition.
Technology gets us into trouble, but also gets us out of trouble. The same technology that allows us to create environmental impacts allows us to mitigate them--and in fact, is necessary to mitigate them. (As Jon Stewart said the other night on The Late Show, the same science that allowed the pandemic to happen has ameliorated the suffering). Where we have made the biggest impacts, those are the same areas where we often need the biggest techno-fixes. That is what leads people astray--if a little project is good, a big one must be better. But you can have too much of a good thing.
Small is beautiful.
The solution, if condensed into a sound-bite, is a "portfolio approach." A lot of smaller actions, more affordable water conservation and recycling, that doesn't drown or dry up rivers, lakes, and estuaries or saddle some far away place with new ecological impacts. Not as exciting and simple as one big silver bullet. And equally important, connect water savings with the environment.
When I'm in San Francisco, I always wonder if it is better to flush or not flush. Because if I flush, Hetch Hetchy Reservoir water diverted from the Tuolumne River actually makes it to the freshwater-starved San Francisco Bay Estuary (although not in natural patterns, locations, timing, magnitude, or duration of flow). If I don't flush, that water will probably be used to maintain an unsustainable acreage of Central Valley agriculture. Either way, the Tuolumne River remains 79-92% diverted in most years.
So how do we get the water we save to flow down rivers, where it is needed most? State and local government incentives and regulations must go hand in hand with conservation and the technological advances that save water. Mono Lake is a good example of both, where state legislation funded water recycling in L.A. that was used to offset mandatory reduced water exports from the Mono Basin.
What we need to do is go watershed by watershed, determine what environmental flows are needed, and actually require all water rights holders to share the pain in providing those flows (starting with the Delta). Sound familiar? This is what the Water Board was tackling in 2018 when Governor Newsom decided to stop them from doing their job, and defer the task to future generations who will now be saddled with an even longer list of problems to fix.
And then, once we've got ambitious ecosystem restoration goals that actually restore enough water to our rivers and estuaries, we must go about the hard but incredibly important work of reducing our water footprint, which in most cases means fallowing unsustainable acreages of cultivated land.
A lot of this land should never have been cultivated and needs to be fallowed anyway. Retire the flood-prone or seepage-impaired lands along rivers that prevent rivers from flowing, or where high water tables or saline soils cause headaches for growing and draining irrigated crops, or where groundwater pumping is excessive. Retiring enough of this land in the San Joaquin Valley would have multiple benefits--it would save water in reservoirs, improve flows in the Delta, prevent polluted drain water from being created, stop overpumping of groundwater and subsidence, allow rivers to flow with fewer constraints, and reduce flood impacts. You may say that retirement of these problem-plagued desert lands that never should have been irrigated is just another simplistic silver-bullet solution--but what other silver-bullet solution has 5-6 of these benefits from one action? Building a new dam might have half of these benefits (if we are lucky), would be more expensive, and cause multiple new environmental problems.
Getting back to the question in the title--the other solution is education. Because in a democracy, we need everyone to understand the impacts of our collective actions. To understand that our ecosystems sustain us, and when we damage them we damage ourselves. It is more costly (and less effective) to restore than to not damage in the first place. Building new infrastructure like dams and aqueducts means huge ecological impacts, costly mitigation, and long-term maintenance and management costs. A more naturally-flowing river benefits aquatic species, riparian species, groundwater recharge, water quality, downstream habitats, sediment balance (spawning gravels and beaches), residents, recreationists, and local economies.
So why not divert the Great Lakes? The costs and environmental impacts would be astronomical compared to a portfolio approach. Aren't we done with the unenlightened approach of taking water from far-away places just because we can, so that we can irrigate more and more salty desert? It could take generations to undo the problems we've already created by following that manifest destiny western water approach--we don't need to go back to the economically and ecologically expensive 20th century concrete and steel approaches that caused our current environmental problems.
Why should any region have a right to grow beyond its local carrying capacity and invade another region like a vampire? Southern California is on track to be sustainable. We can learn from that success, learn how to live within our means. We can be good neighbors. It feels good, costs less, and leaves our kids a living planet.
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