Photo by Gary Robertson/ CC BY-NC 2.0.

Here are 181 Candidates to Seriously Consider

On October 22, 2014 the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences identified 181 dams in California that are “high-priority” candidates for reallocating water flows, to protect the health of related watersheds and sensitive species—in keeping with the state constitution’s “beneficial use of water” section, the public trust doctrine, both state and federal endangered species acts, and Section 5937 of the California Fish and Game Code, a rarely enforced state law more than 100 years old. 

In their technical report Assessing Flows for Fish Below Dams: A Systematic Approach to Evaluate Compliance with California Fish and Game Code 5937, Theodore E. Grantham and Peter B. Moyle acknowledge reasons most dam owners haven’t complied with the Fish and Game requirement that they release enough water “at all times” to keep fish “in good condition.” There are well over 3,000 dams in California—some federal, some state, some privately owned—and enforcement would carry with it financial and political costs that most leaders prefer to avoid.

Sometimes dams outlive their usefulness: dynamited early 1900s mining dam at Emerald Lake, Trinity Alps. Photo by Gary Robertson/ CC BY-NC 2.0.

“This drought year, as in those past, California water regulators have given away to cities and farms some river flows critical to fish and wildlife,” say Grantham and Moyle in the online summary posted on the California Water Blog.“It’s a dicey tradeoff considering most of our native fishes are in trouble even without the drought.”

Yet citizen lawsuits—to provide healthy water flows for the San Joaquin River, Putah Creek, and a handful of other waterways—have succeeded, whether or not these represented the most critical need statewide.

Which led to the question that prompted the UC Davis watershed report: “If Section 5937 were more broadly applied to improve fish flows, which dams should get the focus of attention?”

To come up with an answer, the Center “developed a systematic and science-based approach for evaluating and targeting dams for potential enforcement,” a detailed research protocol soon to be formally published in the peer-reviewed Oxford Journal BioScience, published on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

Rusted steam-powered winch above Emerald Lake in the Trinity Alps. Photo by Gary Robertson/ CC BY-NC 2.0.

Adequate for most of us, though, is the shorthand explanation of how they evaluated dams for “evidence of inadequate downstream flows for sustaining healthy fish populations,” information that allows managers and policymakers to perform “triage”—to focus their efforts where the need is most urgent.

First, researchers identified dams subject to fish flows law, “those on relatively large rivers and streams with enough storage capacity to change the timing and magnitude of river flows.” These dams were then reviewed for changes in downstream natural water flow that could harm fish. Finally, the impact of altered flows on fish was assessed, to flag dams in watersheds where fish are imperiled.

Using these admittedly coarse “filters,” the UC Davis researchers evaluated 753 California dams and identified 181—almost 25 percent—as “high-priority candidates for Section 5937 enforcement.”

Letting It Flow

According to Grantham and Moyle “there is ample evidence that many large California dams likely fall short of providing adequate flows to keep fish in ‘good condition.’” More than 80 percent of California’s native fish are at risk of extinction, they say, if present trends continue. How we manage dams is the key factor for their survival.

Lake Shasta is a high priority for Section 5937 enforcement, say UC Davis researchers. Photo by Paul Hames for California Department of Water Resources.

Removing dams entirely is one possible solution when below-dam flows aren’t enough—or are too warm—to support healthy fish and wildlife populations, though the report doesn’t address the whys and wherefores of any action. Yet it’s not the only possible approach. Releasing water at critical times can keep fish healthy during crucial periods in their life cycles.

Aerial view at Folsom Lake showing low water, January 16, 2014. Photo by Paul Hames for California Department of Water Resources.

The researchers believe “strategic implementation of Section 5937 could provide reasonable protections of California’s dammed river and streams.” Such implementation would have to be “systematic and transparent,” from monitoring and evaluating water flows to mitigating any environmental effects.

And, the report points out, being identified as “high priority” doesn’t necessarily mean a particular dam violates Section 5937: “That determination requires a closer, on-site investigation of dam operations and their effects on fish.”

Still, “enforcement” candidates reasonably close to home here in Northern California include some dams whose removal—even the very thought of their removal—would cause gasps of disbelief: Folsom Dam on the American River, in Sacramento County, for example, and Anderson-Cottonwood, Keswick, and Shasta Dams on the Sacramento River, in Shasta County. Other notables include Dwinnell Dam(Shasta River Dam) on Shasta River, in Siskiyou County, and both Lewiston Dam and Trinity Dam on the Trinity River, in Trinity County.

Dry times at Folsom. Photo by John Chacon for California Department of Water Resources.

(Dwinnell, though, is no longer a “high priority.” As the result of a lawsuit—dam owner Montague Water Conservation District has agreed “to release significantly greater flows and to take other measures to protect fish down stream.”)

Others candidate dams close to home includeBlack Butte Dam on Stony Creek, in Tehama County; Englebright Dam on the Yuba River, in Yuba County; La Grange Damon Tuolumne River in Stanislaus County;New Hogan and New Melones Dams on the Stanislaus River in Calaveras County;Conn Creek Dam in Napa County; andWarm Springs Dam on Dry Creek, in Sonoma County.

Then there’s Boca and Stampede Dams on the Little Truckee River, in Sierra County;Donner Lake Dam on Donner Creek, in Nevada County; and Lower Scotts Flat Dam on Deer Creek in Nevada County.

Truly stunning to contemplate, however, are the many Southern and Central California dams the report identifies as top priorities, the great majority of those 181 enforcement “candidates.

Long Valley Dam on the Owens River, which saves water for transport to Los Angeles, is one of those candidates and a case study included in the report. Several species of fish native to the Owens River, including the Owens tui chub, are affected by this dam below Mono Lake in the Owens Valley.

Salmon need cool, fresh water to survive and thrive. Photo by Carl Costas for California Department of Water Resources.

If you haven’t already taken a look, download the UC Davis report here and read up on its results and research methods. Neighborhood fish will be grateful.

Mono Lake and Aspens. Photo by Jerry Kirkhart.

The war of politics and power waged on behalf of Mono Lake and its water has been so contentious, convoluted, and long-running, and has involved so many public agencies and public hearings, so many lawsuits and compromises, that the simple facts are virtually impossible to separate from the details.

Central to the saga, though, is the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “If we don’t get the water,” said self-taught engineer and water czar William Mulholland in 1907, “we won’t need it.” To get water to the L.A. desert—necessary to fulfill his vision of a lush southstate paradise, only incidentally profitable to real estate interests secretly connected to the plan—Mulholland and his DWP proposed an aqueduct that would carry the eastern Sierra Nevada’s water south from the Owens Valley (and the towns of Bishop, Big Pine, Independence, and Lone Pine) to Los Angeles. To gain support (and municipal bond funding) for “Mulholland’s ditch,” even the Los Angeles Times helped fudge on the facts—convincing the public in the early 1900s that a drought existed, a deception unchallenged until the 1950s.

After buying up nearly all private land in the Owens Valley (usually dishonestly, by condemning the land and water rights by lawsuit to drive down the price), Mulholland and his water people had their finest day in November 1913, when the first Owens Valley water flowed into the aqueduct: 30,000 people showed up for the event.

Commenting on the subsequent, permanent desolation of the once lush, quarter-million-acre Owens Valley, the cowboy comedian Will Rogers said soberly: “Los Angeles had to have more water for its Chamber of Commerce to drink more toasts to its growth.”

As L.A.’s thirst grew ever more unquenchable—by 1930, the city’s population had grown from 200,000 to 1.2 million—violence over eastern Sierra Nevada water rights became commonplace. Denied use of the land as abruptly as their forebears had denied the native Paiutes, outraged ranchers “captured” and controlled the aqueduct on many occasions, and dynamited it 17 times. But urban growth was seemingly unstoppable, and in 1930, L.A. voters approved another bond issue—to extend the aqueduct north into the Mono Lake Basin.

Mono Lake. Photo by Neil Girling.

Following completion of this northern stretch in 1941, runoff from Rush, Lee Vining, Walker, and Parker Creeks was diverted into the ditch-tunnel drilled under the Mono Craters and into the Owens River and aqueduct. Even worse for Mono Lake—with its water level dropping and its delicate aquatic ecology suffering almost instantaneously—Los Angeles completed a second aqueduct in 1970, to “salvage” runoff otherwise lost to the lake. Until quite recently, Mono Lake had been shrinking ever since. In 1990, it was estimated that about 17 percent of Los Angeles water came from Mono Lake. California’s Dead Sea had nearly died as a direct result.

Central to the present-day chapter of Mono Lake’s story is David Gaines, longtime Lee Vining resident, biologist, and founder of the Mono Lake Committee—killed, along with committee staffer Don Oberlin, in a January 1988 car accident near Mammoth Lakes. Though he surely would have loved to see Mono Lake’s waters rise again, at the time of his death, Gaines had already made major progress toward that eventual result. Starting in the 1970s, he and his growing, loosely organized band of Mono Lake lovers began taking on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and anyone else involved, even through passive inaction. From guerrilla theater and educational “events”—such as public picketing, protests, and volunteer bucket brigades hand-carrying water from Lee Vining Creek to Mono Lake—to press conferences and political confrontations, the Mono Lake Committee was untiring in its war against water diversions.

As a result, the Interagency Mono Lake Task Force—including representatives from Mono County, the L.A. Department of Water and Power, the California Departments of Water Resources and Fish and Game, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the federal Bureau of Land Management—was convened. The group agreed, by 1980, that the only way to protect the natural resources of the Mono Basin was by curtailing water diversions and raising the lake’s level. An almost endless round of lawsuits against the DWP and state and federal regulatory agencies (along with countersuits) in both the state and federal court systems has subsequently helped implement the task force recommendations.

A state Supreme Court decision in 1983—specifically related to Mono Lake but setting the California legal precedent that now protects all state waters—declared that lakes, rivers, and other natural resources are owned by all the people and must be protected by the state for the public trust. Though competing needs are undeniable, the right to divert water from any ecosystem depends upon that system’s continued health—and if harm occurs, water rights must be adjusted accordingly, throughout time.

Mono Lake at first light. Photo by Howard Ignatius.

But though the tide finally turned in Mono Lake’s favor, at least legally, skirmishes have continued over how much water must be released into the Mono Lake Basin to ensure the health of that ecosystem—how much water will protect island-nesting gulls from coyote predation, how much water will protect the lake’s brine shrimp, how much water will protect the region’s stream fisheries. Needless to say, the opinions of Mono Lake Committee members and other environmentalists differ from those of L.A.’s Department of Water and Power. Actual cutbacks in diversions—under court order—didn’t begin until 1989.

Political pundits contended at the time that recent state legislation to make peace at Mono Lake merely pays the city of Los Angeles, with public funds, to strike a rather vague deal with the Mono Lake Committee—and encourages L.A. to increase groundwater pumping from Inyo County’s Owens Valley, all at California taxpayers’ expense. “If this is what peace looks like for Mono Lake and the Owens Valley,” commented the Sacramento Bee‘s Bill Kahrl, “it’s hard to understand what anyone thought was worth fighting for in the first place.”

Members of the Mono Lake Committee answered that even successful lawsuits have not yet protected Mono Lake, and that state legislative action at least opens the door for a lasting peace. The committee also noted that new state and federal water reclamation and conservation projects would more than compensate for L.A.’s loss of Mono Lake water.

Owens Lake. Photo by James Kirkus-Lamont.

Events of immediate, and lasting, benefit to Mono Lake continued through the 1990s. In 1994, the State Water Resources Control Board promised that Mono Lake’s water level would rise to 6,392 feet above sea level (it was 6,417 feet in 1941, when water diversions began)—an accomplishment expected then to take some 20 years, though that time frame has stretched out considerably since—and supported the restoration of the lake’s watershed streams and wetlands. The DWP now has multiple meetings each year with the Mono Lake Committee to coordinate efforts and improve communication, sessions described by the committee as “collegial” and a “testament to the progress made in opening up communication . . . . and building a promising working relationship.” The Mono Lake Committee now offers tours of DWP facilities.

But despite L.A.’s impressive progress in water conservation, the city’s Department of Water and Power has indeed increased its groundwater pumping in the Owens Valley, directly south, to the great detriment of that environment—at least initially, a crisis without a committee to speak on its behalf. Now there is one: the Owens Valley Committee, though the groundwater struggle goes on.

The solar array used to power Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. Photo by J.S. Moorman

And new conflicts over Owens Valley land and resource use are emerging, including the DWP’s proposal for a 1,200-acre solar power array in the center of the valley near Manzanar. The OVC left the Mono Lake Planning Committee in 2013, over groundwater, dust mitigation, and other disagreements with the DWP and another nonprofit citizens action group, The Deepest Valley, has formed. Both groups fight on.

The war over eastern Sierra Nevada water—and power too, now—continues.

Aerial view of delta patterns shot north of Sacramento. Photo by Paul Hames for California Department of Water Resources.

In his new book Living with Water Scarcity, David Zetland offers a brief yet astute description of what have become universal water allocation conflicts:

“Go anywhere in the world and you’ll find two opposing sides to a water allocation. A farmer complains about water going to the environment. An environmentalist complains about water going to the city. A businessman complains about water going to farms.” All of them are certain that they deserve the water more than others, Zetland says. They agree that politicians should allocate water for its highest and best use, but doubt the ability of water managers, government officials, and political leaders to decide what “highest and best” might be. 

Notice that there are more than “two sides” here. There are multiple competing demands for water, not only a finite resource but one of few requirements of life on earth. Deciding who or what gets water can literally be a life or death issue.

As Zetland explained in the first part of this discussion, understanding the difference between scarcity and shortage—scarcity being a perception and shortage, actual limitation on supply—is essential to begin successfully living with water scarcity. Separating politics from economics, a process discussed at length in part two, is the next step, necessary for later arriving at a solid “social good.” Moving into the political sphere, the final step, allows “for policies that are simple enough to protect common goods but flexible enough to allow a variety of behaviors.”

Water allocations are inevitably controversial, given that the community can’t agree on how best to serve the community. There is no lack of data or facts to support good decisions. The problem is that we each bring our personal experience—our own subjective “lens”—to interpretations of fact. Even when we recognize our biases and try to include or accommodate others’ opinions, our views are skewed. As a result “an irrigation manager may neglect environmental water flows” and others “may ignore industry’s plea for [water supply] reliability.”

Yet according to Zetland, people can be “pragmatic, creative, and engaged” in updating policies and arriving at new solutions through mutual respect and compromise.

How do we achieve such enlightened compromise in water policy decisions?

All of us have to pretend we don’t already have the right answer or answers, Zetland says. We have to pretend we don’t already have all the answers.

Summertime. Photo by Dani Alvarez/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

“A community can move closer to common answers by asking people to ignore their personal role, costs and benefits. . . . If nobody has the answers, then everyone can participate in the solutions.”

Yep. This really is the hard part, and Zetland tackles it full on in the second half of his new book.

Regarding water monopolies, he suggests introducing competition as a way to create more effective, responsive, and responsible public service. To avoid disasters such the Tennessee Valley Authority’s toxic tailwater spills into rivers in 2008, destroying local homes, there must be some consequence for failure—something more effective than the blithe ability to pass the cost onto customers (in that case, $1.3 billion in fines and cleanup costs). Professionals provide good service, if there are consequences for failing to do so.

Assuming effective regulation or oversight, competition provides an incentive structure that rewards water managers for achieving customer goals. Having “skin in the game” makes a difference

When local performance benchmarks aren’t effective, as in large water monopolies, Zetland supports some form of “performance insurance” to be imposed by regulators, insurance that would be inexpensive for well-run and responsive organizations, quite expensive otherwise.

The community can participate by opting to run its local water monopoly as a cooperative, by “professionalizing” community oversight, or by making the utility more dependent on the goodwill of its customers.

A Human Right to Water?

Zetland doesn’t believe the global movement to recognize a human right to water is effective for solving the problem of inadequate water access for the poor: “A human right to water is worthless in a corrupt country and redundant in an honest one.”

“Rights only lead to results when governments are honest,” he says. “Dishonest governments, on the other hand, do not care about human rights, legal promises, or citizen complaints. An honest government will make sure that citizens get good quality water because people do not want to get sick or die. Good governance (a lack of corruption) separates civilized countries from their dysfunctional, struggling neighbors”.

A better way to overcome the indifference of leaders to the welfare of the poor is to put the focus instead on “governance and money,” which could include requirements (in exchange for aid, say) such as publicly registering or otherwise assigning communal property rights to water access.

“Other People’s Money” or Pay Your Own Way?

Who should pay for the dams, canals, pipes, and other water infrastructure that agriculture and other businesses require?

That’s an easy one for Zetland. If businesses pay the “full cost of water as a private good,” which means the current competitive price, then they are paying for infrastructure costs too.

Making those calculations can get complicated. In the case of “multi-functional” dam projects, for example, the value of public recreation and downriver flood protection can be hard to quantify, and “user” cost shares (for farmers and others) accrue to private benefit over very long periods of time.

Whitewater Rafting. Photo by David Berkowitz/ CC BY 2.0.

Farmers and other private business interests “work hard to direct public spending to their benefit,” Zetland points out. But reducing public subsidies for private benefits is the only way to assure rational infrastructure decisions, given that those “decisions will affect our choices, wallets, and behavior for a very long time.”

Zetland first heard the term “other people’s money,” or OPM, in reference to California’s Central Valley Project, a vast network of Northern California dams and delivery canals started in the 1930s by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation—an immensely ambitious project and also an immense boondoggle, considering that the farmers who benefit from this massive publicly funded infrastructure have never repaid the construction debt. Not even the interest:

“The Other People who paid for this project in the 1930s never saw their money again. Their great-grandchildren have only seen 20 cents on the (depreciated) dollar returned.

Farmers, meanwhile, have “profited from cheap water for 75 years and counting,” he says, before adding, tongue firmly in cheek: “Not all those profits go to selfish ends. Many farmers ‘give back’ to their political friends.”

As for the arguments that California’s position as the country’s chief agricultural producer and its contribution to the California economy justify such massive public subsidies, Zetland says no.

The ecosystems that have been sacrificed for California’s water engineering benefited far more people than farms do, even now. Second, he says, agriculture uses 80 percent of California’s water supply to produce only 3 percent of the state’s economic output and 5 percent of its jobs. Finally, current subsidies benefit corporate farmers—farmers with political connections—more than they benefit small family farms, or farmers with real skill.

Worse, such massive public subsidies prevent good local farmers from replacing bad corporate farmers—resulting in “wasted water, expensive food, abused labor, and dying communities.”

Worse yet, the environmental costs of such a skewed supply-sided equation have never been factored in, at least not by decision-makers. Which is a shame, given that new, “green” approaches could make a different at every level of water management and use.

The Urgent Need to Protect Environmental Flows

“Less means more” when it comes to protecting the water that our shared environment requires for ecosystem health, according to Zetland—because we all benefit. We need to use less so there is more for ecosystem use.

Yet it’s no easy task to come to general agreement about precisely how much we should extract from the environment for human use and how much we should leave.

“The question is tricky because the environment is a public good that we all enjoy, regardless of how much we have contributed to its health or deterioration. The answer to ‘how much should we take?’ can be very different from the answer to ‘how much should I take and you leave?’”

Eagle Falls. Photo by Beth Young/ CC BY-SA 2.0.

So great is the human impact on the environment in general that scientists have declared the beginning of a new era, the Anthropocene, which could be considered the shadow side of the Age of Aquarius. Apart from biodiversity loss, the most important fact in this new, human-centered epoch is the impact of rapid climate change caused by converting fossil carbon sources into carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

And climate change will disrupt the natural water cycle globally, increasing water scarcity and also demand while lowering water quality.

“Our past neglect has damaged the local and global environment. Now we must protect our local, water-dependent ecosystems and restore their flows,” he says. “A healthy environment with functioning ecosystems delivers clean air and water, gives us food and pleasure, and protects us from variations in temperature, water flow, and weather.” The reality of climate change makes these benefits even more valuable.

The challenge, he says, is to use our human cleverness to do much more with less, with water as with other resources. We can use less—in some cases, substantially less—with little ill effect.

“We cannot take as much water from the environment, so we must cope with less. Less personal water doesn’t automatically harm our quality of life. People in Amsterdam use one-fourth the water of people in San Francisco, but they aren’t any less happy.

Lobbyists and some editorialists may declare the end of civilization as we know it, Zetland says, but people doing business won’t, or at least not for long. They’ll respond to market forces, as they always do. “Business people—farmers, water managers, and industrialists—love free water, but they can find ways to work with less. Water scarcity in Texas has led oil and gas companies to recycle their production water.”

This writer has attempted to explain economist David Zetland’s views, in this and the two previous articles, but he probably does the job better than anyone–so download a free (PDF) copy of his book (see below) and dig in to get the authoritative word. David Zetland is assistant professor of economics at Leiden University College in Den Haag, the Netherlands. He received his PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Davis in 2008. His blog,Aquanomics (that’s a “g,” as in the Spanish word for water, “agua”) and his first book, The End of Abundance, address these and other topics in more detail—and with more citations—than the new book. Yet Living with Water Scarcity, which like Abundance is for sale in both Kindle and paperback editions, is available for free if you’ll be satisfied with the PDF version.

Up the Road Editor Kim Weir holds a degree in Environmental Studies and Analysis and also a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. She has been a journalist for an impressive number of years. A member of the Society of American Travel Writers since 1991, she specializes in California and the West. Weir wrote most of Moon Publications’ original California travel guides, including the best-selling Northern California Handbook.

Aerial view showing water running dow the Oroville spillway at Lake Oroville, California. Photo by Paul Hames for California Department of Water Resources.

Valuing Water as the Good It Is, Not the Good It Was

As discussed previously, economist David Zetland wants us to understand the difference between water scarcity and water shortage. Water scarcity, he says, is a perception. We worry that there may not be enough water to meet our needs, the needs of the environment, and the needs of agriculture and other business. Water shortage, on the other hand, is a fact. In the midst of a shortage there is no water to be had, at any price. Effectively managing water scarcity can prevent water shortages. Failing to manage scarcity will create shortages—an experience already shared by at least some California communities, businesses, farmers, and ranchers.

Zetland’s main point is that water needs to be managed “as the good it is, not the good it was.” Most of our water regulations and rules come from a time when water was abundant—and when public dollars were generously allocated to engineer the delivery of that abundance, via dams, aqueducts, and other infrastructure. Yet the rules that accompanied water abundance are inappropriate in a time of scarcity.

“So we need a new management paradigm in which we identify what type of ‘good’ water is, decide what type of good it should be, and change institutions to move towards our goals.”

This management process has multiple but distinct moving parts. To allocate what economists call “excludable” goods—in this case, water used by individuals or groups in ways that legally exclude others from using it—the tools of economics should suffice, as for any other commodity For non-excludable or community water, which can be used but also overused or abused by anyone, political decision-making is required, so this “social” good can be shared.

Fine-tuning these distinctions further, economists also recognize “rival” goods (in this case, water) that a person can’t use twice, or two or more people can’t use simultaneously, such as the water we drink. (Here’s a “fun fact” from Zetland: “Rival” derives from the Latin adjectiverivalis, for a person who shares a river or rivus with another.) Non-rival water would be the lake multiple people might swim in.

What makes allocating water so tricky, Zetland says, is the fact that changing circumstances can transform water from one type of “good” into another—which means management strategies also need to change. Rival water, for example, may be privately held or owned in a common pool. Whether that water would best be managed by economic or political means depends on local institutions: “Reforms won’t work if they ignore past practices and cultural norms.”

Using Price to Prevent Water Shortages

So how should we be managing the scarcity of water as a commodity (excludable good)?

“If water is scarce, raise prices. People will use less water, just as they would use less gasoline,” David Zetland says, noting that higher prices won’t threaten public health and safety. “We know—from studies and intuition—that people cut non-essential uses when prices rise. That is how we know people have plenty of water in the western U.S.: more than half of residential drinking water is sprayed outdoors.”

The rules of scarcity and shortage are the same for water as for other goods, he points out, except for the fact that, unlike most goods, water is not traded in markets that would balance supply and demand through higher or lower price.

Water doesn’t work this way because water regulators require water supply monopolies—which generally pay nothing for the water they distribute—to charge only for their delivery costs. Such “pro-consumer regulation” doesn’t include the value of water or the huge costs, later, of inevitable shortage.

Demand for the gallon of water we each need every day to survive is high, or inelastic. We’ll do almost anything—pay almost anything—to get it. What we’re willing to pay for water beyond that core need, though, is much more elastic. The cheaper that extra water is, the more we’ll use. But when water is scarce we make different decisions, demonstrating the elasticity of that demand. Witness the growing interest of Californians in replacing water-guzzling lawns with native or other low-water vegetation.

For a while we can “supply” our way out of water scarcity—by pumping groundwater, by recycling and purifying “used” water through new technologies, even by desalinating seawater—but that’s no solution if demand continues to increase.

“We can spend money on new supply, but that supply will be overwhelmed by additional demand if consumers do not pay the full cost of delivering their water,” as Zetland puts it.

California has an impressive history of spending more and more public money to increase water supply. The Governor Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct, named after current Governor Jerry Brown’s dad, is the State Water Project’s largest conveyance. The aqueduct is essentially an open-air canal whose dimensions decrease as delivery needs (water supplies) decrease, traveling south. Photo by Dale Kolke for California Department of Water Resources.

The “scarcity value” of water is not included in the price water utilities and irrigation districts charge their customers so—keeping in mind that fresh water supplies are finite—over time the imbalance between supply and demand can only worsen.

Zetland points to the huge (and growing) city of San Diego in arid Southern California as a fairly typical illustration. The city’s aqueducts, more than 50 years old, deliver cheap water from elsewhere. The cost charged to users is just enough to cover delivery (aqueduct construction). Given their relativity cheap water, San Diegans use quite a bit—about 150 gallons per person per day, or double what people in Sydney, Australia use and five times water consumption levels in Amsterdam.

“San Diego’s water managers worry about shortages, but they have not raised prices to lower demand. Instead they look for additional supplies,” Zetland says.

In their continuing pursuit of “more,” about 20 years ago San Diego water managers started buying water from farmers, at a substantially higher price—but customers didn’t feel much pinch because the cost of old and new water was averaged over time. More recently, as scarcity arrived again, water managers decided to build a desalination plant.

The irony is that the extra cost of desalination could have been avoided through conservation, if scarcity costs were included in San Diego water bills. Instead, cheap water continues—because costs are averaged among all supply sources—and the region’s demand for water continues to grow.

“Nobody wants to pay more for anything, but it is better to pay more for something than less for nothing,” as Zetland puts it. “Sometimes we forget that value matters more than price.”

Because most water managers are biased toward seeking new water supplies rather than managing (lowering) demand—the longstanding assumption here in the U.S. and elsewhere being that increasing demand equals increasing wealth—the effects on the environment and on our collective future may well be devastating.

“The most important fact affecting water management across all sectors, worldwide, is the financial cost of raw water: zero. A utility pays a fee for its extraction permit and an irrigation district files paperwork to divert [or pump] water, but neither pays for the volume of water removed from rivers, lakes or underground aquifers.”

To begin to balance this skewed equation, Zetland proposes a “scarcity surcharge” on all water bills that reflects the value of water removed from the environment or “borrowed” from potential future use.

Better yet, we can begin to set prices with the goal of balancing supply and demand. The advantage of focusing on price—rather than subsidized conservation efforts or public education campaigns—is that water users can choose how they will respond to changes in supply.

“Correct pricing,” he says, will stabilize water utility finances, encourage conservation, and prevent shortages.

It will also encourage widespread recycling of “dirty” water, either to substitute for drinking water now used to wash cars and irrigate gardens or as an additional drinking water supply, depending on its purity. Pricing can also deter or pay for water misuse and the environmental degradation it causes.

Getting “Rights” Right

What about water needed for producing our food? Don’t farmers need cheap water to “protect us from foreign food of dubious quality, maintain the rural backbone of our culture, and feed billions”?

No, not really, according to David Zetland. Farmers provide food of appropriate quality to the highest bidder. The business of farming uses 70 to 80 percent of available water in most countries, as in California, so farmers have an immense amount to lose when the water runs out. Given the high stakes it’s easy to understand “why farmers complain when they do not get enough water, why they are increasingly in conflict with cities, environmentalists and each other,” and why, when faced with shortages, they want lax enforcement of rules that “threaten food security.”

Zetland says farmers must buy and sell irrigation water in markets if we want to “save communities, maximize food production, and improve water management in other sectors.”

Allocating agricultural water through markets won’t produce miracles or change the facts regarding water availability, but it will improve the facts—maximizing water’s private, social, and environmental benefits. Not all rural communities will survive, though, let alone thrive. Food won’t be so cheap. And not all agricultural and environmental demands will be met. Some farms—perhaps entire farming regions—will go dry. And some rivers may die.

Zetland’s book discusses three main categories of water rights. (Up the Road will explore California water rights in some depth later.) Yet in this country and elsewhere water rights have evolved to meet changing needs and to accommodate local circumstance.

Take the striking example of the Owens Valley and Mono Lake on the eastern side of California’s Sierra Nevada, where farmers had claimed prior-appropriation rights to water from the Owens River and nearby aquifers. Water engineer William Mulholland of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power saw the opportunity to greatly expand L.S.’s water supply, to support further growth. The city bought up nearly all the land in the Owens Valley and then executed its right to export prior-appropriation water (water allocated to that land) via the Los Angeles Aqueduct—all perfectly legal.

Viewing the Milky Way from the South Tufa Towers at Mono Lake, site of one of California’s recent water-export battles. Photo by Joe Parks/ CC BY-NC 2.0.

Over decades those L.A. water exports depleted local groundwater, drained Owens Lake, and also diverted the local rivers that fed nearby Mono Lake. In 1983, the California Supreme Court ruled that Los Angeles’s water extraction was damaging Mono Lake. Exercising a public trust right to keep more water in the lake, the court weakened Los Angeles’s rights.

The key point, Zetland says, is deciding how much water is available for allocation—which would mean available water after necessary environmental flows are accounted for. Not only have rivers been allocated down to zero, in terms of the environment’s share, some have been over-allocated to the point that many rights will never be delivered.

“Water rights need to be reformed to reflect water flows, consumption, and supply,” he says, predicting that farmers will use less water if they can profit from selling their allocations in markets that reflect local conditions. “Farmers have the most to gain from markets because they have legal or traditional rights to most water.”

Though he generally supports market-based water sales as an effective tool for water allocation, Zetland also believes the community needs to act for the greater good. Given that different members of any community have different opinions about what that “good” may be, just how does he propose that we achieve that?

Up the Road Editor Kim Weir holds a degree in Environmental Studies and Analysis and also a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. She has been a journalist for an impressive number of years. A member of the Society of American Travel Writers since 1991, she specializes in California and the West. Weir wrote most of Moon Publications’ original California travel guides, including the best-selling Northern California Handbook.

David Zetland is assistant professor of economics at Leiden University College in Den Haag, the Netherlands. He received his PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Davis in 2008. His blog, Aquanomics (that’s a “g,” as in the Spanish word for water, “agua”) and his first book, The End of Abundance, address these and other topics in more detail—and with more citations—than the new book. Yet Living with Water Scarcity, which like Abundance is for sale in both Kindle and paperback editions, is available for free if you’ll be satisfied with the PDF version.

Aerial views of waterways & sloughs meandering through The Delta in California. Photo by Paul Hames for California Department of Water Resources.

There’s a difference between water scarcity and water shortage, and economist David Zetland wants everyone to understand that distinction.

Scarcity is a perception, but water shortage is a fact. Shortage is far worse than scarcity, he says, because even if you otherwise have the necessary money (or other requirement) to acquire what you want, when there’s a shortage you still can’t get it. 

Water scarcity is increasing in California and many parts of the world. Successfully living with—managing—scarcity, Zetland says, can prevent shortage.

Zetland’s new book, Living with Water Scarcity, “describes appropriate solutions for living with—perhaps even thriving with—water scarcities in both quantity and quality.”

Thriving with water scarcity?

That kind of shockingly optimistic comment sets Zetland apart from other talking heads on the topic of water.

Consider what he had to say to The Guardian on the topic of how California’s water system subsidizes the price of almonds for export: “The people of the state of California are more or less destroying themselves in order to give cheap almonds to the world.”

California grows more than export crops. Photo by John Chacon for California Department of Water Resources.

Even politicians use water. Photo by Florence Low for California Department of Water Resources.

Acreage planted to almonds in California has doubled since 1996, he points out. Due to the current drought farmers are now pumping groundwater to irrigate almond orchards at levels that are causing their neighbors’ wells to go dry. Almond growers, anxious about the future, are now starting to withhold some of this year’s crop, which is driving process higher.

But as Zetland told The Guardian, higher prices are a good thing, if they spur improvements in California’s water management.

“The problem is that California, because of its failed institutions for managing water, is allowing these almonds to come on market at $3-$4 a pound wholesale, when the price would be tripled if California was managing its water sustainably and farmers faced the real cost of water.”

Almonds are not the issue. California produces other agricultural products that use massive amounts of publicly subsidized water, such as grapes (including wine grapes) and milk. And it’s not just agriculture. California also supports an abundance of people, swimming pools, and golf courses. In addition the state needs water to support its diverse natural environments. No, the problem is antiquated water policies that don’t correctly recognize value.

According to Zetland there are very effective means available to equitably allocate scarce water supplies, for both private and public uses, and there are good examples of their application elsewhere. There are four main reasons these solutions aren’t widely used, all of them flowing from a time when water supplies were abundant.

“First, water managers trust systems that have worked for centuries. They do not experience the pain of scarcity and do not want to work now for benefits later.”

The current system also benefits special interests—meaning large-scale farmers and industrial-strength irrigation districts—which is motivation enough for them to consistently block change. In addition, “water customers have a hard time communicating their frustrations to complex water monopolies that may be slow to answer the phone.”

Finally, Zetland says, “politicians and regulators may be too biased to see the need for change, or too busy to promote it.”

But, he believes, “with a destination, a map, and hope” such barriers can be overcome.

David Zetland is assistant professor of economics at Leiden University College in Den Haag, the Netherlands. He received his PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Davis in 2008. His blog, Aquanomics (that’s a “g,” as in the Spanish word for water, “agua”) and his first book, The End of Abundance, address these and other topics in more detail—and with more citations—than the new book. Yet Living with Water Scarcity, which like Abundance is for sale in both Kindle and paperback editions, is available for free if you’ll be satisfied with the PDF version.

Table Mountain wildflowers in Oroville, CA on April 4, 2013. Photo by Florence Low, California Department of Water Resources.

In Fall

There is a faint rustling at the top of the pines—just a teasing promise of winter rains to come. The September days are still hot in the mountains, but you can see that the season is about to turn. The green grass of early summer (wild oats, timothy, red clover) is browning. Now, evening comes more quickly in long shadows over the meadow.

By October, the rancher is looking for cloud cover in the west and hoping for that first good, soaking rain to revive the winter range and begin the cycle of renewal. A steady one to two inches with warm days to follow would be ideal, but the rancher will be grateful for any moisture because then the life-giving winter rains are sure to follow. 

In Winter

Sometimes, winter rains can be a blessing for ranchers and sometimes they can be a disaster. At my ranch on Rock Creek if it rains steadily for three days and three nights it can flood. My mother always told us that if we could see the Sutter Buttes to the south it was clearing up and wouldn’t flood. My sister and I would keep a watch on those blue hills. So far, my mom’s prediction has held true.

Cows meander in the fields of Big Pine, CA near HWY 395. Photo by Florence Low for California Department of Water Resources.

We know that we need the rains (and sometimes snow) to fill the springs, creeks and drainage holes for the cattle to have water in the spring. But when you’re kneeling on the wet ground helping a cow calve, or pulling her calf in a snowstorm, it’s hard to think of spring, sunshine, and grass growing!

By early January on Rock Creek the rains have brought goldfields into bloom. Grandpa called goldfields “those little yellow flowers” and said when they came up it was time to move the cattle from the valley to the upper range

In Spring

Water in spring means full creeks rushing and tumbling, springs that are overflowing, lava potholes for the border collies to swim in. If the rains have been plentiful (like this year), the grass is strong and healthy and the cattle put on weight quickly.

Sometimes, in a perfect spring, the rains come about two weeks apart, and the pastures and rangelands are lush with rye, filaree, and clover. The native grasses and wildflowers are splashes of bright color. After the goldfields, the shooting stars, the johnny-jump-ups, and the tidy tips arrive. Larkspurs, like troops of union soldiers, march across the fields. Later, poppies, lupine, and mariposa lilies line the banks of water holes. On the upper range little seasonal creeks and springs are full. Down in secluded draws, cows with new babies graze on dark green carpets. The smell of wet earth is everywhere. Spring is God’s yearly miracle for a rancher.

In Summer

As spring comes to an end in late May it’s time to move the cattle from the spring ranges to summer pasture in the high mountains.

Cattle grazing on lush green hills near Salinas County. Photo by John Chacon for California Department of Water Resources.

To keep these pastures growing all season ranchers will need to irrigate, often from rivers and creeks. I’ve built dams with rocks and mud (very environmentally friendly!) and with ground cloths and tarps. At one ranch, we irrigated from a creek that was home to a family of beavers. The beavers built their dam about a mile above the pump that diverted the water we irrigated with. In order to have enough water flowing in the creek each morning, we had to first go up to their dam and take out enough of their willow and mud construction. It took about an hour to dig out even a small hole. Meanwhile, the beavers slapped their tails on the water and scolded us. At night, they rebuilt their dams stronger than ever.

Even though irrigation is hard work, you feel proud watching the water pour across the meadows. You can take a break from digging and admire your achievement. Geese, with their babies tucked on their backs, are sailing down the creek. Sandhill cranes are stalking the ditches for frogs. Deer are startled out of the willows.

After four months of irrigating you’re hoping for a thunderstorm to keep the grass growing. But, as the days get shorter and the nights get cooler, you feel fall coming closer. Now the year has made a full circle; in every season, water is crucial to the rancher. Water is life.

JoEllen Hall comes from a cattle ranching family with a long grazing history in Butte County and elsewhere in Northern California. Her mother Doro­thy Stover Hall, an accomplisher trick rider, was one of the first Little Nells of Chico State’s vanished Pioneer Days. Jo’s border collies Goodness and Mercy followed her nearly all of their days.

Salmon in the American River. Photo by Carl Costas for California Department of Water Resources.

Benjamin Franklin is credited with that aphorism about the worth of water. Generally taken as a metaphor, Franklin’s wisdom was first published in the 1746 edition of his wildly popular Poor Richard’s Almanak. More than 150 years later farmers in California seemed to know the literal worth of water. WATER WEALTH CONTENTMENT HEALTH: That simple four-word message stretched across the Modesto Arch at 9th and I Streets in downtown Modesto summed up their expectations of the Northern California water that made agricultural abundance possible. 

By 1912, when the arch was new, there was good reason for optimism. Attracting new farmers and other residents with the mass-marketed California image of endless sunshine and robust health, relatively new settlements in the great Central Valley were becoming recognizable towns. The first regional irrigation districts were already established, and irrigated fields expanded agricultural possibilities well beyond winter wheat, California’s first major export crop. From a farming perspective the future looked much like the landscape, and also like those enticing folk-art produce labels that helped make California an overnight sensation—expanses of green fields and sunny skies as far as the eye could see. The nation’s biggest breadbasket was being created from rich riverine soils and seemingly endless ribbons of clear, cool water, and it seemed as if that would never change. As writer Joan Didion would later say of the vast valley where she was born and grew up: “All day long, all that moves is the sun, and the big Rainbird sprinklers.”

But other aspects of that vast, placid landscape did move. Circumstances changed, and they’re changing still, in ways that terrify California families and family farmers more than corporate agricultural interests. Californians, particularly those who value the state’s rich soils and agricultural abundance, should be frightened—all the more so if they also treasure the Golden State’s bays and estuaries, rivers, lakes, and well-watered remnants of wild natural beauty. Being forced to choose between productive orchards and fields and the well-being of wild rivers, wild lands and wild creatures is all but impossible for most. Yet the politics of California water seems poised once again to force such a choice.

Joan Didion is well known in recent years for the moving memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, her story about the death of husband John Gregory Dunne and the deep grief that followed. Being a valley girl—meaning someone born and raised in the great Central Valley, not that other valley way down in Southern California—Didion has always understood where California actually is. In her essay ”Notes From a Native Daughter” she tells us:

Many people from the East (or “back East,” as they say in California . . . ) have been to Los Angeles or to San Francisco, have driven through a giant redwood and have seen the Pacific glazed by the afternoon sun off Big Sur, and they naturally tend to believe that they have in fact been to California. They have not been, and they probably never will be, because it is a longer and in many ways a more difficult trip than they might want to undertake, one of those trips on which the destination flickers chimerically on the horizon, ever receding, ever diminishing. . . . California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

Getting things to work out was challenging. Some might say, nothing short of magic.

Despite the high-flying hopes spelled out on the brand new Modesto Arch, plenty of hard scrabbling was straight ahead. In California the 1930s and the Great Depression meant overflowing migrant labor camps up and down its Central Valley. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath would tell that story to the world. Dust Bowl refugees came to pick cotton, though many of them stayed to play their parts in California’s “completion,” as historian Kevin Starr describes the transformation that came from the desperate need to get America working again.

Though Depression-era public works projects created thousands and thousands of jobs in California, these were not make-work programs. As Starr puts it:

Most of them brought to fulfillment decades, even half centuries, of planning. From the nineteenth century, Americans in California had realized that if California were to reach its full potential as a regional civilization, it would have to be physically adjusted. It would have to be rendered complete. Completing itself as a physical place, then, became the central public challenge California presented to itself in the 1930s, through public works programs.

Aerial views of waterways & sloughs meandering through The Delta in California. Photo by Paul Hames for California Department of Water Resources.

This “completion” of California meant extensive engineering and new water delivery systems. And the predictably unpredictable and wild Sacramento River was at the center of state public policy debate for decades. What should be done? And who should do it—the federal or state government?

Because the Sacramento was a navigable river, and therefore a national resource under federal jurisdiction, the United States stepped up—in 1873, not long after the Civil War. Commissioned by President Ulysses S. Grant, Colonel Barton Alexander of the Army Corps of Engineers submitted a bold, immensely detailed plan for building a system of dams and canals for irrigation and flood control throughout California’s great Central Valley, a design intended to ”rescue” one-third of California’s land area—wetlands and tule marshes—for both agriculture and human habitation. Then in 1919 Lt. Robert B. Marshall of the U.S. Geological Survey proposed transporting water from the Sacramento River system to the San Joaquin Valley and moving it over the Tehachapi Mountains into Southern California.

The rest, as they say, is history, one comprised of two separate yet interconnected world-renowned feats of engineering—the federally funded Central Valley Project (CVP) approved in 1935, managed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and the California State Water Project (SWP), endorsed by the California Legislature in 1945 and managed by the state’s Department of Water Resources.

The CVP manages 22 dams and reservoirs—including Shasta, Trinity, Lewiston, and Folsom Lakes, and both Whiskeytown and San Luis Reservoirs—as well as 11 power plants, 500 miles of major canals, and conduits, tunnels, and related facilities. The SWP features 20 major reservoirs and lakes, including Lake Oroville. Adding lasting confusion to the complexity, both the CVP and the SWP move water via the Sacramento River and through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, requiring a high level of cooperation and coordination. And that’s not even considering all the counties, cities, small towns, irrigation districts, and private landowners with rights and responsibilities in this grand scheme.

We know, now, that there is a price to be paid—often a very high price—for damming wild rivers, for diverting water away from its natural course. Yet the California of today wouldn’t exist without the “completion” of the state’s landscape.

Some sense of what it meant, to California and the country, to complete these immense water-moving monuments can be understood from the comments made in 1964 by President John F. Kennedy at Whiskeytown Reservoir, where he spoke upon that project’s completion:

Whiskeytown Reservoir is not the largest structure on the Trinity River, but its completion is significant because this is the last of the Trinity Project dams. With the Trinity Division completed, and the upper reaches of the Sacramento now harnessed, Shasta County and its neighbors are assured of water and power—they can enjoy new chances for recreational use and new access to open space—and of great importance, the flow of two watersheds can now be regulated for the benefit of the farms and cities of the lower valley.

For too long this water ran unused to the sea. For too long surface water in one area was wasted while there was a deficit nearby. Now, by diverting these waters to the eastern slopes, we can irrigate crops on the fertile plains of the Sacramento Valley, and supply water also for municipal and industrial use for the cities of the south.

And while running their course these waters will generate millions of kilowatts of energy and will help expand the economy of the fastest growing state in the nation. Our national assets belong to all of us. Children who were born in the East will grow up in the West, and the West will grow up in the East. And we will find by concentrating our energy on our natural resources, on conserving them—but not really conserving and saving them, but by developing and improving them—the United States will be richer and stronger. We can fulfill our responsibilities to ourselves and to those who depend upon us.

Modern sensibilities, not to mention salmon, might take issue with notions of natural waters running “unused” to the sea, as well as the idea that developing natural resources means “improving” them. Yet the economic and social benefits of moving water to less blessed urban areas are real.

Sandhill Cranes. Photo by Florence Low for California Department of Water Resources.

What no officials would question, then, and few are questioning now, is the assumption that engineering is still the solution for ever-increasing demand.

Seemingly cemented into California’s unnatural wonderland of water is much magical thinking—as if building the right delivery system assures that there will be enough water for any number of people and all possible uses. As if this magician’s trick can continue forever, manifesting more and more water with newer and better technological sleights of hand.

But what if there isn’t more water? What if there’s less? Clearly it’s a problem when demand exceeds supply, but what if allotments already promised to water users far exceed what’s typically available?

This is where we are, today, and where the conversation must begin.