Rosefolly cottage

Reply to: Well, now you’ve done it, MiGreenThumb (Z5b S.Michigan/Sunset 41) Elevation: 1,029 feet -- started talking about water around a Californian! As a 6th generation Northern Californian who has been around a while, I can assure you that availability of fresh water here has always been dicey, even many decades back when there was only a small fraction of the current population and even in places, like my family's homesteaded ranches in Mendocino County, where there were hardly any people (and still aren't). There's an old saying, "Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting" and there's no truer statement about water in California than that, whether 100 years ago or today. Because there is no rain (and I mean zero) between April and maybe mid-October or even later (not until December/January some years), except for occasional summer thunderstorms in the Sierras, access to a year-round supply of water here has always been critical, much contested, and governed by water rights laws that date back to 1850, when California first became a state (surface waters, at least – underground sources via wells have only recently come under some regulation). The infrastructure and laws around surface water appropriation and rights in California are complex, arcane, steeped in custom and history, and aren't even well-understood by most current Californians (the great majority of whom were born elsewhere) much less folks living outside of California. Surface water can’t be stored or used by anyone in California unless they hold the specific right to that water – be they municipalities, individual land owners, agricultural irrigation districts, whoever. Rights that allow beneficial use of such can be bought and sold, but nobody can own water itself. There are also differing priorities among established rights for surface water; rights originating prior to 1914, for example, tend to have highest priority and get first use of a given source, while later rights with successively lesser priorities get what's left, which is likely to be nothing in drought years. In the article you link, the author (who was born in Chicago, by the way) mentions only the State Water Project, which provides just part (about 12%) of California’s water supply. Overall, via dams and pumping, around 50% of all precipitation that falls in CA is captured, 75% of which falls in the northern half of the state, even though 80% is used in the southern half of the state, so massive amounts of water are transported south, mainly via canals. Roughly 80% of captured water goes to irrigation and other ag uses (at only a fraction of its actual cost, with taxpayers in general heavily subsidizing ag users) and no more than 15% of the total goes to municipal or residential use, where users pay around 10x more for the same water (an opportunity not lost on ag users, who can, and do, sell their cheap water rights at a premium to municipalities with shortages for handsome profits). Given that agriculture currently contributes only about 1 to 2% of the state’s total economic output, this situation is becoming a real head-scratcher and will likely change as the political influences of ag interests, once so dominant in the state, continue to wane. In any case, soils on land that is irrigated in arid climates eventually and inevitably become toxic and useless for farming due to salinization and saturation (remember the fate of ancient Mesopotamia and its Fertile Crescent?), something already starting to happen in California’s Central Valley, where an increasing amount of cropland is being permanently fallowed for these reasons. Bottom line is that water supply infrastructure in California does need to be updated, but the emphasis should first focus on re-allocating current supplies, as the amount being withheld and withdrawn from natural systems is already excessive, something that has been obvious to local ecologists, at least, for a long time. Because Jackie lives fairly distant from the infrastructure that serves ag users, though, her area does need to increase local storage or sources. No worries about Great Lakes water being shipped here, either – the cost and technology to move it over or around two major mountain ranges would be prohibitive – would likely be vastly more cost-effective to subsidize moving Californians back to there ;-).

Q