How California Can Teach Itself About Water
The Wet, Wasteful North and the Dry, Conserving South Must Share Perspectives, and Plans
In California, we owe the existence of our communities to the willingness of previous generations to rearrange our natural assets. Billions of dollars have been spent rerouting rivers to channel the prodigious precipitation that falls on the remote north state to needier, more populated places in the south and on the coast. Rivers and streams that flow down from the Sierra have been dammed and controlled to provide water for Central Valley agriculture. Levees have been built to reclaim the marshlands of the California Delta—the great estuary where the Sacramento …
