| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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California Futures Marc Reisner
California Wild: You've referred to California as a "hydrologic fantasyland" and the "most successful make-believe civilization since Babylon." Do we still have our heads planted in the sand with regard to water issues, or are we making progress on rational planning and conservation? Marc Reisner: I guess we're making progress. We're not subsidizing irrigation water as much as we used to. We're allowing water markets to develop slowly and gradually--at least we're trying to allow that. There are some cities, such as Sacramento, that still don't meter water at all, which is insane given that Sacramento typically has hundred-degree days during the summertime and gets about 12 or 13 inches of rainfall a year. And, of course, we still have a few water districts which encourage waste by selling water so cheaply that it might as well be free. It's cheaper than dirt, literally. Well, I think what's going to happen is we're going to have another drought, with millions more people, with fish and wildlife now having legitimate standing as water users, which they didn't have before 1992, and with more and more species listed as endangered. There's going to be tremendous competition for water. There won't be enough to go around, and things will change at a substantially faster pace than they are now. Unfortunately, there's plenty of water for 150 million Californians. If you get rid of most irrigated crops, not even all of them, you buy out all those water rights [and] transfer them to the cities, you can fill this state up with people from border to border. There's too much water in California, not too little. CW: Are you more or less optimistic than you were when you wrote Cadillac Desert? MR: Well, my perspective has changed because my identity has changed. I wrote that as a journalist and as a card-carrying environmentalist. Today, I am an entrepreneur involved in efforts to buy and sell water. I think of it as green capitalism because all the ventures that I'm involved in would create some environmental benefits, at least as I see it. I joined a little start-up company called Vidler Water Company, and we've got a couple of underground storage projects going. So, I now believe that elements of the environmental community are being too intransigent, when it comes to resisting virtually all new [water] storage. And I said that, really, before I was involved in any of these efforts. I think that when the crunch comes and you have four or five or six endangered species demanding more water, and agriculture demanding more water, and urban areas demanding more water, the situation becomes politically intolerable. And I think that given the political forces arrayed against each other, you're more likely to lose the Endangered Species Act or at least modify it, than you are to cut L.A. back by 60 to 70 percent or to cut some of the farmers off entirely. I was one of the first to argue that irrigation is a very inefficient use of water on a per acre per dollar basis, but if sprawl is what you get by moving water out of agriculture, I think I'll stick with alfalfa. There are arguments to be made for those low-value crops. Rice, for example, is a pretty good substitute for the wetlands that used to be there before the ricelands. You could make a similar argument about alfalfa, which is now everybody's most-hated crop because it uses more water per acre than any other. It's probably second only to rice in its dual-purpose importance as wildlife habitat. So do you really want to get rid of every last acre of alfalfa? In the rice region, ducks by the tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands nest in the alfalfa fields. They don't nest in rice fields, but they like to nest close to the rice and close to the marshes. CW: When you talk about underground storage, does that mean that you're still advocating removing dams? MR: I'm talking about removing dams at the same time that I'm talking about increasing storage, which isn't really inconsistent. I can name you two dams that I think ought to go, one small, one large. There's a dam on Butte Creek called Centerville Head Dam, which blocks what's now the most important run of spring-run [chinook] salmon, the next likely listed species in the state. Twenty thousand fish crowding into about nine miles of spotty spawning habitat, that's all they have left. There's more [habitat] above the dam, but they can't get over it. So I'm talking about removing the dam and modifying waterfalls with ladders or whatever, and I've managed to piss off the Wise Use movement and the environmentalists up in Butte County and actually make them allies, probably for the first time in history. The second, Englebright Dam, is a big dam. It probably can't be removed because it's too important as a sediment catcher. It holds back a lot of hydraulic mining spoils. I think we can build enough political support for a modification of the dam where we knock it down to 70 feet, which is essentially where the sediment is now, and build a state-of-the-art fish ladder around the lower dam, and probably you could get quite a few fish up around it. Then you have the South Fork of the Yuba, with 40 miles on the main stem and probably another 30 or 40 miles on tributaries, at least. Looks like excellent spawning habitat, and there's almost no [other] place in the state where you could take out one dam--or modify it--and bring fish back into so much ancestral habitat. On the other hand, we need more storage, and I think you can do that underground. The Madera Ranch project, which I was formerly involved in, would divert floodwaters from the Delta or even from the San Joaquin River during very wet years, spread them over thousands of acres, and create a marsh habitat while doing that. The water then percolates underground, and you use that essentially for drought emergencies. Four hundred thousand acre-feet of storage--that's the estimated storage in the depleted aquifer--is four times the capacity of the Los Vaqueros Reservoir in the East Bay Hills [see Habitats Spring 1999 California Wild]. Los Vaqueros cost almost half a billion dollars, and one engineering firm thinks you could build this whole project for $60 million. There's no evaporation loss. You get habitat values. There's no dam. But we've got local opposition there, too. I know that new water storage will cause growth. But if you view growth as inevitable, as I do, then you try to make new storage supplies in the most environmentally benign way possible without putting great farmland out of production. CW: Earlier you referred to the Ricelands Habitat Partnership and how rice farming can be put to the advantage of wildlife. How is that project proceeding? MR: More than half of the acreage on which rice is grown can't be burned after harvest. Ultimately the law [the 1991 Rice Straw Burning Reduction Act] will take full effect and no burning will be allowed. Which means [farmers of] 400,000 acres of riceland will be confronting a dilemma of how to remove three to four tons of stubble per acre. One solution is to flood the acreage to a shallow depth, which in most instances sufficiently decomposes the straw. It also attracts waterfowl, in some places great numbers of waterfowl. But there simply is not enough water to decompose all the stubble, so you need to find economic commmercial uses for straw. We're the only rice-growing country in the world that doesn't reuse all or most of its straw. I think in China, 70 to 80 percent of all the newsprint is recycled wheat and rice straw. CW: What is your take on CalFed, the multi-agency process for water planning? Does its agenda fit in with your ventures? MR: CalFed fits in intimately, in theory. CalFed is supposed to be promoting reliability, new storage, and restoration, especially of the salmon runs and anadromous fisheries. I am intimately and actively involved in all these arenas, but I've gotten absolutely nowhere with CalFed. The Bureau of Reclamation and I went to them for $14.5 million to put a down payment on Madera Ranch, which is the last big piece of unfarmed property on the floor of the San Joaquin Valley that's still in private hands. It's bigger than Manhattan Island, and it's only 18 miles from Fresno so it could easily end up being subdivided. The Bureau asked CalFed for about a third of the purchase price, and they were bombed by environmentalists who thought it was premature. They didn. t want new water storage; they thought the price was too high; they didn't like the idea of my partner or me making serious money on the deal, which we would have done. And meanwhile local farmers, ranchers, and politicians came up with what I thought were just completely cockamamy arguments opposing it, saying we were going to contaminate the water table with selenium. CalFed just backed down instantly. So my opinion of CalFed right now is not as high as I wish it were. I think when it comes to new water supply they're focused way too much on reservoirs. Now what makes them think it's going to be any easier to build new reservoirs? There's going to be tremendous opposition, and it's much more expensive per acre-foot than groundwater storage. They have spent millions, tens of millions of dollars, on so-called restoration strategies, which I think in the long run will accomplish little. A lot of people's toes are going to get stepped on when you seriously try to restore salmon runs, or when you seriously try to create water reliability--those are the two major goals of the CalFed program--but they're afraid to step on anybody's toes, so nothing much is going to happen, at least for a while. CW: The state's population is projected to grow another 30 percent by 2020. If there's enough water to fill California with people from border to border, is population growth a big problem for California? MR: For California and the world. People ask me "What is the greatest environmental problem?" Some people think it's water, and I say, "No. It's population growth, by far." It eclipses the next five most significant environmental problems combined, and in California it's not much different. With Silicon Valley practically driving the U.S. economy right now, we could end up with 100 million people, which would make us about as densely populated as Japan. So we could be a semi-desert version of Japan. And unfortunately, there is enough water to sustain that many people. CW: You're completing a book about natural disasters in California. What has that revealed to you about the state? MR: I've written a book in four parts about various types of disasters that have affected and will continue to confront California. One is wildfire, another earthquakes, a third invasive species. And the fourth part is about climatic extremes, drought cycles, which have been worse in the past, based on tree-ring studies, than anything we've experienced so far. And with the projected consequences of global warming on California it will become worse. We're, at some point, in for a 15- or 20-year drought, not a six-year drought, and we may be in for floods that could seriously threaten even the biggest dams. We had a flood in 1986 that forced Folsom Dam to spill substantially more water than the engineers designed it to spill. If Folsom Dam were to be washed out by a biblical flood, we'd have $10-20 billion worth of damage in metropolitan Sacramento. I guess the one conclusion I draw from this book is that California now is viewed by most thoughtful Americans as a national asset, because of the gigantic economic engine that's just churning away here--thrumming away until the rivets are practically popping--generating about a sixth or seventh of the GNP and a tremendous amount of export trade. But at some point California is going to turn into a huge national liability, because it is so bloody expensive to pay for this state's mistakes. Of the ten most expensive natural disasters in U.S. history, about half have occurred in California. The [projected] Hayward fault earthquake will be the worst disaster on American soil since the Civil War. There won't be as many casualties as there were in the earthquake in Turkey [last August] but the property damage and the paralysis will be unbelievable. The property damage estimates vary wildly from a low of about $20 billion to a high of $240 billion. So I'm thinking we're going to have, in the next 50 years, almost for sure, a monstrously destructive earthquake in the Bay Area, a similarly destructive one in the Los Angeles region, the usual episodic wildfires, burning up hundreds of thousands of acres and many homes, and at some point, the average American citizen is going to say, "Let's just take a great big chainsaw and cut California along the Nevada and Oregon borders and float it out to sea."
Blake Edgar is Senior Editor of California Wild. |
Winter 2000
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