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Sacramento
Bee
September 30, 2007
When
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called a special legislative
session on water supply, it underscored that California's
fundamental conflicts over water remain as rigidly unrelenting
as they have been for the past three-plus decades.
Ostensibly, as framed by Schwarzenegger and other politicians,
the conflicts are largely financial and technological. What's
the most reliable and cost-effective way of capturing and
conveying enough water to serve present and future needs while
protecting, to the extent possible, fish and other wildlife
dependent on flows in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the
nexus of water in California?
Were that the only question, engineers, hydrologists,
construction managers, biologists and other professionals
could answer it. It wouldn't be easy, but they could do it,
and politicians and voters could decide how to apportion
costs. That's more or less how the peripheral canal came to be
approved by the Legislature over a quarter-century ago as the
best approach to transporting water while protecting the
Delta.
There are, however, an infinite number of intangible aspects
to water, what Schwarzenegger and others have likened to
religious war. Indeed, California's decades of arcane water
conflict can be just as opaque as the 1,100-year-old doctrinal
feud that leads Sunnis and Shiites to kill each other in Iraq.
Mistrust, supposition and myopic self-interest killed the
peripheral canal in 1982 and continue to block agreement on
water today.
The conflicts, moreover, are only tangentially about water per
se; fundamentally they are deeply seated, perhaps intractable
philosophical differences over how -- or even whether --
California should develop to serve its ever-burgeoning
population. Water supply is intrinsically connected to land
use, housing, energy and transportation policies. Those are
intertwined, in turn, with our widely divergent conceptions of
what kinds of lives we Californians should be leading in the
21st century.
Once -- in the quarter-century after World War II -- we
Californians knew what we were and what we wanted, empowering
a generation of officeholders to build highways and water
systems and other infrastructure to serve ever-expanding
residential suburbs.
But the economic evolution and cultural change that began
sweeping through California in the 1970s undermined our social
consensus, creating cultural divisions and a more
confrontational political climate. Now we argue over whether
to continue the low-density housing patterns or shift to a
high-density, highly urbanized mode. And, of course, that
megaissue and the subissues such as water involve huge
financial stakes, both public and private.
When voters rejected the peripheral canal, the last major link
in the state's north-south water transfer system, in 1982, it
symbolized the erosion of consensus not only on water but on
every other major public policy -- taxation, energy, education
and transportation being merely the most obvious. And they and
other issues have, for the most part, been stuck in neutral
ever since.
It may be impossible for Schwarzenegger, lawmakers and the
countless economic, ideological, cultural and geographic
subfactions to agree on the kind of comprehensive, everlasting
water plan the governor seeks. But at the same time, it may be
impossible to function in any development pattern without some
major alteration of our increasingly unstable water system,
and it may be impossible to make incremental change that can
stabilize that supply.
Until -- and unless -- we regain some civic consensus about
California and its future, water may be one of those many
issues that are perpetually unresolved, leaving it to
front-line water agencies and officials to muddle through as
best they can.
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