That wasn’t so hard, was it?

The State Water Resources Control Board has weighed in with its (narrowly confined to water flow-only factors) assessment of what ails the Delta.

Tidily summed up by Kronick, Moskovitz, Tiedemann & Girard, all that needs to happen is for Californians to allow

75% of unimpaired Delta outflow from January through June
75% of unimpaired Sacramento River inflow from November through June
60% of unimpaired San Joaquin River inflow from February through June

Wow. That was really easy. Let’s make it happen, California! All you have to do is use a lot less water! Start by stop growing, developing real estate, and farming in unsustainable, toxic regions!

Of course, the problem is that the state’s citizens want to have their cake and eat it too. They want water, but they don’t want to pay for it. They want schools, but they don’t want to pay for them. They want to be environmental stewards, like their grandparents are, but they don’t, or should we say won’t, pay for that either.

When push comes to shove, the Delta will be the next endangered species to go extinct. The SWRCB report and this map just makes the point that it’s only a matter of time:

According to KMT&G, the report was produced as a consequence of last fall’s assembly votes, the centerpiece of which, the Water Bond, has now fallen through even the Governor’s big hands.

The Governor wanted his cake and eat it, too. Sorry, Governor—no new taxes, no legacy water projects.

All that is left now are bits and pieces from those heady days. Fragments like this SWRCB report, which will be a nuisance to those wishing to export more, not less, water, from the Delta.

But there were other things agreed to last fall. There was the creation of a Delta Watermaster, kind of an ombudsman of water coursing through the Delta. This position has evaporated with the Water Bond.

A majority agreed that, when it came to sharing responsibility for ensuring water supply and ecosystem health, the idea of “co-equality” meant something.

Also agreed to last fall was all sorts spending that, depending on your view and where you lived, was either wasteful pork or necessary investment. What happens to those projects now?

With its report, the SWRCB has done a useful thing, which is to describe the scale of the problem California faces with its water situation. Unfortunately, that problem is so big and so politically intractable that describing it only reinforces just what a doubtful future faces the Delta. Californians have some difficult choices to make.

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Manmade weather

Over the past year or so, the DNP has noted how much man made weather has been making the news in California.

Man made droughts, that is.

Droughts caused by men and women who seek to protect “three-inch bait fish.”

Doesn’t it make sense somehow that in some other part of the world the concern is about man made floods?

Like here:

The DNP believes that this clipping illustrates that floods and droughts, like laws and religions, are made by the commissions and omissions of men and women. The pain caused by these acts is experienced by men and women, and that men and women are able to express the effects of that experience to others.

Little fishes like Delta smelts do not have the ability to express the pain they feel, and that is why a whole other group, we might call them other men and women, must do the expressing for them, often in the form of constraints on the ability of men to do what ever they wish to do with “their” land.

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Who pays for “co-equal” goals?

One of the points made by some economists opposed to the now terminally ill Water Bond is that it would be paid for by public, but would largely benefit private, interests.

According to this way of thinking, the principle should be that the beneficiary pays. This principle makes good sense, but the devil is in the details, especially because the region that the Bond focuses on, the geography, is a below sea level landscape inhabited by perhaps 50,000 souls who cannot hope to pay for the scope of work the Bond contemplates that serves their interests.

So, Delta ecosystem improvements will not be paid for by Delta residents. Who should pay for them? Sacramento waste water producers? Westlands Water District and Paramount Farms? The cities of Santa Clarita, Santa Monica, San Francisco, San Rafael (actually, no—not San Rafael) and San Bernardino?

All of the above? Certainly, San Franciscans benefit from the bond, even though their water supply is cut out of the Delta watershed long before it arrives there. So does anyone in Crescent City, Santa Barbara or Redding who believes in environmental conservation.

The DNP is a bit confused by this principle of beneficiary pays. Assuming for a moment that the bond actually benefits anyone (as opposed to, say, the shared benefits of increasing water user fees, conservation enforcements, and groundwater regulation—in other words, seriousness on the water issue), who, ultimately, does NOT benefit from the Water Bond?

How can the private beneficiaries be distinguished from the public ones? How does a suburban developer in Palmdale get separated from the person he sold a house to ten years ago?

Let’s face it, honestly parsing these questions would lead to a twenty-two, not a two-party system.

Another point of received wisdom is that the Water Bond was full of “pork” that wouldn’t actually help resolve the state’s water crisis. Dan Walters makes this point in his SacBee piece:

It’s loaded with unconscionable pork—such as a quarter-billion dollars for Schwarzenegger’s pal, billionaire Warren Buffett, to underwrite removal of dams on the Klamath River that have absolutely no connection to California’s water supply.

The DNP guesses that one person’s pork is another person’s job. But really, the point is that the state could use some pork stimulus-packaging its belly. We’d have preferred it was a quarter-billion dollars worth installing metering devices on groundwater pumps in the San Joaquin Valley, but that’s just us.

Can any one help educate the knowledge-poor DNP team on either of these matters?

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Shipwrecks and the logic of abandonment

While many aspects of the Delta’s physical and cultural history have been documented here at the DNP, one sometimes must look beyond the Delta’s attributes (or the state’s policy discourse on water) for spatial and social inspiration.

In India, especially during the dry season, one sees many shipwrecks—or in this case, building-wrecks—old vessels left high and dry by the retreat of water.

These shipwrecks suggest to the DNP many new scenarios for the Delta’s future—particularly scenarios related to the logic that led to Gov. Schwarzeneggar pulling the plug on law implementing so-called “co-equal goals” of water supply security and ecosystem restoration—it is the logic of waiting, of abandonment, of unregulated groundwater pumping, of Proposition 13 and the state’s 1/3 majority rule.

A recent seven-day excursion through Rajasthan and Gujarat, in western, arid, India, yielded a number of examples of building wrecks that, much like the predicament California’s water future faces, suggest how time affects decisions about investing in technology and settlement.

Among the world’s most beautiful water infrastructures is the Indian stepwell, or baori in Hindi. Stepwells are dug wells like other dug wells, except that these wells were made into permanent constructed pieces intended to be occupied by people, and are therefore social, spatial and architectural.

The stepwell, the Chand Baori, is in Abhaneri, a few kilometres north of the road between Jaipur and Agra. It is over 30 metres deep, and is today used for movie scene backdrops, not water supply:

The vav (“stepwell” in Gujarati) at Anuraj is of another type, axial, with a single broad and long stair leading down many stories to the pool.

At the end of this journey downward toward water is this, a deep hole. Imagine a rope with a bucket at the end, descending:

Like many stepwells, the Anuraj well was constructed by a queen. The quarters of Queen Padmini of Chittorgarh were constructed in a reservoir in the hilltop fortress between Jaipur and Udaipur, just a short boat ride outside of her palace walls.

India’s water infrastructure is spatial in other ways as well. Reservoir lakes, mostly dry now, are occupied by quarters like Queen Padmini’s, but also by temples, shrines, stepped terraces, and swimming pools.

The town of Bundi, home to dozens of stepwells (including to another built by a queen, very similar to Anuraj), most of them behind the walls of its fort (think under siege 1000 years ago, and water supply) has a lake with many such shipwrecked structures.

Another dry lake is found at Udiapur, once considered the most romantic city in India. Lake Pichola is a good example of how climate change and the immediate, desperate demand for water by an expanding population have permanently changed India’s great water spaces and artifacts.

Everyone one speaks with in India agrees that the days are hotter, and the monsoon season shorter. Once a glamourous enough spot to film a Bond flick there, Lake Pichola has, just before the start of the monsoon season, been reduced to this:

Palaces shipwrecked in the middle of a dry lake, cows grazing on the lake bed—hard to see Bond here…:

It is highly unlikely that any of these remarkable treasures, whether reservoir lakes or stepwells, will ever be filled again, unless the state decides that they are to be artificially maintained in order to fulfill the expectations of the tourist.

The above stepwells, palaces, and other utilitarian and spiritual shipwrecks are among the more exquisite artifacts of India’s water history. A more common sight these days, and a more quotidian one, are these water towers, all built to this or similar design:

And for less populated places, all through India, the state is frantically drilling thousands and thousands of “tubewells.” Tubewells are 30-metre deep artesian wells distributed according to population. These rationally distributed water sources solve an immediate problem of water scarcity, and have taken the place of the collective stepwell and lake water sources.

Like the extensive groundwater pumping operations of California’s agricultural regions, tubewells are relentlessly lowering the groundwater level. Tubewells are the necessary present and future other of India’s water past.

Tubewells now extend approximately 30 metres, sufficiently deep to ensure that no lake or stepwell will ever again intersect with groundwater. Inevitably, as India’s aquifers are drawn down, this infrastructure of water supply will need to extend ever deeper.

And other infrastructures, equally finely distributed and even more base and instrumental, will continue to be relied on by a population that just needs water.

The DNP team is coming back to North America with new ideas about how the stepwell (among other things encountered), a most public and spatial work, might inspire a new group of speculative projects for the Delta.

These projects will focus to a greater degree on the likelihood of an abandoned Delta. The recent decision to postpone the November vote on the co-equal goals proposition is a clear indication that the state is headed toward a bottom-line set of decisions about what it will and will not fund.

Funding the side of the “co-equal” goals that are an expression of the state’s commitment to environmental stewardship will be abandoned, as will the Delta landscape.

The stepwell, an artifact of an earlier age, reminds the DNP of the Delta, in itself an artifact of an earlier age. At the bottom of these fantastic spaces today one finds little more than a puddle of fetid liquid, home to pigeons and bats.

Shipwrecks in the form of abandoned Delta levees, meandering strings of riparian habitat occupied by brave shack cabin owners, fishing and hunting clubs, marinas, camps and the varied marks of the once cultivated polder interiors.

California-scaled stepwells, public elaborations on the vertical access points of an underground twin-bore tunnel sending water from the North Delta to the pumps near Tracy.

Shipwrecked shrines, the pleasure and practices of the transient types who will occupy the Delta’s watery future. One supposes that through them there will be new ways to imagine the Delta’s future.

The light side of abandonment—of failed levees, ruins, saltwater intrusion and the attendant ecosystem and lifestyles of such places as the Delta seems destined, in large part, to become.

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Lawyers

Despite Sec. Salazar’s overblown praise for the agents involved, yesterday’s signing of an agreement between water supply and environmental advocates regarding Delta smelt water supply is a token act. Judging from their ho-hum reactions to the achievement, lawyers for both sides know it.

They are gearing up for a negotiation that will not result in token, less-than-a-week-long policy.

The DNP team, basking in 104+ Indian heat, finds relevant what Gandhi, who himself was a lawyer, said about the lawyers of his day (apologies to women lawyers everywhere):

I had learnt the true practice of law. I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men’s hearts. I realized that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder. The lesson was so indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases. I lost nothing thereby—not even money, certainly not my soul.

and

Lawyers are also men, and there is something good in every man. Whenever instances of lawyers having done good can be brought forward, it will be found that the good is due to them as men rather than as lawyers.

and

Lawyers will, as a rule advance quarrels instead of repressing them. Moreover, men take up that profession, not in order to help others out of their miseries, but to enrich themselves. It is one of the avenues of becoming wealthy and their interest exists in multiplying disputes. It is within my knowledge that they are glad when men have disputes.

The DNP would have preferred that advocates of both sides saved the money of their clients for the real litigation to come.

Even better, that money could have been used to repair levees, restore habitat, and feed unemployed farm workers.

Savvy California lawyers toying with federal administrators desperate for even the thinnest of accomplishments just isn’t fair play.

 

 

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