Conservationist and environmental organizations in California - The
Southern California Water Alliance, the Environmental Water Caucus, the
Winnemen Wintu tribe, Food and Water Watch, California Sports Fishing
Protection Alliance (to name a few) - are building support for a giant
rally against Governor Brown’s twin tunnels (misnamed the Bay Delta
Conservation Plan), an industrial project to re-engineer the San
Francisco Bay Delta.
Each tunnel, designed to send more estuary water to arid regions of
the state, is large enough for a high-speed rail. According to Barbara
Barrigan-Parilla, executive director of Restore the Delta, "Draining
fresh water from the Delta will only doom sustainable farming and
decimate salmon and other fisheries."
The Bay Delta Conservation Plan is 40,000 pages long. To keep it
simple, the $25 billion water-transfer project is based on a single
assumption: that California's water ecosystem crisis is caused by a lack
- a lack - of engineering projects in the Delta watershed. As if the
Delta needs more steel, more pumps, more cement (and more farmers
dispossessed through eminent domain). The peripheral tunnels, the
industrial heart of the project, do not replace, they actually augment hundreds of dams, aqueducts and pumps that already send water to corporate farms and cities south of the Delta.
The Central Valley Project, initiated in 1933 as an ongoing federal
subsidy for corporate farms, now includes 20 dams, 11 hydroelectric
generators, 500 miles of canals, aqueducts, ditches, dredged channels
and countless pumps.
The State Water Project, begun in 1960, added 29 dams, five
hydroelectric power plants, hundreds of miles of canals and pipes
reaching from the southernmost regions of the state up to Lake Davis,
Frenchman Lake and the upper tributaries of the Feather River, where the
Orville dam, the tallest dam in the United States, towers 770 feet
above its riverbed.
At Tracy, 11 thundering pumps are lined up in a row. An
80,000-horsepower engine moves 6.7 billion gallons of water south
through the San Joaquin Valley, where it runs up to a 2,000-foot-high
barrier - the Tehachapi Mountains. The Edmonston Pumping Plant shoots
water up 1926 feet through 10 miles of tunnels inside the mountains. Except for the Florida Everglades, ruined by development and
unrestrained growth, the SF Bay Delta watershed is the most micro-managed, over-developed estuary in the United States. Including
the mighty rivers that once replenished it, our Delta is now the most
complex, extensive, and costly hydraulic system in the world.
True, there are bigger dams on larger rivers in China, but no region
of the world draws more water from more rivers through more conduits at
greater public expense over greater distances than Southern California.
When is enough enough?
No water-conveyance system - not the Los Angeles Aqueduct that turned
Owens Valley into a dustbowl; not Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Las Vegas
and other desert city conduits that drained the Colorado River so dry it
no longer reaches the Sea of Cortez; not the water transfers that put
Mono Lake on life-support; not the subsidized Central Valley Project
that ended wild salmon migrations up the San Joaquin and Sacramento
rivers; not the massive State Water Project, which Governor Pat Brown
proclaimed in 1960 "a permanent solution to the state's water crisis";
none of the federal- or state-sanctioned projects, nor all of them taken
together, has ever appeased the water appetites of agribusiness,
developers and land speculators and the powerful Association of
California Water Agencies that still frames water policy in Sacramento.
The very title of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, like Chevron Oil
TV ads on clean air, is disingenuous. Crafted by the development and
water lobby, the plan is profoundly anticonservationist. The entire
project goes contrary to the long-held consensus that fishery declines
and mass habitat degradation are the direct result of excessive
technological interventions in nature's ecosystems.
In 1969, Barry Commoner,
one of the founders of the environmental movement, wrote: "We need to
reassess our attitudes toward the natural world on which our technology
intrudes. . . . Modern technology has so stressed the web processes in
the living environment at its most vulnerable points that there is
little leeway left in the system."
"The larger the technical fix," writes Cynthia Barnett in Blue Revolution,
"the larger the unintentional consequences for the next generation, or
even for the next fiscal year. The constant re-engineering of past
engineering mistakes is a costly drain, which America keeps circling
while our most important water resources go down."
In Unquenchable Robert Glennon writes, "Engineering
mentality assumes that there must be a technological fix to water
shortages. There's no need to live within our means, to tailor land use
plans to available water supply, because an engineering solution can
solve the problem and allow growth and unsustainable water practices to
continue for a while longer. This is how we've always conceived of water
problems: There must be someplace to go for more water . . . a new
pipeline to import more water."
It is absurd to believe that one more engineering project, crafted by
the same power elites that have dominated water policy throughout the
20th century, will somehow bring stability to a state whose leaders
continue to promote growth in desert regions already living beyond their
regional means.
taken from here
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