The “Six Californias” initiative declared California in its current iteration “ungovernable,” and proposed to divide it into six smaller states: Jefferson (near the Oregon border), North California (including Sacramento), Silicon Valley (including San Francisco and Oakland), Central California (most of the middle of the state up to the Nevada border), West California (including Los Angeles), and South California (including San Diego). The putative idea behind the initiative was that smaller, more localized governments would be better able to serve citizens. In reality, it was mostly a publicity stunt. Though it generated plenty of headlines and Twitter jokes, the initiative didn’t get enough valid signatures to make it to the ballot, and the six mini-Californias died before they were born.
When I first read about Six Californias, my second thought was, This is what I’ve been trying to explain to people! My first thought was, This would never work, because some of those substates wouldn’t have any water.
As it turns out, those are actually sort of the same thought. Water—who accesses it, how, and for what reason—has played a fundamental role in the creation of the areas roughly mapped out by the Six Californias initiative and the conflicts between them. It is fitting that a venture capitalist drew these hydrologically untenable lines on the map. After all, corporate interests and a few super-wealthy individuals are the ones who stand to gain the most from California’s tangled water politics. (...)
Longstanding regional water conflicts like the one between L.A. and Owens Valley have intensified in the past few years as California has sunk deeper into a devastating combination of heat and drought—the worst on record since record-keeping began in 1895, according to the National Weather Service. Conditions are so severe that quakes are rumbling and mountains are literally moving as our rapid consumption of groundwater from aquifers warps the earth’s crust.
As our agricultural backbone, the Central Valley (which is technically two valleys that together dominate the middle of the state) has been particularly hard-hit. It is largely in the Central Valley that California produces about half of the country’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts; one-fifth of its dairy; and, of course, most of its wine. But hydrating all those cows and growing all those crops requires water—an immense amount of water, 80 percent of what California uses.
Usually, Central Valley farmers get around 5 million acre-feet of water from the federally run Central Valley Project, but in 2014, they received none of their contracted water supply. Zero. Instead, the limited water went to other regions. More densely populated residential counties in the Bay Area got 50 percent of their promised supply, for example. The Klamath River, which runs through the far north of California and into Oregon, got extra water to keep endangered salmon alive. The Central Valley got none.
Farmers, forced to rely more heavily on the already overtaxed supply of groundwater or water shipped in from elsewhere at great expense—more on this later—are understandably unhappy about the scenario. If you drive from one end of the state to the other on I-5, you see signs bristling along the roadside. They say things like food grows where water flows and no water = no jobs. Farmers blame the coastal regions, with their politicians and environmentalists who think “fish are more important than our farms.” The signs say congress created dust bowl, not dismantle capitalism.
And “big-city liberals”, anxious too about access to water, respond in kind. When journalist Alan Heathcock, who’d been reporting in the Central Valley, posted pictures of drought-stricken fallow farmland to Facebook, his friends left comments about how “these must be really shitty farmers” and “this is what happens when you ‘overfarm’ land.” A move by Senator Dianne Feinstein to divert water to the Central Valley met resistance from a congressman from Draper’s “Jefferson,” who protested that the Senator was “trying to spin this as a job saver, but that ignores the jobs up north that depend on water.” Another from the Bay Area said, “Best I can see, she’s making a decision that jobs in the Bay Area and Northern California and the Peninsula south of San Francisco aren’t as important as jobs in the Central Valley.”
When the problem appears as so many trade-offs, it’s impossible to say which people in which area of the state have more legitimate claims to dwindling water supplies. The farmers in the Central Valley need water, and so do the suburbanites, the fishers, and the environment. The people of the Owens Valley need water, and so do the people of Los Angeles. The social and microeconomic diversity of the state makes our water problem appear ever more morally complex, when the basic pathology is in fact pretty simple.
Who does the water system benefit the most? What powers comprise the San Fernando land syndicates of the present-day Central Valley? Though the bramble of California water politics is impenetrable in places, a few entities stand out as disproportionate beneficiaries of today’s system.
by Lauren O'Neal, TNI | Read more:
Image: uncredited
