Written by yours truly, posted at Zocalo Public Square:
“In California, we owe the existence of our communities to the willingness of previous generations to rearrange our natural assets. Billions of dollars have been spent rerouting rivers to channel the prodigious precipitation that falls on the remote north state to needier, more populated places in the south and on the coast. Rivers and streams that flow down from the Sierra have been dammed and controlled to provide water for Central Valley agriculture. Levees have been built to reclaim the marshlands of the California Delta—the great estuary where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers come together east of the San Francisco Bay—for farming and to protect cities built on the state’s massive floodplains.
Much of this transformation occurred in the early part of the 20th century: By 1925, the Delta had been pretty much carved into what it looks like today. As the state’s development progressed, more rivers were harnessed to remove the water from their natural watercourses and instead deliver that precious liquid to our chosen destination. This work eventually culminated in the construction of the massive Central Valley Project and State Water Project—two of the largest water systems in the world. Today, only a handful of California’s rivers are not dammed or diverted at some point. … “
Read more from Zocalo Public Square by clicking here.
