The politics of water

Water politics is something else I love, and will comment about with some frequency. Here's something I once wrote about water.

I first read Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert during a vacation to San Francisco in the summer of 2005. I was staying with the family of a friend from college and asked for a recommendation for a “good book about California history.” My friend’s father, a lifelong San Franciscan from an old California family, suggested the title. Reisner traces the twin history of Western settlement and development and the “cultivation” of the West’s water resources. He describes the unavoidable and absolutely necessary connection between the two, beginning with John Wesley Powell in the 1860s and 70s to the end of the dam-building boom in the late 1970s-early 1980s. Reisner’s book and the additional reading that followed have compelled me to the academic and political study of the locus of politics and water. Water is a necessary commodity in crisis on a national and international scale. Of course human beings cannot survive without water, but water also drives the production of goods – energy, food, manufacture – that are keys to civilization’s survival. Demographic shifts in the United States have seen the greatest growth in the regions with the least amounts of water: California, Texas, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, the fastest-growing cities in the United States, and decreasing snowfall and a shorter spring thaw in recent years have called into question the continued reliability of these regions’ water sources. These issues come to a dramatic head around the Colorado River, which provides water for these major cities and the agriculture of the region. The Colorado River Compact, which allocates annual flow of the river, needs to be revised to reflect more realistic estimates of annual river flow in the context of global climate change; to address the increasingly urban population changes; to reflect surges in growth in Las Vegas and Arizona in particular; to reconcile shifts in the national and regional economy from agriculture to information. These policy questions need immediate attention from well-trained public servants.