This isn’t an article from 1933, it’s from 2009:

The customer seemed interested in a black blouse offered for $1 at the thrift store. But instead of buying it, she set it on the front counter.

Maybe tomorrow, she told the cashier, she would have the money. Or the next day. But not now.

“That is the way people are now,” said the cashier, Alicia Reyes, as she watched the middle-aged woman walk out of the store. “They just come in here and look. They just come in here to kill the time. And then they take off.”

Welcome to life in Mendota – the unemployment capital of California. With a 41 percent jobless rate, the town’s social fabric is tearing at the seams. Alcoholism and crime are on the rise. To save money, some mothers wash and re-use disposable diapers. Unemployed men with nothing to do wander the streets and sit on benches.

The irony is obvious: In a large swath of the nation’s most productive farming region, many struggle to fill their own cupboards.

There are many factors here – the economic meltdown and struggling economy, of course.  But the third year of drought conditions have devastated harvests, leading to less workers needed to pick crops.  This is the sad future of a dry California.  With housing cratered throughout the state, the fallback option of construction is closed off as well.  And as seasonal workers stay home, the businesses that support the economy have less consumers and suffer as well.

This is a disaster area, and the signs are it will only get worse.  The state jobless rate is projected to grow as high as 15% before subsiding, and will remain in double digits until the beginning of 2012.  The FDIC has issued warnings to at least six state banks, telling them to increase capital levels.  “Two-thirds of the state’s banks will be operating under cease-and-desist orders” by the end of 2009, according to one analyst.  And housing prices continue to fall off the cliff.

The Central Valley is in a Depression.  The rest of the state may not be as far behind as you think.

As someone who has written before of the water problems our state faces, and who has repeated the “omg worst drought ever” frame, it’s important that I give some necessary attention to Michael Fitzgerald of The Stockton Record, who called bullshit on the whole thing today:

California’s “drought” is overblown. The alarmists calling it a historic disaster are trying to pull a fast one….

Besides, state officials, SoCal water importers and other Chicken Littles don’t mention they drained Northern California reservoirs prior to February’s storms.

“In the first year of the drought, we passed water like a drunken sailor,” said Bill Jennings, head of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance.

Some perspective: In the 1990s, the state and feds exported 4 million acre-feet of Delta water annually. In this decade – and well into the drought – officials imprudently powered up exports to more than 6 million acre-feet a year.

They irresponsibly sucked reservoirs down. They nearly killed the Delta. They stopped only when a federal judge called a halt.

“We cannibalized Northern California to sock it away in the Kern water bank and Diamond Valley water bank down south,” Jennings said, “giving no thought to the question of a second or third year.”

In short, those who have the weakest water rights claims – such as sprawling Southern California exurbs – have been recklessly drawing down our water supplies to support a totally unsustainable  use of the land. We’ve had intimations that this is going on, with the collapse of Delta fisheries and the West Coast salmon population. But the media often reported this as an unfortunate consequence of mandated water deliveries from the Delta, through the pumps at Tracy and down the delivery chain that the drought (and everyone agrees we’re in some sort of drought) has exacerbated.

Funny thing about those “mandated water deliveries” though:

The 80-year average for Delta water is 29 million acre-feet annually. The state and feds wrote contracts promising 130 million acre-feet: 41/2 times reality.

Other contracts bring total export contracts to an insane 245 million acre-feet, an ocean of paper water promised to people who gauged their farms, businesses or urban water consumption accordingly.

In other words California water policy has been built on debt, just as I’ve been arguing. To water the suburban sprawlconomy and the agricultural sprawl necessary to feed that sprawlconomy, we created a kind of “water bubble”, where contracts to deliver water were written without regard to mother nature’s ability to pay. This almost exactly parallels what went on in banks during the housing bubble.

And like the collapse of the housing bubble, those who engineered the water bubble are saying the answer is to spend more public money on bailing them out – in this case through more canals and dams.

Don’t get me wrong, California does face water problems and does need to change how we use water here. But the answer isn’t to waste more water on sprawl. Instead it’s time we got serious about providing water security by reducing how much we use, retrofitting urban areas to do more recycling, and implementing more water-friendly and environmentally sensible farming practices across the state.

Recent storms have eased our water worries to a degree – the state Department of Water Resources reports that the Sierra snowpack is at 80% of normal. But because of the dry winters of 2007 and 2008, California still needs much more precipitation:

Elissa Lynn, a meteorologist for the Department of Water Resources, said the water content in the snow would have to be between 120 to 130 percent of normal by April 1 to replenish the state’s reservoirs, the largest of which are less than half full. “That’s just the snowpack,” Lynn said. “We need to have rainfall in the mountains continuing through the spring, contributing to the total water supply. That’s what we had hardly any of last year.”

Rain and snow would have to fall virtually every day this month to get back to normal, a highly unlikely scenario, according to Steve Anderson, meteorologist for the National Weather Service.

The LA Times uses these numbers to explore whether proponents of new dams and canals are overstating the crisis in order to generate support for their favored water projects:

The water interests who have spit out grim news releases the last two months were silent Monday in the face of the growing snowpack.

Those who would like to build new reservoirs and canals and to weaken environmental regulations have invoked the drought like a mantra in recent weeks…

Sen. Dave Cogdill, a Republican who represents agriculture-dependent Modesto, called the drought “epic” when he introduced a $10-billion water bond package last week that includes funding for new reservoirs and other infrastructure.

There’s no doubt that folks like Cogdill are trying to take advantage of the crisis – but the water crisis is real, even if it’s not quite as bad right now as it looks. On a regional basis the situation is still serious – the Monterey Peninsula, for example, overshot its carrying capacity long ago and has been overdrawing the Carmel River for decades. Growing propulations and more water-intensive agriculture have strained existing resources. And global warming will lead to less water availability for California.

Still, it’s important to refuse to let California get shock doctrined by those pushing bad water solutions using the drought as a cover. That was the message Debbie Cook delivered on desalination in a post at The Oil Drum:

The next worst idea to turning tar sands into synthetic crude is turning ocean water into municipal drinking water. Sounds great until you zoom in on the environmental costs and energetic consequences. It may be technically feasible, but in the end it is unsustainable and will be just one more stranded asset.

We’re debating desal here in Monterey as well, and Debbie Cook’s criticisms of the concept are extremely valuable to us – and to a state that, despite this week’s rain, still has to figure out how to secure its water future.

Recent rains have caused some flooding damage around the state, but have generally failed to dent the drought that now threatens to cripple the already stressed agricultural-based economy of the Central Valley, as a recent UC Berkeley study suggests (h/t to Aquafornia):

Substantial cutbacks in water deliveries from the delta to Central Valley farms will severely reduce the region’s income, employment, revenues and farm acreage, according to a new report from the University of California’s Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics.

The report projects potential economic impacts for 2009 as the state grapples with its third drought in the last 30 years…

Based on projected allocations, Central Valley farmers could sustain revenue losses from $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion this year, depending on their ability to increase groundwater pumping.

The economic impact is already being felt:

Across the valley, towns are already seeing some of the worst unemployment in the country, with rates three and four times the national average, as well as reported increases in all manner of social ills: drug use, excessive drinking and rises in hunger and domestic violence.

With fewer checks to cash, even check-cashing businesses have failed, as have thrift stores, ice cream parlors and hardware shops. The state has put the 2008 drought losses at more than $300 million, and economists predict that this year’s losses could swell past $2 billion, with as many as 80,000 jobs lost.

“People are saying, ‘Are you a third world country?’ ” said Robert Silva, the mayor of Mendota, which has a 35 percent unemployment rate, up from the more typical seasonal average of about 20 percent. “My community is dying on the vine.”

This is a double whammy hitting the Central Valley. They have been the hardest-hit region in the entire country, perhaps the entire world, by the housing bust. The economic crisis alone leads to reduced demand for farm products, but the drought is going to make a bad situation much, much worse.

The Central Valley is at the leading edge of the 21st century crisis, brought about by California’s overdependence on debt and sprawl. As I’ve explained before, the “debt” is not merely financial – California has lived beyond its natural resource means for some time, overpumping water to slake the thirst of new suburbs AND to water the fields to feed the suburban consumer.

This is much the same problem that hit the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. 50 years of farming the marginal lands of the Great Plains eroded the topsoil, creating an environmental catastrophe at the very moment that a collapse in farm prices and wages led to a massive foreclosure wave. The place they headed to escape the crisis was the Central Valley.

Some farmers would like to just keep pumping the water, and cut off fish (which are already in severe distress) or cities (which are already facing mandatory rationing), and others believe a Peripheral Canal is the solution. But if this is the leading edge of climate change, those solutions will be the deck chairs on the proverbial Titanic.

I personally believe it’s important to maintain agriculture as an industry in California. But we need to find a way to make it sustainable. Continuing the methods of the past is no longer an option, as the Steinbeckian scenes now unfolding in the Central Valley should make clear to us all.  

( – promoted by Robert in Monterey)

(This is cross-posted from my site La Vida Locavore, which covers food politics and all news related to food. Stop by and check us out if you’re ever wondering what Tom Vilsack’s up to, what really happened to all the peanut butter, or where California milk REALLY comes from… hint: not the happy cows in the pictures.)

The news in California is bad. Well, mostly bad. After all, the Oscars are tomorrow. But the budget’s a mess, the economy sucks, and on top of that there’s a drought. What’s next, an earthquake?

To manage water in the face of the drought, the federal government is cutting off water to many California farms for at least three weeks in March. The amount of time without water will depend on whether we get rain in the next few weeks. In the San Joaquin Valley, the drought will cause an estimated $1.15 billion (with a B) in lost agriculture-related wages and 40,000 lost jobs in farm-related industries. And if that ain’t bad enough, the New York Times reports that the problems go beyond food in affected towns:

Across the valley, towns are already seeing some of the worst unemployment in the country, with rates three and four times the national average, as well as reported increases in all manner of social ills: drug use, excessive drinking and rises in hunger and domestic violence.

California farms receive 80% of their water from federally-managed supplies and the rest from the state. The feds are turning off the tap, but farmers may still receive some water from the state. Unfortunately for the farmers, some of the water may be legally unavailable to them due to laws or rulings protecting endangered species.

(Meanwhile, in the parts of the state where I hang out – San Diego and Los Angeles – I’ve seen idiots who let their automatic sprinkler systems water their already wet lawns on rainy days recently.)

Over at Change.org Natasha Chart asks if a recovery is even possible on a planet headed for environmental collapse? That’s an answer I wish I knew. Natasha’s been covering the water story regularly with a post about Colorado’s fights between Big Oil and Big Water, a post about agribusiness and water use, and a post I highly recommend reading (even though it scares the shit out of me) called “We don’t have to choose a dustbowl”

My own environmentalist hippie foodie answers to the water problem begin as follows:

1. Why is it still legal to have lawns in California? Seriously. Somebody should outlaw watering your lawn. If we weren’t in such a budget crisis I’d add that the city should provide native drought resistant plants to residents who want to make their yard beautiful and able to survive without water.
2. California growers need to go organic ASAP. It’s not a fix that will help them this year, and it will reduce their productivity in the next few years but in the long run, it will make all of their crops more drought resistant because the soil will store more water.
3. We’ve gotta do something about animal agriculture. It uses a TON of water. If factory farms are something we have to have, then they shouldn’t be located in California. Period.
4. We need to expand fruit, nut, and vegetable (so-called “specialty crop”) production in the other 49 states to plan for decreased production in California and to reduce energy needs for shipping food across the country. Right now there are actually laws preventing farmers who grow commodities to switching over to grow specialty crops instead. You can’t even buy land from a farmer who used to grow commodities there and grow specialty crops on that land! The USDA is dabbling in changing that policy but only in a very small pilot program.

These things are expensive – either for the farmers or for the state that mandates it and compensates the farmers (or offers financial incentives to make it happen without mandating it). But we bailed out the banks even after they screwed up and got us into this mess. Why can’t we bail out our farmers? After all, we need to eat.

Rachel Maddow is more than just an excellent TV host and progressive hero. She’s also a policy geek who hails from Castro Valley and who, because of her father’s long experience working for East Bay MUD, knows a LOT about California water policy.

In December she was invited to give the keynote address at the annual conference of the Association of California Water Agencies in Long Beach. It was a fantastic speech, showing her range of knowledge on federal infrastructure politics and California’s water needs.

The speech is reproduced below in its entirety; I haven’t been able to find an audio or video of the address but am told it was very well received by the audience.

Maddow’s words are all the more important as California enters the third year of the most severe drought the state has faced since the American conquest. She speaks of three “water eras” and that the third, which we are now entering, will be defined by the search for “water security.” It’s a perceptive, big picture talk that sets out the fundamentals that ought to guide us as California struggles to deal with the water crisis.

The speech is also a useful counterpoint to Dan Walters’ latest column, which blames the water crisis on the state being “ungovernable.” That misses the key point – California’s ungovernability stems from the decision in 1978 to lock 20th century policy in place by giving conservatives a veto, conservatives who have defined their politics by promising to preserve the 20th century model of California life, with all of its waste of resources and unequal outcomes.

Maddow reminds us that to deal with the crisis, we need an attitudinal shift – and that shift must come as part of a breaking of the conservative veto over California politics. Only when we decide that the policies of the 20th century must be abandoned will Californians mobilize to take power away from those who so recklessly defend those policies.

RACHEL MADDOW’S SPEECH

ACWA FALL CONFERENCE

LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2008

Thank you so much for having me here — it really is an honor.

I know that I’m a new face to a lot of you here — which makes it all the more kind that you invited me to speak.  But maybe it’s wise if I introduce myself a little — or at least explain how I got here.

I was born in 1973 — or as we called it in my family — the year the California Aqueduct was completed.

I went off to school — to public kindergarten — the year that Prop 13 went into effect — I can actually remember the library hours changing because they couldn’t afford to staff it anymore.

I grew up in the East Bay Municipal Utility District, and my parents still live in the house I grew up in — though now there’s a drinking water filter on a pitcher next to the sink in the kitchen, which we never had when I was a kid.

The first posters-or-anything I remember us putting up in the house were really pretty drought-related exhortations in favor of native plants.  I don’t even think my mom liked California poppies, but we had posters of them all over the house because they were apparently the poster-plant for patriotic gardening in the 70s.

Our family vacations were to a place that other kids called “Yosemite” — but in our family, it was the place with the reservoir where Hetch Hetchy got its water!  

We’d pile in the car and drive to grandma and grandpa’s house in San Diego, very excited for the canal-viewing opportunities from interstate 5 as we drove south.

We didn’t go so far as to have a Delta smelt as a pet or anything, but California’s water troubles… were really quite central to the way I understood the world as a kid.  

And growing up in a time of drought — made a lasting impression on the wet-cement of my very young mind — it gave me a lifelong appreciation that water is rare… water is fragile… and water is power.  I live on the east coast now, in New York City, where everyone thinks that time is money — to me as a kid… and I guess now, too… water always seemed like money.  Water.  Oil.  Land.  Information.  Control.  Things to fight over — things to fight for.

Now California’s back in drought — my parents have long-since converted everything at their house that’s convertible to low-water-use… and so have all our neighbors as well.  They didn’t do that out of do-gooder hippy instincts… we don’t live in a very hippy do-gooder kind of town and we’re not a do-gooder hippy kind of family — but people have made the switch because it’s dumb not to.  It’s the same for families as it is for farmers and businesses now — no one can afford to waste water… or to waste much of anything anymore.

As we head into the worst economic prospects in more-than-a-generation… as we’re back in drought in California… with a new democratically-dominant era coming to Washington… is California going come out of this drought differently than it has from others?  Are big changes ahead for the perennial resource fights that have defined my life as the daughter of a California water geek?

Briefly, let me say this about the election of Barack Obama to the presidency.  He ran, essentially, as the Hope candidate.  I know everyone says he was the “change” candidate — but honestly, both campaigns ran their guy as the change candidate — McCain said he’d bring mavericky no-business-as-usual change to the republican party and to Washington, Obama said he’d bring change to Washington not just by changing the party in charge, but by changing from the divisiveness of typical politics.  

Dick Cheney was not on the ballot this year — the chant of “four more years” was a threat and an insult, not a cheer this time around — everyone was running as a change candidate.  You know, our existing President George W. Bush told an interviewer during the campaign that if he was running for a third term this year, he would have run as a change candidate!

So while this was inevitably a change election — I think it’s important to remember that Obama ran as the hope guy. The hope candidate — the don’t be afraid, don’t look down — look up, we can aspire to better things, be hopeful, brighter days ahead guy.

While that’s neat — and I do feel good about our country electing an African-American president for the first time, and for choosing the let’s-not-blame-each-other, we’re-a-united-country, we-all-need-to-pull-together candidate?  While I think that’s neat and I do feel proud about that?

I do think it’s worth asking who in their right mind… would be hopeful about the country’s future with an economic outlook like this.

The economic crisis we’re in right now is so big and so dire, that you can’t use metaphors anymore to explain it.  The burning house, the house of cards, dominoes, they’ve all been rendered quaint by how big a mess this is.  Rather than a metaphor — how about a comparison.

If you add up the money that the federal government, the Bush Administration, has spent-or-committed-to-spend in an effort to shore up the economy THUS FAR — what we’ve spent or committed — it is greater than the entire cost of the new deal.

– It is greater than the cost of the Louisiana purchase. – It is greater than the cost of the Marshall plan. – It is greater than the cost of the Vietnam war. – It is greater than the cost of the KOREAN war. – It’s greater than the S&L scandal. – It is greater than the cost of the effort to get a rocket to the moon. – It is greater than the expenditures, actually, for the entire lifetime of NASA as an agency. – It’s greater, and I am not kidding here, it is greater than all of those things combined. – And yes, I’m adjusting those dollars for inflation.

For what we’ve spent… for all that… does it seem like we’re out of the woods?

Yeah, I know.

So it is hard to be hopeful.  About the future of the country… given the scale of the economic pickle that we’re in.

But you guys here in this room — maybe ought to be hopeful… about the prospects for fixing some of the problems you’ve joined this association to confront.  Oddly, the depth of the financial crisis may offer a historically-informed reason to be hopeful.  

And that’s because spending on infrastructure… at the federal level… and to a certain extent at the state level, too — starts to look like a smart economic idea, in tough economic times.

In fact, when you start reading, in any field, about crumbling American infrastructure, you very frequently come across the phrase, “about 80-years-old”!  So much of what we worry about, and what needs replacing, and what we wonder how we’ll ever match in terms of scale and ambition — is about 80 years old — because about 80 years ago — the second-President Roosevelt’s response to the great depression was to build build build, invest invest invest.  To spend massive amounts of public money to put people to work and to pray to the gods of keynesian economic prowess, that it would work to swing the country back into the black.

The spending helped… the projects were built… and ultimately what ended the depression full-stop, was World War 2 — and a level of massive national mobilization…and spending — that also had the pleasant side effect of liberating the world from Nazi tyranny and elevating us to superpower status and a source of envy and pride for the world.  (That list of all the massive spending outlays that don’t even come close to equalling what we’ve spent-or-committed-to-spend on this financial crisis?  That didn’t include World War 2.  We spent more on World War 2 than we’ve spend thus far on this crisis).

But in the 1930s, the Depression, the New Deal and its public-investment prescription meant a lot of very specific things to the West and water.  FDR promised the new deal in 1933 — in 1934 — the Bureau of Reclamation received a budget that was half of the total budget it had received for all of the previous 31 years combined.  A hundred million dollars!  

In the 1930s, we saw the construction of the Central Valley Project, the Big Thompson project, the Columbia Basin, of course the Hoover Dam, completed two years ahead of schedule in 1935.  

The Central Valley Project had been proposed in 1931, it had a hundred and seventy million dollars worth of bond-funding approved for it in 1933, but in the midst of the Great Depression and a dearth of investors, it wasn’t going anywhere until two years later, in 1935, when FDR approved federal funds for it.

As you all know, the CVP was a massive project, equivalent in size if not fame to the Tennessee Valley Authority — it was a huge undertaking that turned the Central Valley of California into the breadbasket of the nation.  And of course brought with it some equally massive environmental challenges.

Are we due for a new New Deal as a response to this current financial crisis? If you squint and he starts smoking again, can you imagine this new guy as Barack Delano Obama?  In some ways, yes.  Yes, we can.

Candidate Obama talked up a fifteen billion dollar national infrastructure investment bank while he was on the campaign trail.  Since the financial crisis ate trilions of dollars of investment income and stock value, since the industry we used to call “investment banking” disappeared in America, since we seriously began to ponder the very real possibility that there will no longer be any American-owned companies that make cars anymore — since jobless numbers started hitting ten, twenty, thirty year highs — you can take that 15 billion-dollar infrastructure-spending campaign-promise, add a zero on the end of it, and then start doubling.

By economic imperative if not ideological commitment, the federal government will increase, by impressive amounts, its spending on the home-grown systems that form the basis of our economy and our way of life.  

I interviewed then-Senator Obama about a week before the election; I asked him about infrastructure investment — and he proactively raised the issue of the electrical grid as something that is not only antiquated and fragile, but in need of a politically-informed overhaul to bring it in line with our ambitions about diversifying our energy sources and making our energy use more sustainable.  

In his first president-elect youtube radio fireside chat thingie — president-elect Obama then singled out roads and bridges and schools as targets for federal re-investment, as part of a new jobs program that he says aims to create or save 2 and a half million jobs over the next two years.

In other words, infrastructure is back.  Some Republicans in Congress will oppose a lot of the new spending, but they will not be able to mount a unified opposition to the democratic-led efforts because a lot of them support it, too.  Democrats like to capitulate to Republicans even when Republicans don’t have any real power to wield, so they will succeed in inflecting some of the spending bills, changing some of the areas of focus for the new investment, but they won’t stop it.  There will be a big new federal-spending commitment to roads, bridges, schools, mass transit, communications, energy, and… water.

Which is the silver lining we’ve been waiting to find… around the dark, dark cloud that is this worst economic forecast … in about 80 years.

But there’s that phrase again — in about 80 years.  If water-in-the-west is due once again for a round of federal investment much as it was in the last great economic downturn — should we expect that the same kind of projects will be built?  Is there another Hoover Dam, another CVP, another massive water-storage diversion civil engineering monument that’s ready-to-go, agreed-to, and just waiting to be funded?

Maybe there is — I’m not dumb enough to weigh in pro- or con- on the old peripheral canal idea, so don’t try to tempt me.

But my sense is that the infamous water wars of California… of which you-all are veterans… have seasoned you… prepared you well for the big-grab, the big resource scrum that’s ahead.  But I just want to interject one idea about how the politics of infrastructure and federal investment in infrastructure have recently been changing.  Since the Bush Administration has been in office and the Department of Homeland Security has been created — there’s been a sort-of democratic government-in-waiting taking shape, biding its time, working on campaigns, writing think-tank articles and giving speeches — about how they’d do security differently.

It’s true in every field, actually — Tom Daschle since he lost his job as democratic leader in the senate, has been positioning himself as the democratic party’s big health-care thinker — now he’s coming back to washington as the secretary of HHS.  Lawrence Summers, Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary — since he left Washington, he’s most publicly known for a really bad time as president of Harvard — but he’s also been the Democrats’ economic modeller-in-chief — very publicly transforming himself from an anti-regulation ruling-class-interests kind of guy — into the centrist reformed-deregulator, post-Rubinomics that is the hallmark of all the economists who Obama has brought to Washington now.  

And on security issues… one big difference between the outgoing administration and the incoming administration… the old-school and the new-school, which you can tell if you geek out on this stuff like I do and you read the academic papers of and go to the speeches of the wonks who have been the Democratic-government-in-waiting while Bush has been in office?  The difference?  Is that the homeland security thinking of the new guys.  Includes infrastructure.

Which means you won’t be able to compete for infrastructure resources using the same arguments that you did with the Bush administration… or that you might have used during earlier eras of federal investment like during the New Deal.

I think you can make the case that the first era in water-in-the-west was defined by development — on the national scale it was Manifest Destiny, at the local scale… it was things like the migration of people out of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake that forced the quick buildup of water infrastructure in the area where I grew up.

The second era of water-in-the-west I think has been the struggle to find sustainability — balance… to make sure that even the stakeholders who don’t use water to turn a profit, are having their interests represented in the great competition for western water.

As you know here in California, fish have much better lawyers now than they did back in the day. Sustainability and environmental concerns are not going away in California or anywhere else.  Ideally we’d be moving into a time in which environmental and business concerns were not always automatically assumed to be at odds, but as long as there are scarce resources, held to a certain extent in common, which require private exploitation for necessary for-profit industries… I think there’s always going to be conflict there.  Creative conflict, hopefully — but conflict.  May the best lawyers win!

I’d argue now, that a third era is on us that isn’t specific to the west, but will affect how well the west does against the rest of the nation in competing for federally-funded infrastructure investment… and ultimately what kind of projects get agreed-to, funded, and built here in this era of opportunity — and that’s the issue of security.  The ideas of catastrophe and resilience.

All those peat levees built oh-about-80-years-ago in the Sacramento-San-Joaquin river valley?  Their failure due to earthquake, flood, or evil design?  Would not only drown the islands of the delta… it would drown the islands of the delta and the delta itself under hundreds of billions of gallons of salt water.  And then what would California drink?

Sure, the great aqueduct every year swallows its fair share of cars, trash and unlucky fishermen… but what if the little pipebombs those fishermen sometimes put into the aqueduct to make the fishing a little easier (and a heck of a lot more dramatic)… what if one day instead we found a smuggled warhead… a biologic agent… maybe capable of killing a lot of people… definitely capable of terrorizing a whole population.

Of the 101 chemical facilities in the United States that are considered to pose the highest risks to nearby population centers?  15 are water utilities.  What if one of the 11 of those utilities that uses chlorine gas as its treatment agent… what if one of those utilities, again, due to earthquake, flood, or evil design, ended up pushing a cloud of chlorine gas downwind to the nearest population center…

Infrastructure is central to security for two reasons.  One — it’s a target for terrorism for all the obvious reasons.  The goal of terrorism is to generate enough social and economic disruption — to traumatize an entire population.  And thereby generate political pressure to pursue draconian measures in response, that ultimately undermine the sustainability of the existing political leadership… or ultimately… that undermine the sustainability of that whole existing political system.  Terrorism works like an antigen — you introduce an agent to an organism that causes the organism to turn its own resources against itself.

For that reason, we’ve seen on 9/11, in Madrid, in London, in Mumbai — low-tech coordinated terrorist assaults designed to inflict maximum civilian casualties, maximum disruption, maximum economic impact.  Bin Laden, in statements since 9/11, has consistently bragged about the economic impact of the September 11th attacks — the bang for the buck — how little the operation cost them to carry out, as compared to the costs it inflicted on us… and that we later inflicted on ourselves.

So infrastructure is important to security first, because it’s an obvious target for terrorism.  But infrastructure is also important to security because even if the threat does not come from terrorism, having the ability to withstand natural disaster, the strains that come from growth and development is an important indicator of national strength, and of competitive advantage.  

The Council on Competitiveness last year reported on risk, security, and terrorism for the private and public sectors, and concluded that, “the ability to manage emerging risks, anticipate the interactions between different types of risk, and bounce back from disruption will be a competitive differentiator for companies and countries alike in the 21st century”.

Companies and countries alike — and I’d argue, states as well.  

People and companies and the ensuing opportunities will gravitate to places that seem robust, dependable, and predictable.  Not being able to manage crises? Having obvious sources of risk and potential catastrophe unattended to?  Is a great excuse for any business to say bye-bye California hello Puget Sound, hello Toronto, hello Asia…

This is the new thing to understand about the new Democratic federal political scene.  The idea is that things will go wrong periodically — whether by God’s design or man’s — and our ability to be resilient, to withstand a punch, to bounce back quickly, to get things back to normal — is a form of national resilient strength and national security… that puts a different cast on potentially catastrophic failure of existing infrastructure.

The guy who’s best at spelling this out is a retired Coast Guard officer from the east coast named Stephen Flynn — he wrote a book called Edge of Disaster — required reading for understanding how to argue for infrastructure investment in the new administration.

Our water infrastructure, much like our energy, communications, transportation, and emergency response systems — need to be able to stay standing, to stay operational in the face of natural disaster or man-made disaster.  That means that our systems need to be strong-enough and well-maintained enough to take a punch — it also means we may need redundancy built into the system — so if critical function are incapacitated, we can swap something else in temporarily to take its place until repairs can be completed.  

Even if the world were as safe as it felt when I was growing up drinking East Bay Mud tapwater… it would still be the right thing to do by America to make those kinds of investments.  We skipped a generation of investment in infrastructure — we just passed the fifty-year anniversary of the Eisenhower interstate system — and those roads and bridges built for less than 200 million people … are now, at the end of their expected lifespans, serving more than THREE hundred million people… who sit in traffic a lot… and pray a lot… when we feel that truck ahead of us on the bridge making those expansion joints rumble.  We’re squandering the inheritance from our smart grandparents who built this country — we’re not doing our part.

Even if the world were as safe as it felt when my mom first planted those California poppies in our back yard, investing in infrastructure would still be the right thing to do, particularly in a massive economic downturn — in order to give American business a fair-shake at competing in the modern world, just as the earlier generations of investment gave American business a huge leg-up in the world because our reliable water sources, our aquifers, or aqueducts, our dams, our electrical system, our highways, our airports and our air traffic system… they were the envy of the world.

Now, the imperative of security has added a new layer to the way that we talk about and argue for and make decisions about what gets built and what gets maintained, where the money goes.  Thinking about security, thinking about catastrophe isn’t fun – it isn’t the kind of be-afraid–be-triumphant emotional whipsaw that we’ve been on, nationally, for the last seven-plus years since 9/11.  But it is the grown-up way for us to move forward as a country.  It’s about denying our enemies easy targets and satisfying results.  And beyond terrorism, it’s about responsibility and competence and the core strength of the country.  

In the big scramble for resources that’s coming, as the new administration starts thinking new-deal-ish thoughts, the choice that you guys have to make now — is whether, looking west, California will look like the land of perennial water wars and thorny politics and the-perfect-as-the-enemy-of-the-good — or whether, instead, California will be able to describe its plans for its own future, in clear terms that resonate with the new politics… that are sweeping into Washington.  

It’s a real honor to have been asked to speak here today — thank you so much for having me.

As you probably know, we are in a three-year long drought.  Reservoirs are already low heading into the dry season, and snowpack levels are frighteningly low.  The Sierras are supposed to get some decent snowfall over the next few days, but nothing big enough to come close to making up the big deficit. If you’d like way more data on our current water situation than you probably want to see, check out the Dept. of Water Resources site.  I will add, that it’s a bit hard to navigate, and the data is a bit stale.

But the data is undeniable. We are in a massive drought right now. And that brings very difficult choices, choices that might bring about the extinction of several species:

But in practice the request means threatened Delta smelt could be sacrificed. The fingerling smelt, native to the estuary, is breeding now and needs freshwater flows to provide the year’s young fish with proper habitat. The smelt and its cousin, the native longfin smelt, are at a record population lows and believed to be on the verge of extinction. Without adequate water flowing through the estuary, their days could be numbered.

“We pray it won’t be the extiction of these species,” said Spreck Rosekrans, an analyst at the Environmental Defense Fund. “It’s unfortunate, with all the forecast and planning tools that the agencies have available, that we need to make a difficult choice between salmon and fish that live in the Delta. This is unprecedented.”(SacBee 2/6/09)

Note that if you read down, you see the consequences of the furloughs with reporters not being able to contact the DWR with questions about the smelt.  At any rate, this very well could mean the end for a species native to only the Sacramento Delta, the fingerling smelt.

And of course, the fish aren’t the only ones hurting.  Down the road, farmers and related business are being devastated:

Never since the Central Valley Project was authorized in 1935 have California’s farmers been so worried about the lack of water. Three years of too little rain combined with pumping restrictions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta have created a nightmare scenario: The federal government might soon cut off the state’s largest supply of agricultural water – the first time in California history.(SJ Merc 2/6/09)

Perhaps this was a long time in coming, we have totally reshaped the Central Valley and its climate.  Yet, it is difficult to understate the importance of the Central Valley to the state and the nation as a whole.  This is where a vast percentage of non-grain produce for the nation is grown. 90+% of the world’s almonds are grown here, as well as a great deal of tree fruits and lettuces.  If you are eating in California, the American West, and basically the entire nation, you are eating food from the Central Valley.

Of course, there is an economic toll to this drought, as farmers are left without resources for their crops.  They are soon left to default on other debts, and businesses dependent on agriculture are left without customers.

But this is the New California.  Climate change is really here, and we have to adapt or die. It really is that simple. Already Bolinas is enacting harsh water restrictions, but it will surely not be the last. The sooner we face up to this, the better.  The era of green lawns is over. The era of swimming pools in every backyard is over. Certainly we have the ability to make changes for the better, the only question is our own will.  It may be too late for the Delta smelt, but we can hope we don’t have to repeat this tragedy every year.

The new Energy Secretary, UC Berkeley physicist Steven Chu, has offered a chilling warning to California of the consequences of unchecked global warming – consequences we’re already witnessing:

“I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,” he said. “We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.” And, he added, “I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going” either….

Chu warned of water shortages plaguing the West and Upper Midwest and particularly dire consequences for California, his home state, the nation’s leading agricultural producer.

In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.

One of those cities facing severe crisis already is Bolinas, in Marin County:

The oceanside enclave in Marin County has enacted some of the state’s toughest water restrictions. Each customer – with the exception of schools and some businesses – may use no more than 150 gallons a day, about 4,500 gallons each month.

A third violation of the order would allow the Bolinas Community Public Utility District to cut off water.

Without drastic cutbacks, officials say, the community of 1,200 could run out of water by the end of April. The town on the southern end of the Point Reyes Peninsula already is drawing from two emergency reservoirs, one of which is effectively empty.

There are a lot of California cities that are nervously watching Bolinas and the dry reservoirs, including Monterey. Sure, we’re due to get some rain tonight, but the estimates are that we’ll get 1-2 inches tops out of the two storms lined up in the Pacific. At this point we need a deluge reminiscent of March and April 2006 to recharge our reservoirs, severely depleted by three months of drought.

Back to Secretary Chu – he offered a strong warning to Americans about the need to not delay action on global warming and sustainable energy use:

He said the threat of warming is keeping policymakers focused on alternatives to fossil fuel, even though gasoline prices have fallen over the last six months from historic highs. But he said public awareness needs to catch up. He compared the situation to a family buying an old house and being told by an inspector that it must pay a hefty sum to rewire it or risk an electrical fire that could burn everything down.

“I’m hoping that the American people will wake up,” Chu said, and pay the cost of rewiring.

One of those who ought to be listening is Senator Barbara Boxer, who was yesterday reported to be working with global warming denier Jim Inhofe to divert $50 billion in transit funding for highways. Massive pressure from transit activists has led Boxer to lessen the damage somewhat but she is still working with Inhofe, for reasons that defy all logic and common sense, and Transportation for America which has led this fight still opposes the amendment.

As the US Senate fiddles, and as the Yacht Party actively seeks to destroy our state’s government, California is going dry. The climate crisis is here.

In the 1930s two crises hit the Great Plains at once – 50 years of overfarming marginal lands had destroyed the topsoil and created what we know as the Dust Bowl, and at least twenty years of economic pressure to overfarm (to pay debts and make up for collapsed prices) had created an untenable financial situation for the farmers. Either one was going to end in disaster – the land would give out or the overuse of credit would end in deflation and ruin. As it happened, the crises both occurred at exactly the same time, producing a social catastrophe from which several states have still not recovered.

California now faces the same problem. For 60 years we have based our economy on the production and consumption of sprawl. This worked well enough until the late 1970s, when those who had prospered the most from this model decided to stop reinvesting profits in the state and in society, and took their ball and went home. The next 30 years were dominated by even more sprawl, financed by massive amounts of debt and by eating the state’s seed corn by slashing the government programs that built prosperity in the first place.

This was always bound to end in disaster, and as we are well aware, that disaster – in the form of economic depression and government bankruptcy – is now here. But the massive sprawlconomy binge had another set of costs whose bill is now coming due – water.

California had an unusually wet 20th century, and we exploited that to the fullest. To have a society built on sprawl and consumption, we needed to siphon as much water as possible to give not just to the new housing developments, but to the sprawling farms. Sprawl is a farming phenomenon as well – wasting land and water resources on resource-intensive crops grown to enrich shareholders, instead of sensibly using land and water to grow crops for subsistence and food security. California was in a water bubble, just as the state was experiencing a financial bubble. We have been living well beyond our means.

Ultimately the water bubble was going to burst. And just as in the 1930s Great Plains, it is bursting at the same moment as the economic bubble. For the least year or so you could drive down the backroads of the Salinas Valley, Salad Bowl Of The World, and see shuttered warehouses and laid off packing workers.

Now that water is less available the agricultural recession is shifting into higher gear. The highest unemployment rates in California are in our agricultural counties – 22.6% in Imperial, 14.3% in Tulare, 13.7% here in Monterey County. (Note: those stats are for nonfarm jobs, and yet the correlation between ag and the rest of the county economy is obviously very strong.)

The water crisis is now about to come to the rest of California. Sitting here in Monterey, in summer-like weather in January, I am inclined to believe the claims that this is the worst drought ever in the state’s recorded history:

California teeters on the edge of the worst drought in the state’s history, officials said Thursday after reporting that the Sierra Nevada snowpack – the backbone of the state’s water supply – is only 61 percent of normal.

January usually douses California with about 20 percent of the state’s annual precipitation, but instead it delivered a string of dry, sunny days this year, almost certainly pushing the state into a third year of drought.

The drought exacerbates the problems caused by our overuse of water resources. To prevent a total environmental collapse in the Delta massive reductions of water flows will be required. And for those of us who live in counties that don’t get our water from the Delta – places like Sonoma, Marin, and Monterey – the situation is going to be worse. Water managers in those counties are planning to 50% cutbacks in urban water use, which is an amount that will dramatically change how we live. We could let every lawn die and stop hosing down every driveway and still not get anywhere close to 50% reductions.

The Monterey Peninsula has been under Stage 1 water rationing for ten years now. You rarely see water wasted here, and new development has been at a standstill (how many towns have vacant lots and abandoned homes within a mile of the beach as we do?). But a 50% cut will force dramatic changes in how we live, as it will around the state.

Those changes ARE coming. There is no way around the fact that the way California was organized in the 20th century – politically, economically, and especially in terms of our land use and water use – is over. Done. Gone.

The question for us now is will we try to actively transition California to a more sustainable future? Or will we do nothing and let the chips fall where they may? The first option at least allows us a chance of rebuilding widely shared prosperity by funding local food, sustainable farming, and urban density. The latter would produce widespread immiseration while allowing a small aristocratic elite to enjoy a semblance of the 20th century lifestyle.

The choice is up to us.

As if we didn’t have enough going on to make these times feel like the 1930s, the Salinas Californian reports on widespread abandonment of fields by farmers in the Central and Salinas Valleys. A devastating combination of drought and recession are leading to a crisis in California farming, endangering our food security:

Consumers may pay more for spring lettuce and summer melons in grocery stores across the country now that California farmers have started abandoning their fields in response to a crippling drought.

California’s sweeping Central Valley grows most of the country’s fruits and vegetables in normal years, but this winter thousands of acres are turning to dust as the state hurtles into the worst drought in nearly two decades.

Federal officials’ recent announcement that the water supply they pump through the nation’s largest farm state would drop further was enough to move John “Dusty” Giacone to forego growing vegetables so he can save his share to drip-irrigate 1,000 acres of almond trees.

The drought is exacerbated by the problems facing the Delta and endangered fish stocks, as overpumping of the Delta has led to an environmental crisis necessitating reduction in water deliveries to farmers and cities alike.

The situation is just as bad in parts of the state not dependent on the Delta. Monterey County and the Salinas Valley get their water from reservoirs in the Big Sur watershed. A third dry winter in a row means they are very low, and will likely necessitate further cuts to urban users and to farmers. Cattle ranchers, a significant industry around Monterey County, have had to move their stocks elsewhere in the state in recent summers and are going to have a difficult time remaining in business this summer.

As stories of peanut butter recalls and tainted Chinese food products dominate the news, locally-grown food becomes that much more important.

California agriculture and water systems need reform, and clearly the answer isn’t to just send water we don’t have into the fields. But this is a reminder of the crisis we all face as a state, and that we need a sustainable water solution.