The Dammed - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 160

“Wrong, wrong, wrong!” Peter Gleick recoiled in a blog post. In fact, Gleick pointed
out, since 1969 California had added the New Melones Dam, Warm Springs Dam, and
Los Vaqueros Dam. And the last significant dam to be built in the United States was the
Diamond Valley Reservoir, in Riverside County, which was completed in 1999. All told,
these dams impound some 8.6 million acre-feet of water, which is a far from negligible
amount.
Just before the 2007 ACWA conference in Sacramento, Lester Snow and Governor
Schwarzenegger had proposed a multibillion-dollar bond offering, largely designed to
fund “more surface storage.” Translated, this meant that in response to the worsening
drought, they proposed to build two new dams—one at Temperance Flat, east of Fresno,
and the other at the Sites Reservoir, on the western side of the Sacramento Valley—and
expand a third dam, at Los Vaqueros in Contra Costa County. In addition, they pro-
posed building a forty-three-mile-long Peripheral Canal around the troubled Sacra-
mento Delta.
The latter idea was not new, or popular. When a similar canal project had been pro-
posed in 1982, it became the focus of an intense political battle and was resoundingly
crushed by voters. But now the Delta was facing more problems than ever: crumbling
levees, development in flood zones, and court-ordered restrictions on water withdraw-
als from the estuary to stem the decimation of salmon, smelt, and other marine life.
“The history of the West is that you never killa dam, you just postpone the debate,”
Gleick told me. “Dams have a way of coming back, like the undead.”
Gleick believes that Schwarzenegger's proposed dams would cost too much, would
not provide the benefits they promised, would be environmentally destructive, were
political sops to powerful agricultural interests, and were short-term answers to the real
long-term issue, which is that Californians use water wastefully and unsustainably.
“I'm not against all dams, per se,” Gleick told me. “I just think there are smarter,
cheaper ways for California to achieve its goals, and we ought to try those first.”
To him, placing huge bets on massive infrastructure projects is a twentieth-century
conceit that should now be discarded in favor of a new approach: relatively low-cost,
low-impact, long-term, high-technology solutions, such as drip irrigation, low-flow
showerheads, front-mounted washing machines, and other water conservation tech-
niques. Pairing this with financial incentives (i.e., raising water rates to reduce con-
sumption) and new regulations, he said, will nurture a more efficient and sustainable
use of water.
“We already know how to do more with less water,” he said. “It's incontrovertible. In
fact, the United States today uses far less water per person than we did twenty-five years
ago. People find this shocking, but it's true.”