Snowpack: The Canary in a Coal Mine - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 166

“WE COULD USE LESS WATER”
On June 4, 2008, two months after Gehrke's trip to Phillips, and a year after Peter Gleick
and Lester Snow jousted over dams at the ACWA conference, Governor Arnold Sch-
warzenegger leaned into a bristle of microphones in front of the statehouse in Sacra-
mento and said, “ his March, April, and May have been the driest ever in our recor-
ded history . Some local governments are rationing water. Developments can't proceed.
Agricultural fields are sitting idle. We must recognize the severity of the crisis.”
After the driest spring in eighty-eight years, California's rivers and reservoirs had
dropped to 41 percent of their average depth. Governor Schwarzenegger issued the
state's first drought proclamation in sixteen years and declared a state of emergency in
nine of the state's fifty-eight counties. Schwarzenegger also directed Lester Snow and the
state Department of Water Resources to improve efficiency and coordination among
local water districts, facilitate water transfers, and expedite grant programs. The gov-
ernor said these measures would aid water conservation and struggling farmers. But if
people didn't voluntarily cut back on water use, he warned, every California resident
would face mandatory water rationing.
Then, with great urgency, he proposed an $11 billion bond to underwrite the con-
struction of new dams at Temperance Flat, at Sites and Los Vaqueros Reservoirs, and
a Peripheral Canal around the ailing Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, just a few miles
from where he stood. “ Water is like our gold ,” Schwarzenegger said. “We have to treat it
like that. There is no more time to waste.”
When I asked Peter Gleick about this, he responded tartly, “No new dams are
needed! Efficient toilets would save California more than 130 billion gallons of water
every year—more than the annual yield of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir.”
The battle occasionally grew personal, as when Michael Wade , executive director
of the California Farm Water Coalition, wrote to the SanFranciscoChronicle,“Peter
Gleick demonstrates his disdain for California farmers by claiming the taking away of
water … and adding a few more low-flow toilets … is the solution to our state's water
woes…. He thinks cotton doesn't contribute enough to California's economy because
other crops have the ability to generate more income. What's next on the chopping
block, cheaper varieties of lettuce? … Does his thinking include jobs?”
As Gleick saw it, Governor Schwarzenegger, Lester Snow, the ACWA men, the agri-
cultural lobby, and their mostly rural sympathizers remain fixated on the idea that dams
haveto be part of the solution to California's water problems simply because that has
always been the answer in the past. “It's a mind-set, an inability to believe that serious
water problems can't be solved by morestorage,” Gleick said. “I get frustrated by this