The Sacramento Delta: A Gordian Knot - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 216

activists have declared war on the salmon- and smelt-killing pumps and the proposed
Peripheral Canal. The result is a circular argument that leads nowhere.
“It's the ultimate Gordian knot . There's no other system in the world as complex as
the Delta,” said UC Berkeley professor Ray Seed, who is studying the Delta with his col-
league Bob Bea. In 2009, the state legislature passed a broad water package that created
the Delta Stewardship Council as a central authority on the matter. But veterans of Delta
battles questioned whether anything will change.
In July 2010, California faced a $19.9 billion budget deficit, and Governor Schwar-
zenegger pushed his $11.1 billion water bond—$3 billion of which was slated for the
new dams in the Central Valley and $1.5 billion for the Peripheral Canal around the
Delta—back to the 2012 ballot, which may signal its demise. (Schwarzenegger was suc-
ceeded by Jerry Brown, a Democrat, in 2011.)
“We've had a sixty-, seventy-year stalemate,” said Seed. “The biggest change now is
the conjugate level of desperation from all parties. No one is winning, and people are fi-
nally realizing that if we all keep fighting each other, we eventually will all lose together.”
THE WATER WE NEED VERSUS THE WATER WE HAVE
To Gleick, the central question presented by the Delta—and, by extension, water use in
general—is “Who needs water, how much water do they need, what do they need it for,
and where is it going to come from?”
Farmers, cities, residents, industry, and aquatic species all have claims on the estu-
ary's limited resources. The dispute over the Delta is about how to satisfy as many of
those water users as possible. But perhaps we have been looking in the wrong direction
for answers.
“We don't really want water,per se,” said Gleick. “We want to grow our alfalfa or
tomatoes, to make our semiconductors, to clean our clothes, to be happy fish. Large
amounts of water is what we have been using to accomplish those things. But we need
to rethink that.”
The Delta's conveyance system grew ad hoc, over a century, with the undergirding
supply-and-demand question being, how do we move water from Point A to Point B?
Today, the demand question is, what is the minimum amount of water that will satis-
fy our needs? The supply questions are, do we have enough water to accomplish those
goals? Where should our water supply be, and how do we design a system to move it?
“We need to change the mind-set away from an engineering mentality —'Let's find
the water we need'—to a management mentality—'Let's manage the water we have
more wisely,' ” Gleick said. “It's difficult. But it's not impossible.”