Floods, Droughts, and Lawsuits: a Brief History of California Water Policy
1Floods, Droughts, and Lawsuits: A Brief History of California Water Policy MPI/GETTY IMAGES The history of California in the twentieth century is the story of a state inventing itself with water. William L. Kahrl, Water and Power, 1982 California’s water system might have been invented by a Soviet bureaucrat on an LSD trip. Peter Passell, “Economic Scene: Greening California,” New York Times, 1991 California has always faced water management challenges and always will. The state’s arid and semiarid climate, its ambitious and evolving economy, and its continually growing population have combined to make shortages and conflicting demands the norm. Over the past two centuries, California has tried to adapt to these challenges through major changes in water manage- ment. Institutions, laws, and technologies are now radically different from those brought by early settlers coming to California from more humid parts of the United States. These adaptations, and the political, economic, technologic, and social changes that spurred them on, have both alleviated and exacerbated the current conflicts in water management. This chapter summarizes the forces and events that shaped water man- agement in California, leading to today’s complex array of policies, laws, and infrastructure. These legacies form the foundation of California’s contemporary water system and will both guide and constrain the state’s future water choices.1 1. Much of the description in this chapter is derived from Norris Hundley Jr.’s outstanding book, The Great Thirst: Californians and Water: A History (Hundley 2001), Robert Kelley’s seminal history of floods in the Central Valley, Battling the Inland Sea (Kelley 1989), and Donald Pisani’s influential study of the rise of irrigated agriculture in California, From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California (Pisani 1984).
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