Channeling Mulholland

The early history of Los Angeles was defined by its struggle to get water wherever, and whenever, it could. William Mulholland and his colleagues did such a good job of securing water supplies during the early 20th century -- building the 223-mile-long, gravity-fed Los Angeles Aqueduct, which imports water from the Owens Valley; establishing the Metropolitan Water District, which brings in water from the Colorado River and Northern California -- that those of us living here today take for granted our lush gardens and year-round blooms. They appear a native bounty when they are, in fact, a work of man. We offer pious lip service to the notion that water is scarce when the weather is dry, only to forget our concerns at the fall of the first raindrop. Implicitly, we behave as if water will always be available and unlimited.

This must change. This page did not like the water bond that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger backed last year, but he is on to something when he insists that California needs to rethink its complicated and woefully overburdened water system. It has been said many times before, but it bears repeating: Our state's breathtaking natural beauty, envied easygoing lifestyle and booming economy -- the California dream chronicled and immortalized by our resident historian, Kevin Starr -- depend on an ambitiously conceived network of aqueducts, pumps, dams and pipes that will literally run dry if we don't invest heavily to change the way we use, capture, store and distribute water.

Figuring out what kind of investments are called for will not be easy. Dwindling freshwater supplies are a worldwide problem, not limited to dusty Western states. In Atlanta, which gets more than 50 inches of rain in an average year (that's more than three times Los Angeles' typical rainfall), drought forced Gov. Sonny Perdue to declare a state of emergency in 2007 as water supplies sank to a frightening three-month supply. In the Upper Midwest, fear that dry Southern states will muster the political power to build pipelines to import water from the region has become "the third rail of Great Lakes politics,” as one observer wrote. Worldwide, according to research cited recently by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, about 2.7 billion people live in countries where climate change and water-related crises create a high risk of violent conflict. Another 1.2 billion suffer high risk of political instability from water shortages. Ban has pledged to protect water resources as a part of his global anti-poverty efforts.