Dry times revive an old debate

Here is where the straws tap into the common pool of California water, where consequence begins. Here, on the backside of the Diablo Mountains, amid a landscape of bleached-out pastures, wind farms and transmission lines, the two-lane Byron Highway crosses the concrete headwaters of two canals.

The first is the California Aqueduct, main artery of the State Water Project, which propels delta water on a 444-mile beeline to Southern California. Two miles down the road the Delta-Mendota Canal also has its fountainhead, feeding the federal Central Valley Project -- an audacious rewrite of nature designed, as the boosters sang, to "make a desert bloom."

They're easy to miss from the road, announced only by minimal signage, tangles of barbed wire and posted warnings, in English and Spanish, "Stay Out: You May Drown" and "Danger: Swift Current." Yet these are critical pieces of connective tissue, binding together the watery north with an arid south.

Not that everyone's sanguine about the arrangement. Grumblings about plugging Sierra rivers to fill Los Angeles swimming pools and supplying farmers subsidized water to grow subsidized cotton have been staples of the state's political rhetoric for decades.

Of more pressing concern at present is the environmental cost -- an escalating collapse of the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the West Coast's largest estuary. It is a crisis marked by creeping saltwater, toxins and, most visibly, the disappearance of fish.

"It all looks pretty innocuous, doesn't it?" said Bill Jennings, peering down into the rippling aqueduct at a point south of the pump house. "Just looking at it, you wouldn't know what this is doing to the delta, would you?"

Jennings is a water person, a member of that insular society of experts and activists sometimes described as the Hydraulic Brotherhood. He happens to be an environmentalist.

There are many other classifications of water people -- engineers, irrigators, biologists, bureaucrats, lobbyists and lawyers, many, many lawyers. If California water litigation were rainfall, we'd all be building arks.

Their ceaseless wrangling has gone on for decades, since the Gold Rush really, but typically without much notice. Only in dry years do Californians on the faucet end of the plumbing begin to pay attention. Only in dry years do low-flow toilets and San Joaquin Valley crop patterns and delta fish counts become part of the public discourse.