This has been a dry year, the second in a row. It has not been, at least not yet, bleached-bones-in-the-lake-bed dry -- "a marginal call," is how one veteran hydrologist politely described Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's decision last month to declare a drought.
Still, it's been dry enough to infuse the water debate with a jolt of heightened urgency and to generate interest beyond the ranks of its perpetual participants. In this particular form of trench warfare, dry spells present an ideal climate for advancement. Whether the objective is to build more dams or provide more cool, fresh water for salmon runs, it's better to push during a dry time than in a season of downpours.
More than 15 years have passed since California last sweated out a drought. That arid epoch gave rise to a raft of measures: legislation to protect fisheries, conservation initiatives, water banks and water trading, collaborative processes to forge consensus among competing "stakeholders."
Somewhere along the way, though, that happy train careened off the rails. Today, in federal courtrooms and before blue ribbon commissions, in farm-town coffee shops and newspaper opinion pages, the brotherhood is slugging it out, same as ever. Farm versus fish. North versus South. Concrete versus conservation. Once again, farmers on the valley's west side are grousing loudly about water cutbacks. Once again, environmentalists are fighting in court to keep fish from being driven toward extinction.
"Sometimes I wonder," mused Thomas Graff, an environmental lawyer and longtime key water person, "if we all just disappeared, would anything be all that different?"
To make the deja vu complete, there even have been fresh calls to resurrect the Peripheral Canal, the 42-mile waterway that Californians rejected with vigor in 1982. Instead of pumping from the delta -- a practice that contributes to the demise of fish and that has caught the stern attention of a federal judge -- river water would be shuttled around the estuary.
This end run would ensure a more reliable flow of water for Southern California's Metropolitan Water District and several San Francisco Bay Area cities, and also for San Joaquin Valley farmers hooked into the federal waterworks. What it would do for, or to, the delta -- well, that will be quite a discussion.
