Water Always Wins

Eighty percent of water used by humans in the state goes to irrigate California’s $ 38 billion crop industry, which supplies more than a third of US vegetables, two-thirds of its fruits and nuts, and international markets. This bounty is made possible by tapping groundwater and micromanaging a vast complex of water-engineering projects: dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, canals, levees, and pumps that have fundamentally changed the natural hydrology of the entire state and caused countless unintended consequences. The San Joaquin River is so diverted that, for more than a half century, it often ran dry for sixty miles. Beyond that, starting at the Mendota Pool, the water coursing through its banks was not even its own. One water expert called the Central Valley “the least wild landscape imaginable.”