They've still got golf courses out there, no?
I don't know to what extent agriculture controls the state politics but it seems to me from top to bottom there's a massive denial of this problem. But as long as the big money don't want change none will occur.
Maybe the state would be better off split into 2 or 3 states. It seems like different regions face different challenges.
Division into separate states wont happen, the other regions take Northern CA water, but have a higher population density and out vote us.
Ag. and golf courses obviously have political clout. I don't understand why we hear nothing on the federal level about this, as you would think we should be encouraging more fruit and veggie production in other regions -- you would think that our farms bills would try to do this, but no. And, most of CA almonds, alfalfa (which use alot of water, not sure how much of the rice exports) is exported out of the country, to the far East, China.
By declaring an emergency, I think it means they can suspend other protections we insisted upon without regular due process - but this is the part in his declaration that cant be interpreted without looking up a bunch of other laws. If you were to click on the link sited in a previous post by Gov. Brown and read the whole thing (I did) it does say that part of this suspension of process etc... is for "salt water intrusion barriers" in the Delta. This is East of San Francisco Bay, so Northern CA. I looked elsewhere to look up what this means. They are going to build quite a few little earthen/rock temporary dams here, where the fresh water meets the brackish, that they think will keep salt water intrusion from spreading too far back. This means they are going to just keep sending the River water south -- and hope this band aid holds from too much salt intrusion for local agriculture and household water -- both of which take local water from the Delta.
So, business as usual for ag. The only thing mentioned is that big Ag. now has to report water use to the state, and that the ground water stuff passed last year, which had a 25 year gradual implementation scheduale, is now bumped up and the local water districts get to take this new data the farms have to supply and come up with a plan by the end of THIS year, end of 2015. Maybe legally it just cant go any faster at this point as they have no data ? It is plausible that to suspend certain crops and exports they have to prove they are the ones using the ground water ?
But, I would think, if you can suspend all environmental protections to take more water than we all legally agreed to -- you would think that kind of emergency would also mean they could say no potable water at all to golf courses, and no out of country exportation of water hungery crops -- but no
When we talk of environmental damage, this isnt a delta smelt over people argument at all. The delta smelt is an indicator species. They are small and susceptible to salt levels etc.... so they were picked to indicate how badly we are messing up the entire SF bay ecosystem. They are easy to count and monitor, and the are a food source for many other bigger critters. But it isnt about them. If they are gone, the rest will die. That is the problem. When we kill entire large regional ecosystems, if/when we collapse them further, the systems we use for our own survival will follow. So, look at a map, the 2 largest CA rivers, Sacramento and SanJoaquin, going into the combined delta system into our largest bay, San Francisco Bay, is a huge thing we are killing. It provides, and provided even more in the past, a ton of human benefit and food. But, corporate farms need that water, to provide lower quality food for a relatively short amount of time, and then leave a desert. It hasnt even been 200 years we have farmed it, it will be fairly untenable by 200 years. So, we let and are letting corporations basically mine, like a strip mine, the soil and water. 200 years, done, and they will move on to destroy another area of the world.
My DIL, who works for a local water conservation nonprofit, just told me we are either the only California county, or one of very few, that doesn't either import or export water. And, agriculture is also a super large industry here. And, we use way, way less water per capita than elsewhere, even the lowest in the state. Maybe since we have no state or federal water subsidies and have to live within our means, we chose to conserve and not build our own desalintion plant (for home use). Agriculture has to be very careful as our farm land is right by the ocean and salt water intrusion happens and will ruin land if you pump out too much ground water, so if they want to keep farming it, they have to watch what they do.
