Dams fragment, divert and subjugate the world’s rivers. In one long lifespan, beginning with the inauguration of Hoover Dam in 1936, the engineering marvel of the 20th century, civilization has altered the most important function that makes the earth work, water. Thus, transmuting humanity into something foreign to the earth it inhabits — a stranger to the very system which gave rise to our species.

The late Carl Sagan was among precious few visionary humans who shared the extraordinary ability to differentiate between deep thought and deep nonsense and recognized the persistence of a satisfying delusion to perpetuate the latter. He understood with clarity that Earth, albeit the universe, was not held by any laws of science or sciences god to harmonize with or support the human ambition of massively reengineering the Earth.

Dr. Sagan wrote, “We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an earth that otherwise sends us spinning off into space or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend.” Without some sense, some outline of how the earth works and our relationship to it, one is deprived of knowing, let alone of asking, the really important questions that promote regenerative life and prevent massive-scale destruction and degeneration.

It is only in blindness that ignorance can find engineering arrogance and feed the certainty of human expediency — that millions of dams can exist worldwide strangling the lubricant of life itself. It is true that dams have created a seemingly unlimited oasis in arid and semi-arid regions of the world. Produced unimaginable population centers in water-stressed locations, food production on marginal arid lands, cheap taxpayer subsidized water and artificial lakes aplenty for fishing, camping and boating. It seems a good thing, yet, what isn’t accounted for is the short-term duration and ecological costs. It has created this artificial bonanza by short-circuiting the natural system of limitations much as the one time wonder of fossil fuels has short-circuited and driven the industrial revolution. The debts of temporary prosperity are all due and payable in the 21st Century.

In the present state of affairs, water, energy, population, war, global economic expansionism, and failing ecological systems are sending shockwaves throughout the vulnerable global community while staggering the biosphere which keeps us among the living tentatively.

Earth Recycling

The world’s water budget is a fixed volume and has remained unchanged for roughly 2.2 billion years in its present state. About 1% of the world’s total water circulates as freshwater while oceans represent 97% of the world’s stores and the remaining 2% is tied up in glaciers and polar ice caps. This finite water pie divides ever more thinly as population, agriculture and the industrial economy expands.

The uninterrupted Earth is a dynamic solar and geothermal energy system which powers the hydrologic and rock cycles. It conducts and convects energy flows from the earth’s 10,000 degree iron core outward through the mantle and lithosphere (crust) generating plate collisions that move continents and trip earthquakes. Magma driven plate collisions uplift mountain ranges and setoff volcanoes recycling lava and gases on land and underwater replenishing both with life-producing minerals.

Solar energy evaporates surface water primarily from oceans to atmosphere to land as water or snow. Erosive rainfall or expanding ice in rock crevices tears down mountains as fast as they rise. The Earth’s lumpy land surface is a massive drainage system. From high to low, meandering and networked creeks and rivers drive the rock and mineral cycle. A river system operates on the principle of erosion and deposition. As a river gains water volume and speeds up it erodes and picks up rock and sediment. As it loses volume and slows down it drops some of its load. Large pulses of water flush sediments onto the rivers floodplain creating fertile soil before arriving at its delta entry to the sea.

Remaining sediments combine with the heavy basalt sea floor at the shoreline which is being subducted under the lighter continental plate from volcanic spreading forces at the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. This continuous underwater volcanic ridge runs like the seams of a baseball throughout the world’s oceans. Everything cycles like a big conveyor; from Mid-Oceanic Ridge pushing the sea floor towards continental plates where it subducts back into the mantle to raise a mountain or explode through a volcano over geologic time. Dams, known as nickpoints, interrupt and distort the natural transport machinery between land and sea.

River Interrupted

Dams quiet the waters and backfill canyons forming massive lakes that produce and release vast amounts of methane from rotting vegetation underwater. The energy-deprived river unloads its rock and sediment load filling the reservoir, predicting its eventual self-cancellation by virtue of sedimentation fill. The only question is how will it end and what will civilization do when it does? What engineering-dominate options remain to further alter, manipulate or control the world?

The National Inventory on Dams shows the United States has constructed 79,000 dams large enough to require state and federal monitoring. These higher risk categories are often located near enough to population centers to pose a direct safety risk to human life and property. Worldwide, there are 800,000 similarly sized dams that are regulated and present equal challenges. Inventoried or not, total dams in the US may exceed 2.5 million and perhaps tens of millions worldwide. They interrupt and fragment the rock cycle and flow of more than 60% of the world’s major rivers with one or more large dams.

The International Commission on Large Dams reveals 45,000 dams of the world are mega-whoppers with heights up to 1000’ and volume capacities exceeding many million acre feet (MAF) of water.

A recent study measured the volume capacities of 29,484 large reservoirs throughout the world. It determined their storage capacity was about 8.7 billion acre feet (BAF) of freshwater. That’s enough water to make a nine foot lake out of Alaska, Texas, California, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada combined. This immense artificial above-ground storage is counter intuitive to nature’s freshwater storage system which stores only .016% of all the circulating freshwater in all natural lakes, rivers, streams, creeks and atmosphere combined – Preferring to store 80% – 90% of the world’s circulating freshwater underground free from evaporation and sedimentation.

Still more revealing is the loss of artificial reservoir stores through evaporation. Although evaporation rates vary from region to region, a 1998 U.S. Geologic Survey (USGS) study of California’s reservoirs in all nine major hydrologic regions recorded 2,342,800 AF of evaporation, about .06% of California’s 40 MAF of reservoir storage. Using a back-of-the-envelope estimation applying .06% evaporation rate to the world’s 8.7 BAF of reservoir stored water yields 522 MAF of evaporation which is about 2.5 years of total California rainfall and 16 years of California water draws for agriculture. That’s water that doesn’t infiltrate as groundwater to feed wells or perennial streams, or grow food, or evapotranspire through wetlands, grasslands, woodlands, and forests, or provide water for wildlife (aquatic and terrestrial) and the billion humans on the planet who don’t have access to unpolluted water.

The World Commission on Dams estimates that 3.1 billion acre foot of freshwater is withdrawn (as opposed to total stores) from lakes, rivers, and aquifers annually. That equals the total discharge of 7 Mississippi Rivers, or 22 Columbia Rivers, or 221 Colorado Rivers. Here again it would cover with 3 foot of water the above mentioned seven states totaling 1 billion surface acres and is 93 times the amount of water drawn from all California reservoirs by agriculture annually — a lot of water. The 3.1 billion acre foot number is still more revealing when one considers that over and above storage and withdrawals, most nearly 65% of all rainfall evaporates before it can become part of either surface or groundwater stores.

Aside from warming atmospheric conditions, and considering only current global population additions (80 million per year), the equivalent of adding a new Germany annually, and factoring rising water consumption rates which triple with each population doubling, all of human enterprises will consume and significantly pollute 90% of all the available freshwater by 2025 leaving a scant 10% to support the earths dwindling water-dominant ecosystem.

Are we playing against ourselves?

When 1964 American Nobel Prizing-winning physicist Charles Townes down-played his break-out laser technology with reporters he demurred, “When I hear that kind of thing, it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.’”

In the 1960’s, the age without limits, this telling remark reflects how little was known and understood about the natural world and the accumulative impacts of dams. Since the idea of the beaver wasn’t to dam major rivers but build small organic dams on its many tributaries. And then these temporary ecosystems evolved and produced abundant life. They reduced flooding and erosion, enhanced groundwater penetration, created the valley’s precious topsoil and fed a radiant food web including decomposing bacteria, amphibians, fisheries, insects, birds, herbivores and carnivores. Comparing a beaver to Hoover Dam is like comparing life to death. Aldo Leopold, the legendary and visionary U.S. Forest Service land manager of the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s said dams make the land sick and provide only a temporary prosperity followed by tremendous vulnerability. This ecological reality is incontrovertible — all dams have an end date.

California leads the list with dams near self-cancellation. Within the next generation, 85% of all U.S. dams will have degenerated to the point of exhausting their operational lifespan of fifty years requiring decommissioning or massive repairs and upgrades. Now consider that every sweet spot in every geologically sane canyon that might reasonably hold a dam already has an aging dam, what then?

Let’s pause for just a moment and ask some relevant questions. What will it cost to maintain, repair, upgrade, and build new dams to replace those that fail or are decommissioned, and restore dysfunctional watersheds impacted by dams?

Let me proffer a worldwide estimate to maintain the current population of 6.7 billion without any further additions. Factoring ecological restoration, maintenance, repair, decommissioning, and replacement cost of the world’s developed water infrastructure as it’s currently engineered would likely be a cost greater than all the energy expended on all engineering projects from the beginning of civilization and this cost would recur every fifty years or so. Now factor in a population adding 1 billion every thirteen years?

Is it even possible at this stage of civilization to convince people to care about a time on earth that many will not have to live in?

These statistics and trajectories have no caution value to a species front-row seated as the primary agent of geologic change on Earth. For example, in three long lifespans, Europeans have altered a continuous American wilderness into a networked, layered, and interwoven mass of asphalt-spreading, carbon-coughing, concrete-lining, pipeshed-connecting, aqueduct-flowing, levee-bunkering, grid-generating, wireless-transmitting, urban-sprawling, mall-cloning, river-damming, and resource-consuming experiment in human unconsciousness.

Dams provide that tempting illusion of prosperity whose short-term gains literally vandalize the future of civilization and natural terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity. This reality remains an abstraction to a developed and developing world breast-fed on cheap energy, cheap water, and unconscious consumption of finite resources.

The tenant of the economic element states clearly that the natural state of soil, rainfall, creeks and streams, forests, valleys, wetlands, deserts, mountains, etc. have no intrinsic value in and of themselves. And only those aspects that can be justified as an economic benefit to mankind first (logging, mining, damming, intensive agricultural production, urban development, or recreation) are redeemable and can be supported in so far as they produce artificial wealth through income generation. Commodification of elements cycling and recycling from the basement of time, as its sole recognized value displays an arrogance not intended by nature or nature’s god.

If the current growing population of 6.7 billion is considered a benefit to mankind, than dams are beneficial — If the vulnerability of dense populations downstream of dams is a benefit to mankind, than dams are beneficial – If agricultural production on arid lands that require large volumes of water that salinate the soil and demand large inputs of fossil-fuel based fertilizers and pesticides that runoff and pollute groundwater is considered a benefit to mankind, than dams are beneficial — If the displacement of 80 million people from their homelands to accommodate dams is a benefit to mankind, than dams are beneficial — if the destruction of life-supporting ecosystems and fishery resources is a benefit to mankind, than dams are beneficial — If the inequitable sharing of benefits and costs is a benefit to mankind, than dams are beneficial — If debt burden, cost overruns, deferred maintenance costs and the impoverishment of people is a benefit to mankind, than dams are the most beneficial engineering endeavor of human history second only to nuclear weapons. God help us — common sense hasn’t.

California has spared no expense to either taxpayers or natural ecosystems to attain its status as the most hydrologically altered landmass on the planet. It would surprise few that California was built on gold, greed, extraction, depletion, extinction, dubiously acquired large-landed semi-desert agricultural empires, well-gifted railroad land grants fueling speculative growth, and highly subsidized stolen water—all comprising a tunnel vision for overextended populations and infinite growth in a world utterly finite.

The incomprehensible vulnerability of California’s over-reaching population centers (Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose), the projected urban expansion of the Central Valley, and the weight of climate-warming models leaves one haunted by civilization’s lack of respect for a river’s entitlement to its water and the food systems that it naturally perpetuates.

There’s only so much natural wealth covering the 158,302 square miles of California’s ten hydrologic regions. When a region overextends its local resources, it must take from another. More than water is diverted; it drains the very wealth of the food chains these waters support in aquatic, terrestrial, and ocean basins.

With 200 million acre-feet (MAF) of average precipitation spreading over 100 million acres containing 450 known groundwater basins and draining on average 71 MAF of runoff through 20,000 miles of rivers and streams, California has only 1,900 river miles legally protected from dams and diversions. All but one major river remains dam-free, the Smith River on the upper north coast.

About 42 MAF of the state’s runoff is captured and diverted through six major systems of reservoirs and aqueducts. This massive infrastructure artificially waters the coastal region from the North Bay to San Diego, and the Sacramento Valley through the San Joaquin Valley into the Tulare Basin, the Mojave Desert, and the southernmost Imperial and Coachella valleys.

Before the Spanish arrived in 1769, there were only twelve large natural lakes in California—Lake Tahoe, Lower Klamath, Goose, Tule, Honey, Eagle, Clear, Mono, Owens, Kern, Buena Vista, and Tulare Lake. Today the latter four are devoid of original wildlife, having been dewatered for agriculture. Tulare Lake, a once-thriving ecosystem in the lower San Joaquin Valley, was four times the area of Lake Tahoe. Today, 1,200 non-federal dams and 181 large federal dams with their reservoirs temporarily dominate a contrived oasis that is doomed by sediment, evaporation, the force of time, the laws of nature, and global warming.

These numerous artificial lakes defy the balance between natural surface water stores and underground stores. In nature, 70% of the fresh water circulating in the hydrologic cycle is stored underground and a combined total of .017% for lakes, rivers, and land-locked seas. Underground storage is free from evaporation, siltation, and storage cost (both economically and environmentally).

Before European contact, underground glacial water stores were estimated at 1.3 billion acre-feet—the entire California landmass under thirteen feet of water. This now has been overdrafted to 850 MAF. Like oil, the remaining supply will be extinguished in less than a hundred years. One out of four Californians rely totally on groundwater, and nearly three-quarters of a billion acre-feet of that groundwater once lay under the Central Valley. Continual overdrafts in the region have caused the landmass to subside as much as thirty feet, yet the aquifer remains a major water source for agricultural production.

Five million acres of Central Valley wetlands—nature’s food bank, filtration system, and flood control mechanism—once brimmed with life including half a million Tule elk and sixty million ducks and geese. Reclaimed for agriculture, this area has been reduced to 350,000 artificially managed wetland acres. Nine out of every ten acres of riparian woodlands are gone, along with ten thousand grizzly bears that once roamed the valleys and foothills. The loss of mega and micro flora and fauna is beyond counting.

Ninety percent of the coastal salt marshes between Morro Bay and San Diego are gone. The 200,000 acres of vibrant salt marshes that once surrounded the San Francisco Bay have been reduced to 35,000 acres by landfill for urban development. The Bay Delta, the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, drains 40% of the state’s total runoff. It is the main pumping station for the massive State Water Project and the Central Valley Project. It serves two-thirds of California’s population and irrigates millions of San Joaquin and Tulare Basin acres. Eighty percent of all developed water is consumed by agriculture.

The Delta is not on the verge of collapse; it is collapsing. Once supporting 345,000 acres of salt marshes and a major fishery for salmon and smelt, it has been reduced to 8,000 marsh acres, with Delta pumps decimating the fisheries. With valuable marshes reclaimed as islands below sea level, they are protected by a series of poorly maintained and aging levee systems vulnerable to earthquakes, storms, and climate change.

Historic flows from the Delta to the Bay have been reduced by half, increasing saltwater intrusion into the freshwater system. (Normally freshwater flows from the Sierra snowpack create a hydraulic barrier holding back intruding salt water.) California’s unceasing march towards 50 million people by 2015 will increase demands and destabilization. A one-meter rise in sea level will inundate about 200 square miles of Delta land. Long-term climate patterns anticipate a sea level rise of six meters. Loss of the Delta will have a catastrophic effect on southern populations and agriculture. Today’s water consciousness, especially in the Bay Delta, is motivated less by the loss of fisheries and ecosystems and more by the loss of water supply and its curbing impact on agriculture, growth, and development.

Salmon are the keystone species, the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Untold millions, perhaps ten-plus million salmon, once migrated between Monterey Bay and the Oregon coast through 582 coastal streams—while steelhead migrated along most of California’s 800-mile coastline. During the winter of 1883-84, more than 700,000 salmon were caught and processed in the Bay Delta alone. By the early 1900s, cannery operations had become commercially unviable. Perhaps 80% of that protein source has been depleted now, with only 10% of the suitable spawning sites remaining.

Think about what the salmon represent in total natural energy distribution and conversion—as an energy component, their nourishing value to the sea, the land, the aquatic and terrestrial food chains, and human life.

Once 400 million strong throughout North America, beavers once populated all the tributaries of California’s great rivers. Building temporary small dams from nearby willows, alder, poplar, birch, maple and aspen, they trapped nutrients from twigs, leaves, branches, and logs, which mixed with silt behind the dam, creating a clear, cool, deep-water fishery. Bacteria break down the cellulose, which feeds protozoa, which feeds cyclops, daphnia, fresh-water shrimp, mosquitoes, dragonflies, caddis worms, tadpoles, and water spiders. These in turn feed young trout, salmon, and frogs, which feed egrets, ospreys, golden and bald eagles, kingfishers, turkeys and owls.

Downed trees fill with insects and feed woodpeckers and sapsuckers. The increased wet area around the beaver pond absorbs flood waves and slowly infiltrates water into the groundwater table. When the building materials deplete, the beavers move on to another location. The dam, filled high with rich, black organic muck, breaks down, causing the water to change course and meander around. As the area dries it becomes a rich pasture of grasses, feeding herbivores which feed predators. The meadow, recolonized by the seeds of the trees that initiated the process, begins anew. Multiply this lifecycle by 13,000 years and you have the continual development of fertile valley bottomlands and a regenerative model for human developments.

Without considering global warming, a century from now all man-made reservoirs that are not full of silt will nonetheless have lost their operational capacities to support agriculture, prevent floods, and serve human population centers. The moment they were filled, the concrete’s limited lifespan began its 50-100 year process of degeneration. Where’s the future?

This narrative represents a very short list of human events upon the landscape. The visible consequence of California’s altered watersheds and landscapes translate into today’s deepening water scarcity. The beaver negotiated its survival within nature, paid for the space it occupies by creating a pool of regenerative life, borrowing energy and converting it to produce a sum of energy far greater than it borrowed from nature—this is the model of regeneration.

In stark contrast, civilization consumes nature, converting its energy in a way that exhausts its supply, and then we return the waste with a toxic aspect that further devalues the natural systems—leading to air, soil, and water pollution, depleted fisheries, constipated rivers, ocean dead zones, deforestation, erosion, salinated valleys, overgrazing, wildlife extinction, toxic dumps, nuclear waste, and yes, global warming.

One can readily see that California as well as the planet is exhaustible. Our unique faculties allow us to shape and modify the land that provides for our survival. That faculty, that capacity, that survivability, comes at a great price, a great responsibility. That price is regenerative stewardship over the land.

The Waters of Change

As a consequence of natural evolution, the Earth’s surface has adapted to the sun’s radiant heat through a renewable hydrologic cycle. How a warming climate relates to the hydrologic cycle is the subject of the following discussion.

There is a high degree of scientific agreement that our planetary energy use relates directly to climbing temperatures. Current climate models are constantly readapting to temperature changes that are occurring much more rapidly than expected due to the climate feedback systems and non-linear movements. The climate system is the hydrologic cycle, and to the extent that model changes, so change rainfall and snow patterns across the state.

Today cold, moisture-laden westerly storms roll off the Pacific Basin from the Gulf of Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands primarily between December and April. They lift over the low-rising Coast Ranges, releasing a taste of their precious load before falling into the arid rain shadow of the 450-mile-long Central Valley. Having warmed during its descent across the lower valley floor, the stingy jet stream yields little moisture to today’s artificially contrived breadbasket of California.

The storms’ real contender is the west-tilting, 400-mile granite spine of the Sierra Nevada. Representing one fifth of California’s landmass, much of the range exceeds 8,000 feet in elevation. Mount Whitney reigns supreme at 14,494 feet. As the air rises, cools, and condenses, the contest between landmass and planetary water cycle is resolved. Moisture molecules transform and surrender as snow.

On the eastern or rain-shadow side of the Sierra is a long narrow trench known as the Great Basin. Any moisture that escapes the wringing of the western Sierra then faces the western front of the 14,000-foot White/Inyo Mountain range, which creates the watersheds of now dewatered Owens Lake and endangered Mono Lake.

Seventy-five percent of California’s precipitation falls north of Sacramento. The critical Sierra snowpack provides roughly 60% of California’s water demands and represents the state’s Achilles heel (along with the Bay Delta) in the wake of a warming planet. The Sierra range contains 24 major watersheds and the headwaters of California’s American, Stanislaus, San Joaquin, Upper Sacramento, Feather, Merced, Tuolumne, Mokelumne, Cosumnes, Calaveras, Kings, Kaweah, Tule, Kern, Caliente, and Yuba rivers. All these major rivers are constipated by numerous dams and their diversions.

This 20th-century hydrologic model laid the foundation for the infrastructure of 1,400 dams and reservoir systems providing water storage and flood protection for California. The 21st century will provide an altogether different climate model, and water management policies and structures will have to change dramatically if the state’s population is to survive that challenge.

The greatest challenge for water managers in today’s weather system is timing the flows from the Sierra snowmelt. A dicey business without climate change considerations, we’re talking about 15 million acre-feet (MAF) of runoff before it hits the first series of dams, and 20 or more MAF at or near the confluence of the Delta. The 20th-century model could anticipate gradual runoff in late spring and early summer to meet the greatest demand between summer and fall. These reservoirs have to be relatively empty in the winter for flood protection. Managers have to decide when to fill the reservoir to meet the greater demands of the dry season. Fill them too early and you risk floods; fill them too late and you risk insufficient supplies and drought conditions.

Climate models show the Sierra snowline climbing upward. As the landmass heats, it requires a greater volume of water to resolve the heat, and a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, producing more intense rainfall and resulting in less snow, earlier and greater mass movements of flows, and erosion. Snowfall that would normally inundate the Sierra throughout the winter and gradually melt between late spring and early summer will come as intense wet storms, generating massive flows and torrential flooding throughout the lower watersheds. This will alter rivers, creeks, and stream channel profiles significantly and cripple the Bay Delta as a freshwater supply for the southland as water is lost to massive runoff and not stored and released slowly as snow.

Incidence of landslides will greatly increase the sediment budget, and some landslides will create slidedams and cause a river or creek to change course, incising fresh sediment loads from alluvial plains. The large recipient of these massive, sediment-laden flows will be the mega-million acre-feet reservoirs of the State Water and Central Valley projects. Inundating the already limited-lifespan reservoirs, the increased sediment budget will reduce their functionality.

These large events will also decrease the ability of the land to slow and infiltrate water into the groundwater system, and the higher temperatures will increase evaporation. Droughts and higher temperatures will increase the incidence of forest and grassland fires. Reduced reservoir water storage will increase groundwater pumping and land subsidence in the already overdrafted, oversubsided Central Valley.

The Eel River runs through some of the most erodable landmass in California, a situation exacerbated by massive lumber operations, gravel extraction, cattle ranching, and narrow-vision land management strategies. The Eel River owns the record for the highest peak flood discharge of 753,000 cubic feet per second during the 1964 flood, enough energy to send a fleet of battleships to Japan. With Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam choking its headwaters and depleting its fisheries, nearly 90% of Eel’s summer flow is diverted into the Russian River, altering that river’s natural profile and enabling unsustainable human developments in population centers and the wine industry to the south.

Outlet Creek, a Willits tributary of the Eel, has six dams with the seventh being built, all within a sixty-square-mile area. The ecology of Little Lake Valley and the former Little Lake, food basin for juvenile salmon, has been destroyed by straightening and channeling the six feeder creeks. With Snow, Hull, and Rice mountains forming the main headwaters, climate change will impact this region’s snowpack and flow dynamics, as well as the larger Sierra range.

All of California’s rivers, like the dams that drain the natural wealth from these regions, are ill-prepared for the upcoming changes in climate dynamics. Natural river systems are among the most efficient systems on the planet. The great sculptress shapes and transports with exacting tools of erosion and deposit. Water is the great conveyor between landmass and ocean—eroding and depositing material pushed up from the constant collision of tectonic plates. Dams incarcerate the river’s main element, water, leaving her artistry a slave to human infrastructural bondage and rendering all dependent life forms immensely vulnerable to even slight changes.

Where do we go from here?

California’s water infrastructure is overdeveloped, overused, oversold, under-maintained, and impermanent. California’s 1,400 dams share a common destiny–silt-up and become a dysfunction waterfall. One would think the profundity of this incontrovertible geophysical fact might dissuade one from building or continuing to build dense population centers supported by impermanence and develop marginal agricultural lands to feed these ultimately doomed arid population centers. Civilization has deferred this reality from one generation to the next. Not in my lifetime eventually claims the living–were so dammed close.

California’s water infrastructure is aging and degenerating. The older it gets, the more problems it has. The massively altered watersheds, accumulating the burdens of dams and diversions, have lost the stability of equilibrium. This impetus drives the collision between the environment, economy, and a population that continues to increase 600,000 per year.

The recent federal court decision to reduce water withdrawals from the irreplaceable Delta by 37% in an attempt to save its failing hydrology and fisheries has staggered farm production, cities, and the Silicon Valley. As well, less agricultural water sends a shockwave through soaring food prices and produces major losses in farm labor that is severely impacting an already deficit-ridden state budget; health care, education and transportation.

Governor Schwarzenegger’s proposed 9 billion dollar Delta bailout (1982 Peripheral Canal revival) seeks to pour vast energy into the sprawl of canals, aqueducts, levees, pipesheds, and off-stream reservoirs. Cloaked as a restoration project, should the central delta be bypassed diverting the Sacramento directly to canals and off-stream storage reservoirs, the central valley and southland water boosters will be well positioned for an ultimate water grab to fuel economic determinism and contrived population growth projections down to the last drop.

The big question remains. Will a canal bypass save the Delta? Answer: No. As mentioned earlier, what the Delta needs most is increased mountain runoff water to create the hydrologic barrier to hold back saltwater intrusion from the Bay and the fisheries need inundated wetlands and sloughs.

The Peripheral Canal simply adds an ever increasing layer of complexity and energy flows to a system that cannot be saved by the same strategies that produced the problem in the first place. California history can be understood from the earliest need to transport water from a distant watershed to an overextended watershed (1913 LA Aqueduct). Each solution along that predictable path requires still more complexity and energy inputs. Yesterday’s solution becomes today’s problem like a mad layer cake. Each new solution bears exponential energy costs often greater than all the energy consumed by all previous water projects. And, the emergent spectre of the unintended consequence, watershed and infrastructure degeneration leaves one pondering this question: Is this advancing towards a higher or better state?

California’s water, population, and economy are up against Stephen J. Gould’s right wall of limitations. The insane complexity, economic and ecological, is beyond comprehension and the exponential energy cost to run the infrastructure alone denies a positive return: A Dead End.

Since our economic system cannot consider limitations because our American way of life is non-negotiable, narrow-visioned, economic growth focused policy makers will commit our remaining economic might and push this unsustainable model against the right wall of limitations unwittingly. In this context, it is difficult to envision a divergent path that recognizes the need to reduce population, consumption, and charts a path towards watershed restoration statewide. Californians will, as they have throughout California’s water history, approve any measure for one simple reason, fear.

The final analysis strongly suggests that the geophysical forces of climate change dynamics, watershed-wide ecological degradation, oversold and over-mined watersheds, overextended economy and overpopulation coupled with the limited lifespan of 1,400 dams will likely, eventually, resolve the issue of overextended coastal populations and ill-conceived floodplain developments once and for all.

The real solution, backing off the right wall, reducing and relocating vulnerable population centers, reducing consumer demand, developing local water sustainability, and restoring watersheds is simply unthinkable–and the unthinkable is the only solution–and real solutions are not found when one cannot even define the problem.

When I went for a leisurely walk Sunday morning, the sky was cobalt blue, ravens side-slipped in a light breeze and tree’s swayed easily in rhythm. With a bright sun holding court over this scene, it seemed unimaginable that anything could be out-of-place. In that moment, I wondered how anyone could communicate that anything was amiss. It seems all too perfect. Yet, everything is relative depending on whether you’re a person strolling on a beautifully day or a water system that’s failing under its gaze.

The great rivers of the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta are the source of water for 23 million people. The delta irrigates five million acres of farmland, and represents the largest watershed complex in California connecting the California State Water Project and the Central Valley Water Project. In May and August of 2007, Federal Judge Oliver Wanger of Sacramento mandated as much as a 35% reduction in that systems water draws. The resulting shortfall translates into a 30% water reduction for San Diego and as much as 50% for Santa Clara County and will significantly reduce food production from those food growing regions.

Wanger’s decree states that water in the Sacramento Delta is being depleted faster than it can be replenished. And, PhD Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute concurs noting that overpumping the delta has promoted salt water intrusion — jeopardizing food-producing delta regions that have sunk below sea level from over-pumping and polluting the fresh water drawn from that system. These fragile levees are old and in disrepair and vulnerable to floods and earthquakes. This natural estuary supports salmon and several species of smelt, the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. They are in serious decline and the entire system is on the verge of collapsing.

Governor Schwarzenegger’s nine billion dollar green-washing plan to bypass the delta floats in a quagmire of tattered 1980’s Peripheral Canal debates centered on ecological and economic viability, and construction timelines. His plan requires two additional large dams further clogging the arteries of an already over-clogged watershed system. The big question is whether domestic water supplies or food production will remain viable after the 10-15 year build-out period and who will be able to afford the food and energy? All of these things while the wild card, climate change, steadily plays it hand.

This ecological crisis coupled with water delivery shortfalls and reduction in food production affects the lives of everyone. How these synergies impact local community viability is this articles subject.

First, let’s consider the issue of food prices. Food prices are stuck like siamese twins to the price of corn and corn is tied to the price of water, and both to the cost of energy. All of these are tied to federal and state trade-distorting subsidies. Subsidies use taxpayer dollars to pay farmers and oil producers to sell their products for less than their actual costs. Taxpayers pay for food and oil twice, once at the market place and the other in their tax dollars that could be shifted to create stability in more stable, local economies.

Corn subsidies exceeded 10 billion last year, wheat subsidies total 21 billion since 1995, and oil subsidies are buried in a myriad of special interest programs including tax loopholes, processing, transportation, and infrastructure restoration subsidies. Subsidy estimates range as high as 45 billion a year and a fully costed gallon of unsubsidized fuel could cost as much as $12 per gallon.

Given this context, and aside from delta woes, corn has doubled in two years and wheat has tripled in price while we peel off a hundred dollar bill for a barrel of oil. We know why oil is going up, but what about the grains? Is it just the increased oil prices? The U.S. has been slowly converting corn crops into crop-based fuel. Corn to feed cars or people? In 2007, one fifth of the U.S.’s 80 million acre corn production provided fuel for only 4% of its fuel needs. Quick math reveals that if the entire crop were dedicated to fuel, it would only provide 20% of our fuel requirements and that much less food stores. Shortly, we’ll look at the chaos this would cause.

This trend is expected to rise as new processing plants are completed. When you tie corn commodities to rising oil prices, that commodity becomes more profitable as a fuel than as food product, the market elevates that commodity into the energy sector driving food prices with it. The calories in one tank full of crop-based fuel will feed one person for one year. There are no substitutes for food, yet plenty of alternatives for fuel. The shark-eyed market always rules.

Now, if you’re thinking lets go with corn-based fuels and substitute another crop for corn, one considers the food segment of the corn industry. Let’s tie corn into our diets. Michael Pollan’s book, Omnivore’s Dilemma, clearly illustrates that relationship. As noted, corn is the largest mono-cultured crop in America.

This stream of corn produces much of the cheapest processed foods we buy at the market. One recognizes these corn-based derivatives as laboratory produced corn syrup in soda’s and fruit drinks. Salad dressing — corn flour — corn starch — hydrogenated corn oil — shortening — and nearly all additives in highly processed foods result from corn or a corn derivative. Cattle, pigs, chickens, farm produced salmon and tilapia have intense corn diets. An average fast food meal is at least 50% corn-based directly or indirectly. We’re a fast food nation built on cheap corn diets which accounts for the growing trend in obesity.

A quick review outlines a collapsing delta integral to food production, domestic water supplies and a healthy ecosystem. We have an industrial food system dependent on cheap corn which is dependent on cheap water and cheap energy that no longer exist. We have corn conversion into fuel driving up domestic food prices and reducing food stores. We have a huge subsidy system that, for the time being, holds the center, but just barely. At best, we have the governor’s plan that essentially continues the same business that caused the delta to fail in the first place, more dams and more diversions that would take at least ten years to build, setting the stage for far greater ecological failures throughout California’s watershed.

What’s breaking down faster then it can be propped up is the rising cost of ecological damage that neither subsidies nor economy of scales can prevent. That’s why small, local farms, although they out produce big agribusiness when environmental costs are factored in, can’t compete, the playing field based subsidies and economy of scales, favors big business and cuts small markets out of the picture.

If you’ve come this far, you’ve earned the finish line — saving the best for last. Historically, change was possible only with the presence of timing, will, and need merging into one path. Timing is present, yet will and need are quickly coming abreast to create the space needed for localism to take hold, compete, and stabilize local economies. That path holds the notion that if you can feed yourself, hold your water resources precious, return food materials that we don’t consume back into the soil, provide clothing and building materials from regional products, we can meet the challenges of climate change and rehabilitate our ailing ecosystem.

Hope is a good thing if your interest is marking time and relying on someone else to fix things. The real question is centered in the notion: “get busy living or get busy dying.” Localization efforts measure their progress by how many new acres of food producing land that can be converted. How many tons of vegetable waste they can convert into soil energy. How many new local businesses and local markets they can create using regional resources. How many trees they can plant in their watershed to hold soil and filter carbon from the air. How many streams and creeks we can make free of litter, debris, and livestock intrusion. How much stormwater runoff carrying toxic pollutants from streets and urban area’s that can be diverted into bioremediation ponds for cleaning. How much of our rainfall we can store in aquifers to feed domestic wells and support terrestrial and aquatic diversity. These are the true measurements of stability and localization. These are the measurements of living well in life.

Seriously, “Late summer 2007, an area of Arctic sea ice almost twice the size of Britain disappeared in a single week.” Overall, about 50% of the Arctic ice has thinned out over the last fifty industrial years as a result of fossil fuel driven economies. Last years shrinkage broke the record for ice melt and 2008 is on pace to obliterate that record.

No, let’s be casual, I mean its only a leading climatologist from Washington State University who recently proved that the tipping point has been breached, and, like it or not, the euphemism shop to till you drop, has the drop on an overly distracted civilization. And it’s not like the issue hasn’t been heating up since “Inconvenient Truth” aired world-wide and every other climatologist in the business not employed by Bush has alluded to the fact that carbon emissions trap heat, and well, hot planets melt ice. No ice, no Malibu, inland properties can speculate new coastlines and build piers or set-up post-industrial villas for the likes of Bush, Cheney and the Wall Street gang.

A recent airing of Exploration hosted by Michio Kaku featured world-renown environmentalist Lester Brown, whose recent release, Plan B, 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, details the folly of a fossil fuel-based industrial economy and its impact on climate, ecosystems, economy, food production, forest, and population. All of which seems rather important, in my view, to the quality of life. Hello Hillary, Hello Obama, Hello McCain? Is anybody home?

Now, if you’re wondering, who’s Lester Brown and why should I trust his data over the governments? Brown is the founder of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington D.C. and the World Watch Institute and has been tracking carbon emissions and global climate patterns for the past thirty years and has the ear, apparently, of most world leaders. Bush, whose personal climatologist exists in the mythical space between his ears, answers only to higher authorities unavailable to common folk.

Brown’s four overriding goals are to “stabilize climate, stabilize population, eradicate poverty, and restore the earth’s damaged ecosystems. Failure to reach any one of these goals will likely mean failure to reach the others as well.” Now there’s a days work. After setting the stage for massive climate change, Brown defines a way out. Albeit, not a family vacation but the notion of living within planetary means has a comforting ring to it. Don’t you think? Let’s consider some of his findings.

In a climate nutshell, for every one foot rise in sea level one hundred feet of land mass is swallowed by the sea due to the shallow slope of coast lines. When the Greenland ice sheet melts, and it is faster than expected, sea levels rise 23′. When the West Artic Ice sheet breaks up, sea levels rises another 16′ totaling 39′ of sea rise, a real boon to mapmakers. Most coastal cities worldwide will be under water displacing 600 million people — sea-rise refugees migrating inland — overwhelming inland infrastructures ill-prepared to house, feed, or employ them. Hurricane Katrina, disaster writ small, pales in comparison to the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars of property damage and hundreds of millions fleeing inland with little prospect for a life.

Aside from the loss of polar ice and Polar Bears migrating tentatively north to stay within the reaches of remaining ice flows, inland areas aren’t sitting too sweet either. Inland mountain glaciers are nature’s way of collecting, storing and slowly releasing water. They pack snow during the precipitation season and slowly release water flows during the off-season to maintain year round river systems critical to natural and industrial food systems. The glaciers of the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas feed the major rivers of Asia including the Indus, Ganges, Mekong, Yellow, and Yangtze Rivers. When upper elevation temperatures warm, snow elevations are driven ever higher and snow begins melting sooner and faster.

Once year round rivers will be rendered seasonal without the glaciers to hold and slowly release stored water and floods will be wide spread throughout the region followed by droughts. These river valleys feed billions of Asians including India, Pakistan, and China who rely on year round flows to irrigate staples like wheat and rice. Wheat, rice, corn, sorghum, and barley represent more than 50% of the world’s food stores — all will be impacted.

Closer to home, Lassen, Shasta and the entire north/south Sierra snow-belt range that feeds the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Klamath, Stanislaus, Kings, Kern, Trinity, Feather, American, Tuolumne, Mokelumne, Merced, and the Owens River, will face similar problems affecting not only the bread basket regions that largely feed the nation but domestic water supplies for tens of millions as well.

The major dams of both the Central Valley Project and the California State Water Project represent the most hydrologically altered and most complex systems on the planet. They serve as water supply and flood control mechanisms timing vast flows of runoff. That mechanism depends entirely on leaving reservoir capacity to absorb large pulses of water until the threat of flooding passes before filling up for storage. That mechanism will be shot to hell with less snow pack and earlier melting characteristics to negotiate. The resulting problem will be too much water too soon and not enough flood control damaging critical crops, property and livelihoods. Again, followed by its twin, drought.

Most people don’t fully understand the relationship between our food supply and somewhat predictable snowfall and rainfall in both quantity and frequency and how a major disruption in either can bring down a vulnerable centralized mega agribusiness specializing in monocultured food systems such as the one the global community depends on.

According to Brown, food system disruptions stress a state’s ability to govern as evidenced by modern genocides in sub-Saharan Africa. Jared Diamond’s book Collapse argues that the centerpiece of all previous civilization collapses has been an undermined food supply. Brown argues the link between poverty and population growth noting that “rapid population growth begets poverty and poverty begets rapid population growth.” Brown notes that states either break this trend or are broken by it. Developing countries that have access to food, clean water, shelter, jobs, and personal security experience dramatically reduced family sizes: from seven children to three per family. No small wonder.

China, at nearly 1.5 billion, has surpassed the U.S. in consumption of basic resources and presents a challenge so improbable, that one doesn’t no where to end let alone begin. Knocking on Beijing’s front door is a desert that’s gaining the size of West Virginia each year. China has more livestock than the U.S. has humans and by 2030 is expected to be on pace with Americans income level. Translating income into consumption paints a picture of 1.1 billion cars, more than all the world’s cars. By 2030, they will consume 98 million barrels of oil a day which is more than the world’s current consumption. Brown articulates that an auto-centered, throwaway economy doesn’t work for the U.S. It won’t work for China nor for India which is on pace to surpass China’s population.

The growing aggregate of unresolved problems ultimately send marginal states towards failure and weakens more stable states. The number of failing or failed states is on the rise and Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Zimbabwe, and Chad are among the top twenty with the balance in sub-Saharan Africa, Malaysian Peninsula, and South West Asia. States fail when they can no longer feed, employ, and protect their populations so evident in today’s failed states of Iraq and Afghanistan. Failed states like endangered species have a tipping point. At that critical point when enough states fail, civilization fails.

What’s the good news? Brown’s data contends that a massive, war-time-speed production of 1.5 million wind turbines with integrating transmission lines be built and installed throughout the Midwest. Coupled with plug-in hybrids, this will reduce carbon emissions by 80%. Texas is cutting a path to develop 23,000 mega watts of wind turbine capacity. Brown notes that the U.S. currently builds 65 million cars per year and that this project is doable and needs to be completed by 2020 to have any chance of arresting warming trends into the future. As well, Brown’s plan bans deforestation coupled with a broad tree planting project with the goal of planting billions of trees balancing carbon sequestration.

Brown’s analysis connects the dots between water shortages and food production as it relates to energy consumption. Most local governments don’t consider water for food production in their analysis of water capacity and demand. Apparently, local governments sleep well on two to seven days of local food supply in supermarkets without concern for either predicted spiraling food prices or a breakdown in the food systems resulting from water shortages.

This point cannot be overstressed. Most people don’t realize how much water they consume in their daily diets. At a minimum, 500 gallons per person per day and a red-meat rich diet with highly processed foods can climb to 1,400 gallons per person per day. That would stretch local water budgets unimaginably. Brown and every other researcher in the field all stress replacing monopolized agribusiness with locally grown food systems.

Eating local and shifting to a plant based diet lower on the food chain reduces energy consumption by a factor of four. Equally, trading your SUV for a Prius reduces energy consumption by a factor of four. Shifting to a plant based diet represents the same savings as shifting from a SUV to a Prius — saving energy, saving water, and saving land.

Taking a break from writing this article, I went to Ardella’s in Willits, CA for breakfast. There, I sat next to a pleasant, mature, intelligent man named Irving who had just finished breakfast. In the course of chatting, he shared that global warming was a hoax and a ploy to give governments more reason to throttle our rights and liberties. That environmentalists are responsible for perpetuating the warming myth and stand in the way of real progress. Progress? Stampeding civilization over the edge? I can only guess at what progress he referred. When I inquired as to his sources, he couldn’t name one and brushed it off with they don’t write, indeed.

Although I wondered why the government was being so stubborn about embracing the global warming myth to propel its rights-robbing agenda — noting they’re doing quite well with the terrorism game. I wondered more about what forces shape this view. It apparently has nothing to do with intelligence just a cultural predisposition well-marinated in the industrial revolution.

Let’s say Irving is right that all these environmentalist and climatologist import Mendocino Gold and are so stoned they wouldn’t notice a melting ice cube in their Margaritas, they’re supporting hedonistic lifestyles with meaty books and lecture tours. What I see in Lester Brown’s plan to save civilization is a lot of jobs, oodles of jobs and an economy that thrives on sun, wind, and local economies — a boon to humankind and nature alike.

Brown’s saving civilization options are based in restructuring the economy through education, ending poverty, efficiency, renewable technology, reducing population trends, and banning deforestation with a massive multi-billion tree planting campaign. His book, Plan B, 3.0 can be purchased for as little as $12 or can be downloaded or read on the internet for free — yes, no charge. Lester Brown isn’t a very good hedonist, apparently. Read it — I did.