Cadillac Desert (60 page)

When the gates closed on Tellico Dam a year or so later, Carter’s humiliation was just about complete. Not a vestige of his water-policy reforms remained. Everything he had asked for was out; everything he wanted out was in. Congress had made a mockery of one of its own laws, and even of an amendment weakening that law, for the sake of a water project so bad it made better sense to abandon than to finish it. The Tellico vote was one of the things that prompted the normally restrained Elizabeth Drew, the
New Yorker’s
Washington correspondent, to write a devastating series on Congress’s capitulation to money and power. To those familiar with water projects, though, it was nothing new.

With the benefit of hindsight, some of Carter’s own people are scathingly critical of how the administration handled the water-projects issue. Guy Martin, his Assistant Interior Secretary, is one. “He blundered from the word go,” says Martin. “He might as well have gone up to the Hill with a six-pound codfish and slapped it across their faces. Andrus begged him not to come out with a big long hit list, but he did it anyway, and from that point on the merits of the whole issue got lost. It became ‘Congressional prerogative,’ the ‘Imperial Presidency.’ He was his own worst enemy. He had a great big chip on his shoulder about water projects, that was his problem. It made him focus way too much on the environmental issue, when the only way he could win was with the economic one. Most Congressmen don’t really care. about wild rivers. The New Deal mentality is entrenched up there—even the right-wingers believe in it. Carter loved wild rivers, and in the end they thought he was just plain kooky.

“What Carter
could
have done,” Martin continued, “is pick the three or four worst projects instead of nineteen, or thirty-two—that was another problem, he kept changing the numbers on them—and get rid of them. He could have done it. In war, you don’t take two dozen beachheads on the same day. You can’t, for God’s sake. But he could have won some big ones. Auburn Dam, for instance. If that dam failed, it would be the worst peacetime disaster in American history. He had them there. Garrison and Oahe were awful. The farmers didn’t even want Oahe. The Tug Fork Project is so ridiculous it strains belief. I can’t help believing that if Carter had focused on a few he could have eliminated them. Then he would have had a small victory, but a real one. Then there’s next year.”

Having said all this, Martin added, almost apologetically, “Carter was right, though. The projects are as bad as he said, most of them. The environmental damage is bad. The economics are bad. The politics are bad. The agencies are out of control. If the Corps and the Bureau built everything they wanted to, we’d hardly have any flowing water left. His instincts were good.”

M
any western members of Congress, not to mention the water lobby and the bureaucracies, were overjoyed when Ronald Reagan was elected President after Jimmy Carter. Reagan might talk like a fiscal conservative, but surely he wouldn’t be against water development. After all, he was a westerner. He owned a ranch in dry country. His Interior Secretary, James Watt of Colorado, was the environmentalists’ anti-Christ. Most of his other key domestic advisers were westerners, too—James Baker, Ed Meese, William Clark, Paul Laxalt. All of them, and Reagan, too, certainly
talked
as if they believed in water development.

No sooner had Reagan taken office, however, than his budget director, David Stockman, was talking about recovering 100 percent of the costs of new navigation projects from the beneficiaries—not just the capital costs, but the operating costs, too. (In 1985, the Corps of Engineers spent around $1 billion on project operation and maintenance alone.) There was also talk of forcing states to pay a large share of the costs of flood-control dams—something Carter had never seriously proposed. Even Watt was suggesting that the states should contribute to Reclamation projects—up front. It wasn’t exactly clear how large a share the administration had in mind, but privately Watt was suggesting that 33 percent might be a reasonable amount. Since that would preclude practically all new water development, the water lobby didn’t know quite how to react. Jan van Schilfgaarde, the director of Agriculture Department’s Salinity Control Laboratory, was speaking one day with William Johnston, the assistant manager of the Westlands Water District in California, and he asked, “Why do you think Reagan is your friend if he wants you to pay a third of the fare? Carter only wanted 10 percent.” As van Schilfgaarde recalls it, Johnston was silent for a moment, then said, “Well, Reagan understands us.” “You can get cheaper understanding from a psychiatrist” was van Schilfgaarde’s response.

As expected, Reagan’s original proposals were slowly nibbled away by Congress, but meanwhile, year after year, no new authorization bills managed to clear the floor—partly because the federal government was suffocating under its own mass, but also because Reagan, like Carter, was threatening to veto. In 1984, the entire $20 billion water-projects authorization in the public-works bill—three hundred projects’ worth—was taken out due to such a threat. A year later, when an almost identical bill reached the floor of the House, environmentalists, who had formed a discreet alliance with Stockman and other fiscal conservatives in the administration, had managed to sneak in amendments and conditions requiring local cost-sharing on the order of 10 to 30 percent—even for flood control. If the amendments and conditions stayed in the bill, only a handful might get built; when a state sees that it has to put up $50 million toward construction of a dam, its enthusiasm is apt to wilt like a plucked blossom. As for the Bureau, one of its largest projects, Central Utah, had been burdened with a supplemental repayment contract that absolutely guarantees recovery of all costs before the CUP receives any further funding. That provision, which could stop the project dead in its tracks, also had Reagan’s private blessing. No one could predict how much of this would remain in this or successive bills when they cleared Congress and reached the President’s desk—and the Tellico experience led some to think, not much—but the pork barrel seemed finally to have lost its anchorings, and to be adrift on the very thing it helped produce: an uncontrollable tide of national debt.

CHAPTER TEN

Chinatown

E
veryone knows there is a desert somewhere in California, but many people believe it is off in some remote corner of the state—the Mojave Desert, Palm Springs, the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. But inhabited California, most of it, is, by strict definition, a semidesert. Los Angeles is drier than Beirut; Sacramento is as dry as the Sahel; San Francisco is just slightly rainier than Chihuahua. About 65 percent of the state receives under twenty inches of precipitation a year. California, which fools visitors into believing it is “lush,” is a beautiful fraud.

California is the only state in America with a truly seasonal rainfall pattern—stone-dry for a good part of the year, wet during the rest. Arizona is much drier overall, but has two distinct rainy seasons. Nevada is the driest state, but rain may come at any time of year. If you had to choose among three places to try to grow a tomato relying on rainfall alone, South Dakota, West Texas, or California, you would be wise to choose South Dakota or West Texas, because it rains in the summer there. California summers are mercilessly dry. In San Francisco, average rainfall in May is four-tenths of an inch. In June, a tenth of an inch. In July, none. In August, none. In September, a fifth of an inch. In October, an inch. Then it receives eighteen inches between November and March, and for half the year looks splendidly green. The reason for all this is the Pacific high, one of the most bewildering and yet persistent meteorological phenomena on earth—a huge immobile zone of high pressure that shoves virtually all precipitation toward the north, until it begins slipping southward to Mexico in October, only to move back up the coast in late March. More than any other thing, the Pacific high has written the social and economic history of California.

Actually, San Francisco looks green all year long, if one ignores the rain-starved hills that lie disturbingly behind its emerald-and-white summer splendor, but this is the second part of the fraud, the part perpetrated by man. There was not a single tree growing in San Francisco when the first Spanish arrived; it was too dry and wind-blown for trees to take hold. Today, Golden Gate Park looks as if Virginia had mated with Borneo, thanks to water brought nearly two hundred miles by tunnel. The same applies to Bel Air, to Pacific Palisades, to the manicured lawns of La Jolla, where the water comes from three directions and from a quarter of a continent away.

The whole state thrives, even survives, by moving water from where it is, and presumably isn’t needed, to where it isn’t, and presumably is needed. No other state has done as much to fructify its deserts, make over its flora and fauna, and rearrange the hydrology God gave it. No other place has put as many people where they probably have no business being. There is no place like it anywhere on earth. Thirty-one million people (more than the population of Canada), an economy richer than all but seven nations’ in the world, one third of the table food grown in the United States—and none of it remotely conceivable within the preexisting natural order.

For all its seasonal drought, its huge southern deserts, and its climatic extremes, there is plenty of water in California for all the people who live there today. If, God forbid, another twenty-five million arrive, there will still be plenty for them. The only limiting factor will be energy: to get to where the people are likely to settle, a lot of the water has to be lifted over mountains. Take any ten of the largest reservoirs—Shasta, Bullard’s Bar, Pine Flat, Don Pedro, New Melones, Trinity, a few others—and you have enough water for the reasonable needs of twenty-five million people; enough for their homes, their schools, their offices, their industries, even (in all but the driest times) their swimming pools and lawns. As for the other 1,190 California dams and reservoirs, their purposes are threefold: power, flood control, and, above all, water for irrigation. What few people, including some Californians, know is that agriculture uses 81 percent of all the water in this most populous and industrialized of states.

California’s $18 billion agricultural industry—and it is a gigantic, complex, integrated industry—is the largest and still the most important in the state, Silicon Valley notwithstanding. That figure, $15 billion, only begins to convey what agriculture really means to California. A great proportion of its freight traffic is agricultural produce. A disproportionate amount of the oil and gas mined in the state is used by agriculture. California agriculture supports a giant chemicals industry (it uses about 30 percent of all the pesticides produced in the United States), a giant agricultural-implements industry, an unrivaled amount of export trade. Because it relies on irrigation—and therefore on dams, aqueducts, and canals—there is a close symbiotic relationship with the construction industry, which is why politicians who lobby hard on behalf of new dams can count on great infusions of campaign cash from the likes of the Operating Engineers Local No. 3 and the AFL-CIO. And, more than any other state, California has been a source of opportunities for the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers.

All of this production, all of these jobs, all of these concentric rings of income-earning activity nourish California’s awesome $485 billion GNP. It is a gross state product, obviously, but everyone seems to refer to it as the “California GNP,” as if the state were a nation unto itself—which it really is, and nowhere more so than in the example of water. California has preached and practiced water imperialism against its neighbor states in a manner that would have done Napoleon proud, and, in the 1960s, it undertook, by itself, what was then the most expensive public-works project in history. That project, the State Water Project, more than anything else, is
the
symbol of California’s immense wealth, determination, and grandiose vision—a demonstration that it can take its rightful place in the company of nations rather than mere states. It has also offered one of the country’s foremost examples of socialism for the rich.

I
n the 1850s, when the California gold rush was at full flood, the Great Central Valley traversed by the miners on the way to the mother lode was an American Serengeti—a blond grassland in the summertime, a vast flourishing marsh during the winter and spring. The wildlife, even after a century and a half of Spanish settlement, was unbelievable: millions of wintering ducks, geese and cranes, at least a million antelope and tule elk, thousands of grizzly bears.

The winter of 1861 and 1862 was the beginning of the end for this scene of wild splendor. Relatively few of the Forty-niners found enough gold to pay their fare back home, let alone retire in the style of which they dreamed. California in the 1850s was full of broken men, searching for whatever day labor they could find. Many of them, having given up on returning home, decided to make a try at farming or ranching in the Central Valley. Most of the pioneers who followed the miners in wagon trains had farming on their minds, too, and by the 1860s the Central Valley was already a vista of cows. Because of the rainless summers, no important crop except wheat could be raised without irrigation, which was an alien form of agriculture to Americans. But the valley’s chronic scarcity of moisture was suddenly reversed in 1861 and 1862. A series of vast drenching Pacific storms bashed the state for weeks on end; in January of 1862, San Francisco recorded twenty-seven inches of rain, half again what it usually gets in a year. The floods would have been bad anyway, but their destructiveness was greatly intensified by the incredible amount of spoil—whole sides of mountains—which hydraulic mining had sent down the rivers to the lowlands. The beds of the valley rivers were raised several feet, and could not begin to contain the torrential runoff; downtown Sacramento was under seven feet of water. The 1862 flood marks the beginning of the valley’s obsession with bringing the rivers under control. Meanwhile, farther south, in the San Joaquin Valley, Henry Miller was using the same flood to acquire hundreds of thousands of acres of ephemerally drowned lands under the Swamp and Overflow Act. Miller’s acquisitive nature, combined with the serendipity (in his case) of the flood, made him enough money to construct a large dam, and he soon had his hundreds of thousands of acres under irrigation. Before he died, he was likely the richest farmer in the United States.