Confronting the environmental legacy of irrigated agriculture in the West: the case of the Central Valley Project.

• Author: Dunning, Harrison C.

1. Introduction

   On October 30, 1992, just before a presidential election, President Bush signed an important western water measure, the Reclamation Projects Authorization and Adjustment Act of 1992.(1) The legislation contains forty titles, some of which authorize water projects. Part of the statute thus is composed of what many regard as "pork barrel legislation," authorizing activities such as the completion of the Central Utah Project and construction of other federal water and power projects throughout the West.(2) Title 34 of that bill is quite different, for it deals with reform rather than initiation of a federal water project. The title has its own name: the Central Valley Project Improvement Act (CVPIA).(3) The CVPIA exemplifies an important shift in thinking about federal water policy in California. Parts of the legislation might serve as a possible model for water project reform throughout the West.

   This Essay examines the CVPIA in light of the environmental legacy of the Central Valley Project. Section II begins with a description of the Central Valley before human development of its vast water resources. Section III then describes the ethic that propelled the development of CVP, while Section IV elucidates the environmental effects of that "putting water to work" ethic. Alternative ideas about water use are presented in, Section V. The next section describes various environmental laws which have affected operation of the CVP. Section VII examines the significant environmental provisions of the CVPIA. After reviewing the substantial uncertainties in the future of the CVP in Section VIII, I argue in Section IX that any significant environmental improvements in the Central Valley Project will depend upon both a strong, active constituency and bold, innovative thinking.

2. California's Historical Central Valley

   Many people are familiar with the work of Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert.(4) Widely read and discussed throughout the West, that book is a trenchant attack on the Bureau of Reclamation. In a coauthored follow-up book called Overtapped Oasis," Reisner describes the environmental attributes of the Central Valley of California before the European settlers arrived. He compares the Central Valley to the magnificent Serengeti Plain in East Africa, that wonderful area teeming with wildlife which straddles the border between Kenya and Tanzania. He writes of the historic Central Valley in which

   [a]ntelope and tule elk were countless - a million of each species is

   a widely accepted figure. Thousands of grizzly bears roamed the

   valley floor and foothills. Millions of spawning salmon, silvers and

   chinooks, swam up the river year round. . . . In the wintertime

   came the most impressive sight of all: skies almost overburdened

   with migrating ducks, geese, white pelicans and sandhill cranes, arriving

   from a great arc of summer habitat stretching from western

   Manitoba to Siberia.(6)

   Reisner paints an inspiring picture of the wildlife resources once found in the Central Valley. These resources, however, are now largely lost. Partial restoration of them depends on the implementation of new water management norms for the Central Valley, where two great river systems come together. The Sacramento River flows south through the Sacramento Valley and the San Joaquin River flows west and then north through the San Joaquin Valley. These rivers join in a magnificent delta area, now greatly modified by human activity, and then flow to the sea through Suisun Bay, San Pablo Bay, San Francisco Bay, and finally the Golden Gate.

   Before the European settlement, the valley experienced enormous floods.(7) The Sierra snowpack formed in the wintertime and melted in the spring, causing great flood waters to flow into the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. Very large seasonal wetland areas were created; as a rough estimate, the valley contained 4,500,000 acres of wetlands.(8) In addition to the rivers and wetlands, the waters created an important estuary in the delta, where fresh water and sea water mix by the force of tidal action.

   The large numbers of settlers, who came to California during and following the gold rush, tremendously modified the Central Valley. In order to claim farmland, settlers drained the wetlands, put in levee systems, and dug diversion ditches to take the water out of the streams and off to the farms.(9) Later, the settlers built storage facilities in the foothills to store increasing amounts of water for irrigated agriculture. Thus, the Valley had changed enormously in the 1800s and early 1900s before the Bureau of Reclamation built the CVP. Nonetheless, the CVP brought with it significant further environmental change.

3. Putting Water to Work

   The CVP is a massive public works project. It grew from an idea which had been around for a long time before the federal government got involved. As far back as the 1870s, people planned to move surplus water in the Sacramento Valley to the deficit areas in the San Joaquin Valley.(10) Northwesterners are familiar with people looking at abundant river systems, believing that the water is not really being put to good use, and arguing for diversion to someplace else where it can be put to better use. The Columbia River has been a target before and may be a target again.(11) This attitude prevailed in the 1880s with regard to the waters of the Sacramento Valley. Largely viewed as surplus water, some Californians thought that water not being put to beneficial use in the Sacramento Valley ought to be moved down into the San Joaquin Valley.

   That idea took on a lot more currency at the end of the 1910s when Colonel Robert Bradford Marshall created his own Marshall Plan, long before the reconstruction of Europe after World War II.(12) Formerly the Chief Geographer for the U.S. Geological Survey, Colonel Marshall in this regard acted in a private capacity. He drafted rather detailed proposals for moving supposedly surplus Sacramento Valley water south into the San Joaquin Valley. His plan became very controversial in California in the 19208, because hydropower development commonly accompanied multipurpose water projects. The private power interests in California in the 1920s were not at all interested in development of public power. Measures to implement the Marshall Plan made the ballot several times in the 1920s, but failed each time. The Pacific Gas & Electric Company, a major utility even then, funded much of the opposition.(13)

   The Depression changed things. The Depression did not hit California as hard as it did the East, but nonetheless the state experienced severe economic problems. The attitude toward the CVP changed because such a big project meant jobs. After legislative approval, the state CVP plan was placed on the ballot by way of the referendum process. The voters approved the state CVP in 1933.(14) When the state CVP was finally put on the books and Californians were ready to implement the Marshall Plan, however, the project's promoters ran into financing problems. They were advised that it would be difficult to sell the bonds necessary to finance construction of the initial units. With hat in hand, the water leaders of California went to Washington and asked President Roosevelt to have the federal government build their fully planned project. Roosevelt accepted. The federal government took the CVP over in 1935 as a relief project,(15) placed it into the reclamation program in 1937,(16) and went ahead to implement the main features(17) (shown in map at Figure 1).

   As constructed, the CVP stores large amounts of water in the headwaters of the Sacramento River system at Shasta Dam near the Oregon border. When needed, it releases water down the Sacramento River.(18) Once the water reaches the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, its passage south is facilitated by transport in the Delta Cross Channel to the southern Delta. At Tracy, the water is pumped into the Delta-Mendota Canal. That canal carries CVP water down the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, over to the middle of the valley, and dumps it into the Mendota Pool. Thus, the water from Shasta Dam largely ends up in the Mendota Pool to replenish a dewatered San Joaquin River, which is blocked at the Friant Dam on the upper San Joaquin River. Water from the Friant Dam is sent north through the Madera Canal and south through the Friant-Kern Canal in order to supply irrigation water to extensive federal service areas.

   This massive reworking of natural flows in the Central Valley was undertaken largely to help east side San Joaquin Valley farmers, many of whom had seriously overdrafted their groundwater resources while farming through a severe drought from 1928 to 1934. Water from the Sacramento Valley covered needs of the lower San Joaquin River water rights holders, so that east side farmers could be served water from Friant Dam via canals. The enormous scope of the CVP was best captured by Justice Robert Jackson, writing for the U.S. Supreme Court in 1950.(19) He eloquently wrote of how the Sacramento River and the San Joaquin River together "collect tribute from many mountain currents, carry their hoardings past parched plains and thriftlessly dissipate them in the Pacific tides."(20) Justice Jackson's words, however, reflected a notion, very common at the time, that fresh water is wasted when it flows into the ocean. The old engineering dictum, still sometimes heard today, speaks of the need to avoid fresh water "wasting to the sea." Water conservation was the solution to wasted water. Of course, at that time, "water conservation" did not mean low-flow showerheads or drip irrigation. Water conservation then meant building a dam, creating a reservoir, and conserving the yield from the river to be used beneficially.

   When Justice Jackson wrote about the CVP and the enormous amount of power produced at Shasta for use throughout the state, he was aware of the boldness of the enterprise, the...