The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s-1990s.

• Author: Sax, Joseph L.

A book recounting the history of water projects in California is not, to put it mildly, likely to attract a vast audience of casual readers. For those of us who work in the area, a scholarly chronicle by Norris Hundley,(1) the preeminent water resource historian, is an occasion to celebrate. The question is whether there is any reason to commend it to a general audience. I think there is.

The story of the plumbing of California may be the best extant case study of the effort to realize the American dream, and how it fell short. Unlike the now-familiar tale of the decline of American manufacturing, this is not a story of fabulous success followed by corporate and union ineptitude and the subsequent triumph of an energized and ambitious Japan. What happened in California is far more subtle and in its way more profoundly disturbing, for the failure was bred in the bone of its own success.

California is an unnatural place, and not just in the way that crude comedians think. It has fabulously fertile land for agriculture stretching north and south for 400 miles, but it lacks sufficient local water sources to put that land into production. Along the coast, all the way from the San Francisco Bay to the Mexican border, it offers the most salubrious settings for urban living in North America, but the entire region is semiarid and incapable of supporting large populations on its native supplies of fresh water.

Had it been compelled throughout its history to live off its resources where they were found, California in the 1990s would look profoundly different than it does. But of course it was not so limited. Technology and vision transformed it. Those who think our politicians have always lacked a capacious view of the national future, or believe that this country has never had an industrial policy, will stand back in amazement when they read Hundley's story. At a time when Los Angeles was one fifth its present size and one tenth its present population, and when most of the state's south coast was barely populated, California's political and business leaders envisioned and brought into being a vast project to transport water hundreds of miles by gravity flow, and at the same time to generate electricity as the water was brought down from the mountains in the aqueducts they built.(2) San Francisco and the East Bay cities built similarly ambitious projects. As Hundley puts it:

[F]requently overlooked in this present age when segments of the public automatically equate cities with environmental destruction, both Los Angeles and San Francisco reflected Progressive values nationally that were ascendant when the two cities launched their projects. They provided the people what they obviously wanted: clean, fresh, abundant, and inexpensive water [and the ousting of private water monopolies]. This demand was of a piece with the public's insistence on pure food and drugs; on playgrounds, schools, and good universities; on cheaper and better transportation . . . and the host of other achievements associated with Progressive Era reforms. [p. 193]

The same energy led to the financing and construction of public infrastructure for water supply in order to establish a prosperous agricultural economy. This is exactly the sort of active government-business cooperation that we associate with forward-looking industrial policies. Paralleling municipal projects for urban water supply, the federal Bureau of Reclamation, under the...