theava.com
Mushrooming population, developers’ zeal, pressure for more housing, agricultural subsidies, pesticides, and other forms of pollution only partially explain the persistence of environmentally destructive water practices. The entire body of water law itself has been—and remains—a major culprit because of flawed statutes and legal principles out of step with the times. Also behind the confusion is the badly fragmented water management system that, along with the patchwork of laws, has emerged from the California cauldron of legislative and court battles over a century and a half.
Typical is the status of groundwater which is of crucial importance to the ecological and economic health of California. The state’s groundwater reserves are enormous, although the usable capacity is less than half that amount because of quality considerations and the cost of extraction. Underground supplies presently account for about 30% of the water used in the state and much more than that amount during drought periods, Despite the immensity of groundwater reserves, the volume extracted greatly exceeds the rate of natural replenishment during dry years and even in normal years exceeds that rate with a considerably greater overdraft for aquifers in highly developed urban and agricultural areas. Careful management to control overdrafts is a self-evident need, but the reality is that groundwater has seldom been subject to meaningful management and remains at the whim of contradictory laws.…
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