how now brown cow of an audience [insert brown claw here].
in a Natural Resource Law class our textbook had a nice long excerpt from Mark Reisner's Cadillac Desert. i love this book. it kind of gives you that "i'm ed-ju-ma-kated" feeling. whoop. anyway, here's a good bit,
"By the late 1970s, there were 1251 major reservoirs in California, and every significant river -- save one -- had been dammed at least once. The Stanislaus River is dammed fourteen times on its short run to the sea. California has some of the biggest reservoirs in the country; its rivers, seasonally swollen by the huge Sierra snowpack, carry ten times the runoff of Colorado's. And yet all of those rivers and reservoirs satisfy only 60 percent of the demand. The rest of the water comes from under the ground. The rivers are infinitely renewable, at least until the reservoirs silt up or the climate changes. But a lot of the water being pumped out of the ground is as nonrenewable as oil."... still with me? still wanting more? .... ok... but only since you begged for it.
"During the first and only term of his presidency, Jimmy Carter decided that the age of water projects had come to a deserved end. As a result, he drafted a "hit list" on which were a couple of dozen big dams and irrigation projects, east and west, which he vowed not to fund. Carter was merely stunned by the reaction from the East; he was blown over backward by the reaction from the West. Of about two hundred western members of Congress, there weren't more than a dozen who dared to support him. One of the projects would return five cents in economic benefits for every tax payer dollar invested; one offered irrigation farmers subsidies worth more than $1 million each; another, a huge dam on a middling California river, would cost more than Hoover, Shasta, Glen Canyon, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee combined. Carter's hit list had as much to do with his one-term presidency as Iran."
and one more passage from Cadillac Desert...
"The Colorado... has more people, more industry, and a more significant economy dependent on it than any comparable river in the entire world. If the Colorado River suddenly stopped flowing, you would have two years of carryover capacity in the reservoirs before you had to evacuate most of Southern California and Arizona and a good portion of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. The river system provides over half the water of greater Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix; it grows much of America's domestic production of fresh winter vegetables; it illuminates the neon city of Las Vegas, whose annual income is one-fourth the entire gross national product of Egypt -- the only other place on earth where so many people are so helplessly dependent on one river's flow. The greater portion of the Nile, however, still managges, despite many diversions, to reach its delta below the Mediterranean Sea. The Colorado is so used up on its way to the sea that only a burbling trickle reaches its dried-up delta at the head of the Gulf of California, and then only in wet years. To some conservationists, the Colorado River is the preeminant symbol of everything mankind has done wrong -- a harbinger of a squalid and deserved fate. To its preeminent impounder, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, it is the perfection of an ideal"