Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History by Ted Steinberg

Author:Ted Steinberg [Steinberg, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2002-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

WATER AND POWER

By the 1920s, California overtook Iowa as the nation’s leading agricultural state. Roughly nine million orange trees and 73 million grapevines spread out across the landscape, amid other crops such as alfalfa, rice, peaches, lemons, plums, prunes, beans, walnuts, cotton, beets, and apricots. These were just some of the more than 200 commercially grown crops produced in the Golden State. Most were plants that had no business being grown on arid lands and would never have survived but for irrigation.28

At the outset, California farmers relied on surface water. But in the 1890s, the perfection of the centrifugal pump brought a vast reserve of underground water—perhaps as much as 750 million acre-feet (an acre-foot is equal to 326,000 gallons)—within reach. The pump, in other words, put growers in touch with enough water to flood the entire state of California to a depth of seven feet. In 1910, Tulare County, a major agricultural center, had 739 pumps; in 1919, it had 3,758.29

Beginning in 1918 and lasting until early the next decade, droughts caused growers to run their pumps with abandon. The result was predictable. In the upper San Joaquin valley, the average ground water level plummeted nearly 40 feet between 1921 and 1939. As the water table dropped, great numbers of ancient oak trees and other native plants died, and thousands of acres of farmland, dependent on the stored underground water wealth, went out of production. By the 1930s, vast expanses of some of the richest agricultural land in the nation were in jeopardy.30

Growers could have limited their water use and submitted to government control over pumping. But they felt it would interfere too much with profitability. Thus a new source of water had to be found if California was going to retain its position as the fruit basket of the nation. It had long been known that the northern reaches of the long Central Valley had two-thirds of the water but only one-third of the land fit for cultivation. Bringing the water south to where it was needed most would take, according to a state plan broached in 1933, a massive plumbing project. But with the nation mired in a depression, insufficient private money existed to finance such an ambitious scheme. So the state of California turned instead to the federal government for support.

In 1937, Congress authorized the engineers and planners at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to begin work on the Central Valley Project, a monumental scheme that, after nearly two decades of work, resulted in four major dams, four elaborate canal systems, and a lot of federally subsidized water for California’s growers. The bureau had been created earlier in the century subsequent to the passage of the National Reclamation Act of 1902. Established to fight monopolies and encourage the family farm, the legislation set up a system whereby money from the sale of public lands would be used to reclaim patches of soil from the clutches of the desert. Under the law, a landowner was entitled to

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