Water is for washing

A great article in The Atlantic about the politics surrounding California’s water management and the fight to safeguard it. Here’s the money quote:

But for now, California’s water story is all about tradeoffs, and the writer behind the On the Public Record blog would like the public to be more aware of them. “I wish we made explicit societal choices. Say, ‘Yes, I would rather we supplied pistachios to the world than had a San Joaquin River’ or ‘No, I don’t actually want my lawn as much as I want to know there are salmon in our rivers.’ We can manage our water system to do a very large range of things, but we can’t do them all well,” she emailed me. “I wish we were guided by actual explicit choices, rather than by every water district manager trying to keep our status quo going just a little longer. If we knew we (all 39 million of us, overall) didn’t want to use water to grow alfalfa for dairy cows, we could design a good transition for the people involved in that industry now. But we don’t make those choices, so we can’t design programs to make the transition to a more extreme climate more gentle for people. We just try to keep spreading the water thinner.”