California's water wars aren't about scarcity. Even with 37 million people and the nation's most irrigation-intensive agriculture, the state usually has enough water for both people and crops, thanks to the brilliant hydrological engineering of past generations of Californians. But now there is a new element in the century-old water calculus: a demand that the state's inland waters flow as pristinely as they supposedly did before the age of dams, reservoirs, and canals. Only that way can California's rivers, descending from their mountain origins, reach the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta year-round. Only that way, environmentalists say, can a three-inch delta fish be saved and salmon runs from the Pacific to the interior restored.

Such green dreams are not new to California politics. But their consequences, in this case, have been particularly dire: rich farmland idled, workers laid off, and massive tax revenues forfeited. Worse still, they coincide with a $25 billion annual state deficit, an overtaxed and fleeing elite populace, unsustainable pension obligations for public employees, a growing population of illegal aliens-and a world food shortage. This insolvent state is in far too much trouble to predicate its agricultural future on fish.

You can learn an important fact about the water wars simply by driving the width of California's vast Central Valley, where most of the battles erupt. True, there is a rich agricultural economy of dairy, wine, row crops, and rice elsewhere in the state, both to the north and to the south. But the farming engine that drives California's $14 billion export industry is centered in the hot flatlands of the 450-mile-long Central Valley, bounded by the mountains of the Sierra Nevada to the east and those of the Coast Range to the west.

I make that drive sometimes, starting from a cabin high in the snowy Sierra Nevada, near Huntington Lake. After descending the pass into the Central Valley, I reach my small raisin farm, homesteaded by my great-grandmother in 1875: 40 acres of Thompson seedless vines, part of what was once my family's 135-acre property within the small-farming patchwork of Fresno County, full of lush orchards and vineyards. As I continue across the state toward the Pacific, I pass through the valley's very different, sparsely settled western region, with its vast corporate latifundia. Finally, I reach the Coast Range and descend into the Bay Area sprawl, where much of contemporary California's environmental policy gets made.  Click Here To Read Entire Article