Yesterday, after four years of drought, Governor Jerry Brown stood on dry grass where the snow pack is normally five feet deep and announced the state's first-ever mandatory restrictions on the use of water — escalating water wars between urban and agricultural users. The shortage of water's unprecedented, but the competition is nothing new -- and it's not just in California, which gets much of its water from winter snows in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. People in Las Vegas and Phoenix, as well as Los Angeles, are pitted against the farmers who feed the rest of the nation and other parts of the world. Will states with no choice but to share water get together to resolve a crisis that's never going away?
Taming Water Use in the Wild West
More
- Hertsgaard on how growers gamed California's drought
- Hertsgaard's 'Hot: Living through the Next Fifty Years on Earth'
- California Farm Bureau Federation on the California water crisis
- Graham on the water revolution that California needs (LA Times, 2014)
- Federal Bureau of Reclamation
- Prior Appropriation Doctrine
Credits
Guests:
- Mark Hertsgaard - Nation magazine - @markhertsgaard
- Chris Scheuring - California Farm Bureau Foundation - @CAFarmBureau
- Thomas Painter - Jet Propulsion Laboratory - @JPL
- Daniel McCool - University of Utah
- Wade Graham - public policy professor at Pepperdine University - @wadelgraham