Letters : Water Problems of the West

The water problems of the Santa Clarita Valley and Agua Dulce (March 9) should have been on page one, all editions. They presage our future.

Washington sent John Wesley Powell west over 100 years ago to report on how best to develop this land. His message was loud and clear: west of the 100th meridian (about 1,000 miles east of us) the Southwest has insufficient water to support population densities, urban and rural, like the East. Our Land of Little Rain has no more water resources now than it did then. All we have done is learn how to transport it.

This has worked in the past, although those in the Owens Valley stood and fought, for a while, but as the rest of the West has grown, so have the water needs of the areas where we have gone to get it. Riparian rights considered, all legal entitlements recognized, he who lives upstream has his hand on the tap. To this day we have not brought ourselves to recognize this basic fact.

We struggle in the courts (we should learn rain dancing, but I forget we don’t like the rain, just the water) and try finagling and trades. There is always that deal with the Imperial Irrigation District that never quite jells. Maybe they know something we don’t. In the meantime the developers, who aren’t going to live where they build, continue their mad pace unchecked, and an uncaring, wasteful populace plants its bluegrass lawns and splashes in its spas and pools amid the lush greenery, heedless of what is sure to be a prime item of future shock.

HENRY L. SCHARFF

Thousand Oaks