Environmental Showdown

The Bush Administration’s schizophrenia over the environment and natural resources is nowhere more apparent right now than in the proposed renewal of 40-year irrigation contracts between the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and California farmers. The internal struggle represents a major conflict between the Environmental Protection Agency and Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr.’s Department of the Interior, with the Council on Environmental Quality siding with EPA. This is viewed by many in the Administration as a critical test case. The issue has not caught much attention outside of selected California constituencies, but its outcome could determine the Administration’s future course on environmental matters and Lujan’s ability to survive as a politically viable secretary of interior.

If the Administration follows logic and apparent legal precedent, it will order a full environmental impact study of the contract renewals and their considerable effect on California’s complex water distribution system. If the Administration elects to hew to the narrow and tenuous legal claims of the Department of the Interior, it will reject an environmental study. The question is whether the Administration will relent now and maintain President Bush’s desire to be a friend of the environment. Or whether it will side with mostly Republican friends in the agricultural community, give away considerable environmental credibility, and possibly lose the issue in the courts anyway.

The only reasonable answer is to proceed with the environmental impact report. This may embarrass Secretary Lujan, but it will not necessarily mean the farmers will lose any of the water they have been using from the Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Valley Project the past 40 years. For the Administration to uphold Lujan’s defiance of EPA would have the same effect as saying it believes in the National Environmental Policy Act, the keystone of American environmental law, only when it chooses to. From that point on, any claim by Bush that he is a friend of the environment will have quite a hollow ring.

The somewhat unfortunate scapegoat of the affair is the Orange Cove Irrigation District on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, the first of some 300 districts to sign water delivery contracts with the Central Valley Project, in July, 1949. Orange Cove is not typical of the agribusinesses that have been the principal targets of conservation organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council for receiving subsidized federal irrigation water, sometimes for growing subsidized crops. Most Orange Cove farms are small family operations that use water efficiently. Lujan issued a new 40-year contract to Orange Cove last summer in definance of EPA’s decision. The Department of Interior claims that other federal law requires it to renew the contracts and that no formal impact study was required. The Council on Environmental Quality, an arm of the White House that attempts to settle intra-Administration disputes of this sort, has sided with EPA. Lujan has had the matter under review ever since and is expected to announce a decision soon.

The EPA position reportedly also has struck a sympathetic chord within the Justice Department where Richard Stewart is the chief environmental lawyer, a former Harvard Law professor and former chairman of the board of the Environmental Defense Fund. Stewart, however, must defend the Department of Interior against a Natural Resources Defense Council lawsuit that seeks to force Interior to do the environmental analysis.

While only the one irrigation district is directly involved, the outcome of the dispute will set a precedent for hundreds of contracts that will be expiring throughout the West. The Central Valley Project of California alone distributes some 7 million acre-feet of water a year, or more than seven times as much water as the city of Los Angeles uses annually.

To ignore the environmental effects of such diversions is to show indifference to massive alterations in California’s water system over the years and to defy the changing nature of its water needs. The Bush Administration could set national water policy ahead by years if it approved the environmental studies, perhaps in a joint venture with California, and used them as the centerpiece for the reconciliation of a variety of water problems affecting both farmers and city folk.