On Being Greener Than Thou

SAN FRANCISCO — This environmentally sensitive city must rank as California’s per capita leader in “Save Mono Lake” bumper stickers. Its fabled streets and bridges fairly teem with motorists advertising their concern for the Eastern Sierra lake that Los Angeles once had all but sucked dry. And it’s a fine thing. Mono Lake needed saving.

Of course, up here “Save Mono Lake” can be seen as coded language, suggesting a hostile subtext. A more elaborate, and honest, bumper sticker would read: Save Mono Lake from demon Los Angeles, which dams rivers and drains lakes to throw up more desert suburbs that will be connected by hopeless freeways filled with air-choking automobiles driven by crass people who wear polyester and pack guns. Amen.

Interestingly enough, San Franciscans tend not to dwell much on the source of their own water. Maybe they imagine it’s delivered by eco-volunteers in recyclable vessels made of natural fibers, with proceeds to go toward rain forest preservation. Alas, it is not. It comes by pipe from a Tuolumne River valley called Hetch Hetchy, high in the Sierra. Before San Francisco flooded it some 80 years ago, Hetch Hetchy was regarded as a mirror of the great Yosemite Valley. John Muir’s failure to save this “temple” is said to have broken his heart, and he died shortly thereafter.

Not that folks here find the taking of Hetch Hetchy at all comparable to L.A.’s notorious grabs for foreign waters. A matter of perspective, no doubt. When a Reagan Cabinet member, making political sport, suggested that Hetch Hetchy be drained and restored, then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein sputtered that the reservoir was a San Francisco “birthright.” Needless to say, “Reclaim Hetch Hetchy” was not destined to become a major bumper sticker here.

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With that context, let us move now to more current events. Sixteen months ago, an array of political officials, environmentalists, irrigators and urban water managers came together in Sacramento and signed a document known as the Bay-Delta Accord. In essence, the warring factions of California water had agreed to give up a portion of their supplies to help restore rivers and estuaries. This was seen as historic. The pact would help replenish fish and fowl. It would mark a new direction for California water consumption, an epoch of cooperation. Peace, declared Gov. Pete Wilson, had “broken out” among the water warriors.

Cut now to a stormy day in January. Attorneys for a certain California city--a city whose water manager had signed said accord--enter a Sacramento courthouse and quietly file a legal document. The city has decided to join a legal effort to challenge certain provisions of the Bay-Delta Accord. Among items it finds troublesome is a requirement that under certain conditions the city must contribute a portion of its water to the protection of downstream ecology. If the court cannot legally prune out such itty-bitty items, the city’s brief goes on, it should simply junk the accord altogether.

And now, would anyone care to guess the city making this legal run on the heralded instrument of water peace?

Those who responded San Francisco will have a tree planted in their name.

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Environmentalists, who only last month happened upon the San Francisco filing, don’t buy the city’s line that the lawsuit is merely a technical stab at resolving language discrepancies between the accord and rules drafted to implement it. Said Dave Fullerton, an environmentalist instrumental in patching together the pact: “They are trying to make the case that the standards they agreed to are unnecessary, and so they are going to take their water back. This was part of the deal, and now they are trying to go back on the deal. . . . We didn’t sign this agreement so that agencies could start chipping away at it.”

While angry, the environmentalists are not exactly shocked. Veterans of California water wars, as opposed to believers in bumper stickers, have long viewed San Francisco’s water bureaucrats as no more or less sensitive to the environment than their infamous Southern California counterparts. In fact, Fullerton said, in the past decade southern water agencies actually have come to be seen as the more enlightened breed.

“This is very typical,” he said of San Francisco’s filing. “San Francisco has always been hypersensitive about its water rights.”

The lawsuit has not yet gone to trial. Resolution, however, most likely will come, not in a courthouse, but in the obscure back rooms where the water warriors seem to prefer to battle. Whatever the outcome, the legal challenge makes a simple, yet important point. When it comes to California water nobody--whether from north or south, city or farm--comes to the table with absolutely pure hands. Spreading scarce water among 30 million people tends to be a devilish business.