Power and Policy in a State Thirsting for Water

Zanja Avenue is a quiet side street in Venice, but the name is a reminder of a once-crucial feature of the California landscape-- zanja madre , the so-called “mother ditch” that provided water to Los Angeles when it was still just a provincial backwater of Mexico.

By coincidence, I happened upon Zanja Avenue at the same time I was reading “The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, A History” by Norris Hundley Jr. (University of California Press, $65, hardcover; $24.95, paper; 800 pages), the definitive history of how water has been used and abused in California, both before and after the days of the zanja madre.

Water has always been something elusive but indispensable in California, as Hundley shows us, and the people who dwell here have always struggled to find it, master it and use it. Long before the first Spanish conquistador appeared in the New World, for example, the Paiutes had fashioned their own primitive irrigation system in what is now called the Owens Valley.

And the zanja madre of old Los Angeles can be seen as a slightly more sophisticated example of the same kind of waterworks.

More recently, as Hundley explains in fascinating detail, water development in California has been carried out on a far grander scale. It is the handiwork of “a new kind of social imperialist.” During the last century or so, the vision and will of the developers, and the genius of the engineers who served them, have transformed what the author calls the “waterscape” of California and created an agricultural, commercial and residential megalopolis that sprawls across the state.

“More can be done to nature with dynamite, a bulldozer and reinforced concrete than with the Indians’ digging stick,” Hundley observes. For the “social imperialist,” as he puts it, the goal was “to acquire the water of others and prosper at their expense, a goal that catapulted California into a modern colossus while also producing monumental conflicts and social costs.”

“The Great Thirst,” first published in 1991, has been fully revised by Hundley, professor emeritus of American history at UCLA, and he has brought the saga of water politics and water technology fully up to date. While Hundley’s self-appointed mission is to demythologize the history of water in California, he brings such grace and majesty to his book that some passages achieve the grandeur of a frontier saga.

Still, Hundley always comes back to the cutting-edge of water policy. He reminds us, for example, that the water needed to supply the suburbs of Southern California is a fraction of what is needed to irrigate the fields and orchards of the Central Valley. Some 77% of California’s water goes to agriculture, and a 1984 study cited by Hundley suggests that a 10% reduction in farm use “would have met California’s suburban needs for the next 20 years.”

He points out, too, that the fight over water is vastly more complicated and more volatile than depicted in such movies as “Chinatown” or “Erin Brockovich.”

“To outsiders, California is the feared water hustler nonpareil,” Hundley concedes, but he insists that the conflicts among “water seekers” within the state are the most ferocious of all: “Los Angeles versus Owens Valley/Mono Basin, San Francisco versus Hetch Hetchy and the preservationists, Army Corps of Engineers against the Reclamation Bureau, [and] the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California versus San Diego and the Imperial Valley” are among the rivalries he explores.

The ultimate irony is that attitudes toward water in California have come full circle during the last 200 years. Under both tribal custom and Spanish law, water was regarded as a public resource that must be preserved for the benefit of the community.

Under American law and the weight of American expansion, the rights of miners, farmers and builders trumped the public interest.

Today, however, judges and lawmakers are paying more attention to conservationists who argue that a purpose higher than private profit must be served when it comes to water policy.

What is required to accomplish the goal of “cooperative water management,” Hundley concludes, is a citizenry that is “informed, vigilant and active.”

If so, “The Great Thirst” is required reading for anyone who really cares about California’s most precious resource.

“California is that surplus of everything which begins with feeling good about oneself,” writes Laurence A. Rickels in “The Case of California” (University of Minnesota Press, $18.95, 374 pages), yet another classic study of California from the stance of a psycho-historian.

What we find at the core of California’s celebration of feeling good, according to Rickels, is a vision as dark as death itself.

“The invention of California from the 19th century to the 1950s can be worked out in examples of mourning which prove that to go West one must--Pac-Man-style--cannibalize some other,” he quips. “This is the Donner dinner party’s primal accomplishment.”

For Rickels, a professor of German literature at UC Santa Barbara, California is not so much a place as it is a symbol and a state of mind.

That’s why he draws on psychoanalysis and pop culture in equal measure to conjure up the dismal meanings that he discerns in such California phenomena as bodybuilding, religious cults, surf music and, of course, Disneyland.

“California is ... where the death wish yields to the death drive,” he concludes. “California could be seen ... as the opening of a frontier; but its simultaneous lack of future, its perpetual dread of the before, reduces the frontier onto which it opens to the zone of a theme-park.”

Not all of the musings are tightly focused on California. Indeed, many of them do not mention California at all. And his points of reference, deeply rooted in the arcane inner recesses of Freudian and post-Freudian psychology, range from the Marquis de Sade and Thomas Mann to Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe, all of them invoked to explain why Rickels regards California as “a semiotic placeholder for a vast and complex network of contemporary phenomena.”

The book is an intellectual tour de force that offers a highly eccentric vision of a familiar cultural landscape. His insights are often uncomfortable and unsettling, sometimes outright shocking, and always intentionally so.

One measure of the success of Rickels’ audacious enterprise is we come away from his book with much less certainty about what we thought we knew about California when we first picked it up.

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West Words looks at books related to California and the West. Jonathan Kirsch can be reached at jkirsch@kirsch-mitchell.com.