What a great idea: devote a month to reading as much as possible about one subject, then share the big ideas.

Water development in the United States is fascinating. I knew nothing about any of it. There’s no way I’m going to be able to teach you everything I learned this month, but I’m going to try and give you the highlights...

• California is pretty much a desert. It has no right to be an agricultural wonderland. Most of the state gets less than 20 inches of rain a year, mostly in the winter. The big cities receive less than a fifth of an inch of rain each summer. Our decision to make it an agricultural powerhouse had forced us to spend ungodly amounts of money and waste insane amounts of water in an effort to maintain that illusion.

• Most of the water that was used initially was drawn from an enormous aquifer that filled up underground over tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years. We’re on track to drain it dry soon. It’s almost impossible to quantify how much water we’ve gone through in 100 years.

• ...much of the water for Southern California these days comes from the North. Dams collect the water and then release it in a controlled manner into the Sacramento River. It moves South for about 200 miles, irrigating some farms, until it joins a delta with the San Joaquin River, where it’s pumped into the Delta-Mendota Canal. It’s then pumped and moved another 150 miles UPHILL to get over the mountains in the way.

• This water isn’t for drinking. People don’t need that much. It’s for irrigating farmlands in the desert.

Reisner shows how the Bureau of Land Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, in a pissing contest, dammed up the whole country. In doing so, we destroyed ungodly numbers of species and ruined wildlife and the land. I always pictured companies and pollution as the enemy of the environment, but they’re not. The real bad guys are dams. We did this.

It’s also established the craziest form of welfare I’ve seen in recent memory. Our tax dollars paid for these dams. Billions. Then we pump the water to farms where we sell it to farmers at hugely subsidized rates. We make it so cheap (again with tax dollars) that people HAVE to waste water. It just makes economic sense. There’s so much cheap water around that they grow water-wasteful crops we don’t need. It’s horrific. Some companies have found ways to create paper farms to rig the system.

...One more thing before I move on. As much as you might hate dams, there’s an argument to be made that we won World War II because of them.

#learnnewthings schedule:

January 2016 – Water and growth in California

February – Wine

March – Game theory

April – Cryptography

May – Art history

June – The history of railroads in the U.S.

July – Oceanography

August – Football (strategy and theory)

September – Chaos theory

November – Linguistics