Blue Revolution Part 1

BLUE REVOLUTION.

Unmaking Americaas Water Crisis.

Cynthia Barnett.

Chapter 1. The Illusion of Water Abundance.

During Americaas retreat to the suburbs in the 1950s, large home lots, disposable incomes, and a nifty concrete spray called gunite gave families a new marker of success: the backyard swimming pool. For the rest of the twentieth century, residential pools symbolized upward mobility and offered a sense of seclusion not possible at city pools or even private clubs.1 The following decades redefined our relationship with water itselfa"from essence of life to emblem of luxury. By the time of the twenty-first-century housing run-up, even the plain blue pool had lost its l.u.s.ter. Adornments were needed. Aquatic affluence meant floating fire pits, gla.s.s portholes, and vanishing edges, which create the illusion of never-ending water.2 The amenity to envy was no longer the diving board. The must-have, now, was the waterfall.

No community glorified the trend like Granite Bay, California.

Granite Bay is nestled on the north sh.o.r.es of Folsom Lake, commuting distance east of Sacramento. The upscale suburb is named for the Cretaceous age rock that underlies this region in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. But during the housing boom, Granite Bayas developers were determined to upstage the areaas natural geologic outcroppings.

In Granite Bayas best backyards, rocky waterfalls cascade artfully into boulder-lined swimming pools, set off with grottoes, swim-up bars, and built-in hot tubs. Thick bushes and trees bearing flowers and fruit adorn the watery wonders, making a place naturally dominated by needlegra.s.s and sedge look more like Fiji. Precisely groomed lawns, a quarter acre and larger, complete the sublimely unnatural tableau.

On Waterford Drive, a beige ranch home with a trim green carpet out front only hints at the tropical excess out back: a pair of waterfalls flow into a clear-blue lagoon, with large rocks positioned for sunning and for diving. This is one of the more subdued motifs. Sacramento landscape architect Ronald Allison tells of a two-and-a-half-acre residential design in Granite Bay with a waterfall, a grotto, a cave, six fountains, a pool with a bridge and an island, and a ninety-foot water slide: aItas fun for the grandkids.a3 Such fun has helped push average water use in Granite Bay to among the highest on Earth. Its residents use nearly five hundred gallons of water a person every daya"more than three times the national average.4 Even when drought conditions cut federal water deliveries to California farmers and closed the stateas salmon fisheries, Granite Bay residents continued to consume water as if it were as plentiful as air. After three consecutive years of California drought, Folsom Lakea"actually a reservoir created by a dam on the American Rivera"was so dry, it looked like a moonscape. As water levels plummeted in summer 2009, officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the lake, ordered all boats removed from the Folsom Marina.5 Yet the San Juan Water District, which supplies Granite Bay from the reservoir, informed its customers that summer they would have to endure no mandatory water restrictions.6 Spectacular squander in the middle of a water crisis is not much of a shock in the United States, where we use about half our daily household water bounty outdoors. The dryer the conditions, the more we tend to pour. What is surprising, however, is to find some of the worldas worst waste in the Sacramento metropolitan area. Thatas because Greater Sacramento has become a national leader in finding solutions to Americaas energy and climate challengesa"and in working to solve other problems brought about by suburban growth. Sacramento glitters with all things green. But when it comes to water, the city represents a national blind spot.

Somehow, Americaas green craze has missed the blue.

Californiaas capital likes to call itself aSustainable Sacramento.a The progressive munic.i.p.al government is spending heavily on light rail and constructing only green city buildings. The utility generates solar, wind, bioma.s.s, and hydro power for customers willing to pay more for renewable energy. Sacramentoas citizens choose to do so at some of the highest rates in the nation.7 The city is so green, it provides organic food to public school children, bike racks to businesses, and free trees to residents who want to cool their homes with natural shade.

But with water, Sacramento isnat so enlightened. The metropolitan area, which lands regularly on lists of top green cities, smart cities, and livable cities, also has earned this startling ranking: it squanders more water than anywhere else in California. That distinction makes it one of the most water-wasting places in the United States. And that makes it one of the most water-wasting places on the planet.8 Residents of the metro region use nearly 300 gallons of water per person every daya"double the national average.9 By comparison, the equally affluent residents of Perth, Australia, use about 75 gallons per day. Londoners tap about 42 gallons per day. The water-rich Dutch use about 33 gallons daily.10 Grottoed communities such as Granite Bay arenat solely to blame. Some of the same politicians who forged the new path for energy in Sacramento fought for the cityas right to keep to the old road for water. The city is one of the last major metro areas in the nation to hold on to flat rates that charge residents the same no matter how much water they use.11 In 1920, Sacramento had amended its charter to declare that ano water meters shall ever be attached to residential water service pipes.a Only an act of the state a.s.sembly, which requires the measuring of water use statewide by 2025, has the city installing meters these days.12 Sacramento is by no means unique. Even as our green consciousness evolves, we often manage to ignore water not only on a global level but also in our own backyards. The Copenhagen climate accord, negotiated by the United Nations in 2010, did not mention the most immediate threat from a changing climatea"the worldwide freshwater crisis.13 Across the United States, we give little thought to our water use even as we replace lightbulbs with compact fluorescents and SUVs with hybrids.

The conscientious consumer who plunks down $25,000 for a Prius may still wash it every weekend in the driveway. The office manager who rallies every department to recycle paper is unaware of the millions of gallons of water a year that could be recycled from the buildingas air-conditioning system.

How is that?

One part of the answer is the illusion of water abundance. When we twist the tap, weare rewarded with a gush of fresh, clean water. Itas been that way since the turn of the twentieth century, when Americans perfected munic.i.p.al waterworks, indoor plumbing, and wastewater disposal as a response to diseases like cholera or typhoid fever.

Water is also our cheapest necessity. Four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline helped drive consumers to cars that cost them less to operate. Lower fossil fuel consumption and reduced carbon emissions are fringe benefits to protecting our pocketbooks. No equivalent economic incentive makes us think about our water waste. In fact, our water is so subsidized that many Americans pay less than a tenth of a penny a gallon for clean freshwater delivered right into our homes.

aAs a society, from a water standpoint, weare fat, dumb, and happy,a says Tom Gohring, executive director of the Sacramento Water Forum, a coalition of business, environmental, and other competing water interests that work together to find solutions to the regionas water woes. aIn the history of our country, weave had some serious water shortages, but very, very seldom have people been told that they cannot turn on the taps but for an hour in the afternoon, or that they must boil water.

aWater is just too easy to take for granted,a Gohring says. aItas always there.a14 This is true in Sustainable Sacramento, and itas true in the scorched Southwest. The most conspicuous water consumption in America is often found in those parts of the country where water shortages are most serious. Nationwide, we use an average of 147 gallons each day. In wet Florida, the average hits 158 gallons. In Las Vegas, itas 227 gallons per persona"in one of the most water-scarce metro areas of the United States, where water managers lose sleep at night thinking about what will happen when the level in Lake Mead drops below the intake pipes that carry water to the city.

Vegas swimming poolsa"with their gla.s.s walls, underwater sound systems, sushi bars, and stripper polesa"make Granite Bayas look like they came from the Kmart garden department. But in both locales, the extreme illusion of abundance makes it all but impossible for people who live and play there to notice their personal connection to the nationas water crisisa"to understand how wasteful water use in one house, in one backyard, multiplied by 310 million Americans, equals trouble for the generations to come.

Profligate water use today will imperil future generations, the same as profligate use of oil, destruction of forests, and other environmental tipping points will. But water is much more important to our future than oil. Thatas because there are no alternatives to it, no new subst.i.tute for lifeas essential ingredient being cooked from corn, french fry grease, or algae.

Like our other great, national illusionsa"say, the unending bull market, or upward-only housing pricesa"the illusion of water abundance is a beautiful bubble doomed to pop. With petroleum, those $4 gas prices sparked a collective aAha!a moment for Americans. But thereas been no aAha!a in the case of water, even though the largest of our waterworks are beginning to show a few cracks.

Letas put it this way: It will not be fun for the grandkids.

Rising 726 feet above the Colorado River between Arizona and Nevada, Hoover Dam stands as a breathtaking marvel of U.S. engineering. Its mammoth hydraulic turbines generate energy for hundreds of thousands of homes. Its reservoir, Lake Mead, supplies water to millions of Americans and another million acres of farmland. The damas iconic symbolism makes a study by the University of Californiaas Scripps Inst.i.tution of Oceanography that much more unsettling. In a grim paper t.i.tled aWhen Will Lake Mead Go Dry?,a marine physicist Tim Barnett (no relation to this bookas author) and climate scientist David Pierce say thereas a fifty-fifty chance it will happen by 2021. By 2017, they say, thereas an equally good chance water levels in the reservoir will drop so low that Hoover Dam will be incapable of producing hydroelectric power.15 Most Americans, including the millions who visit this popular tourist spot each year, donat yet seem to fathom that the largest reservoir in the United States is in danger of drying up, that the famous damas turbines could cease to hum. Even the Scripps scientists say they were astunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it was coming at us.a A dried-up Lake Mead is only the most dramatically visible of the collapses that scientists say could play out in the seven statesa"Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyominga"that rely on the Colorado River and its tributaries as ever-increasing water use, ever-growing population, and a changing climate shrink its flow. Scientists who study tree rings to learn about long-ago climate now say that the twentieth century, when America built its grand waterworks and divvied up its rivers, was the wettest in a thousand years.16 Now, the wet period is over; the National Academy of Sciences reports it unlikely that the Southwest will see its return. Instead, the region is expected to become dryer, and to experience more severe droughts, than in the twentieth century.17 Trees in the West are already showing the strain, dying off and burning at unprecedented rates.18 Now, people must adjust, too, conclude Barnett and Pierce, to forestall aa major societal and economic disruption in the desert southwest.a19 This dry, dusty American future is not confined to the desert. In the Great Plains, farmers are depleting the enormous High Plains Aquifer, which underlies 225,000 square miles of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming, far faster than it can recharge. We pump an average of one million acre-feet from the High Plains every day. (Thatas the equivalent of one million acres covered to a depth of one foot.) If that rate continues, scientists say, this ancient aquifer responsible for nearly one-third of all agricultural irrigation water in the United States will dry up within the century.20 Weave even managed to tap out some of the wettest parts of the United States. Florida has so overpumped its once abundant groundwater that the hundred-thousand-square-mile sponge known as the Floridan Aquifer, one of the most productive aquifers in the world, can no longer supply the stateas drinking-water needs. The Atlanta region has come within ninety days of seeing the reservoir Lake Sidney Lanier, primary water source for five million people, dry up.

But hereas the confounding thing: practically every scientific study that describes these catastrophes and the gloomy future they portend also concludes that it doesnat have to be this way. In the Southeast and in the Great Plains, and even in the arid states supplied by the Colorado River, itas possible to reverse the parched path weave set out for our grandchildren and their grandchildren, not to mention ourselves. Conserving water and changing the way we manage water would aplay a big part in reducing our risk,a says Kenneth Nowak of the University of Colorado at Boulder, coauthor of a recent study that shows the likelihood of depleting the Colorado Riveras ma.s.sive reservoirs depends on human actions.21 America needs nothing less than a revolution in how we use water. We must change not only the wasteful ways we consume water in our homes, businesses, farms, and energy plants but also the inefficient ways we move water to and away from them. This revolution will bring about the ethical use of water in every sector. Such an ethic is as essentiala"and as possiblea"as past awakenings to threats against our environment and ourselves: on the large scale, the way we halted use of DDT and other deadly chemicals; in our communities, the way we stopped tossing litter out car windows and trashing public parks; and at the family level, the way we got used to setting out recycling bins alongside the garbage.

Using water ethically isnat difficult. Itas revolutionary only because itas so different from the way modern America relates to water. But this revolution isnat big, costly, or b.l.o.o.d.y. Itas a revolution of small technologies over mega-waterworks. Itas a savings of billions of dollars in infrastructure and energy costs. Itas as painless as floating on your back in an azure spring. Call it a blue revolution.

Americaas Big Gulp In all, America guzzles about 410 billion gallons of water per day.22 Thatas more than the daily flow of the entire Mississippi River. Power plants drink up more than any other sector of the economy, and while much of what they use is returned, it is often at higher temperatures that can change the ecology of the source. Agricultural irrigation, which accounts for about 40 percent of all freshwater sucked up in the United States each day, is by far the largest drain on our aquifers and rivers.

Throughout the twentieth century, farmers and energy suppliers were the mightiest wizards behind the illusion of abundance. Farmers turned the driest gra.s.sland states in the nation into the most heavily irrigated to raise corn, wheat, and cattle (chapter 5, aTaproot of the Crisisa). Energy companies tapped the nationas rivers first for hydropower, then to cool coal and nuclear plants, never imagining that someday Hoover Damas turbines could stop spinning or that the Tennessee Valley Authority would have to shut down a nuclear reactor due to declining river levels (chapter 4, aPowerful Thirsta).

But even for the wizards, the illusion is beginning to evaporate. Population growth has fueled residential compet.i.tion for the shrinking aquifers and rivers long tapped by farms and energy plants. Our sprawling growth is also physically pushing urban America into those parts of the country that farms and power facilities once had to themselves. In recent years, water-scarcity worries have fallowed cropland in the West and halted or held up new thermal power plants in every region of the United States.23 In both the energy and agricultural sectors, the green sweep of the nation has not only missed water; it is also aggravating scarcity. It can take ten times as much water to generate power for a plug-in electric vehicle as to produce gasoline for the family car. Biofuels are worse. The production cycle can consume twenty or more times as much water for every mile traveled than for producing gasoline. When scaled up to the 2.7 trillion miles Americans travel each year by car, scientists say, water could become the limiting factor for our biofuels craze.24 Many Americans seem resigned to the notion that agriculture and big industries require a ton of water, and thereas not much we can do to change that. This is an especially common refrain in California, where agricultural irrigation accounts for three-fourths of water use.25 Farmers pump so much, what impact could citizens possibly have on the water crisis? But this is like throwing up our hands and concluding that because coal plants are the nationas top emitters of greenhouse gases, thereas nothing we can do about climate change.

It is time, now, to turn our attention to water. Since the turn of the century, Americans have not been involved in the workings of water; we havenat had to be. The conveyance of clean water to homes was one of the most successful feats of technology and engineering in modern times. But occasionally, weave gotten fed up with the nationas direction on watera"when pollution-plagued rivers led to the Clean Water Act, for example, and when fed-up ordinary citizens joined environmentalists more than thirty years ago to help bring an end to the era of mega-dams.

Now, the overtapping of nearly every large river and aquifer in the nation, and the inability of our political inst.i.tutions to change course, call for our involvement once more. In his best seller Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolutiona"and How It Can Renew America, Thomas Friedman writes that citizens were way ahead of politicians when it came to energy efficiency and green living.26 The same will be true of water. The citizen involvement and creativity now driving innovation in the green economy will eventually build a blue one.

The blue revolution will require deliberately different choices and the political backbone to make them: No wasted water in agriculture. No subsidies for crops that are irreparably harming aquifers. Water-efficient power plants. Restoring floodplains rather than building taller and taller levees. Planting trees and installing green roofs on the grand scale, rather than expanding sewers and costly new wastewater-treatment plants. Reusing water and harvesting rain to irrigate our lawns and to cool commercial air conditioners. Replacing wasteful, outdated fixtures in our homes and businesses rather than building expensive new reservoirs.27 Though the driest coastal cities will still build desalination plants and the largest ones, like New York City and Los Angeles, will still import water from outside their regions, the blue revolution is a turn from the vast waterworks of the twentieth century toward local solutions. Itas an appreciation for local water in much the same way weare embracing local produce (chapter 12, aLocal Watera).

In that spirit, the blue revolution begins in our own backyards. Just as itas no longer possible to give all large water users as much as they want, any time they want, itas no longer possible for every one of us to use 150 gallons a day from our ailing aquifers and rivers. Itas a lot like Americaas bank accounts: we are seriously overdrawn for luxuries we didnat even need.

So, how much of that daily 410 billiona"gallon Big Gulp is just us watering our lawns, flushing our toilets, and washing our dishes? Coming in third after power plants and agriculture, about 43 billion gallons a day, or 10.5 percent of the total, goes to public and private utilities. Thatas where the majority of us get our household water. For the most part, this water comes from aquifers (groundwater) or from surface waters (rivers and lakes). Water managers like to accentuate the difference between groundwater and surface water, but those terms simply refer to the location of water at a given moment. Water is often moving between the two. After falling as rain, water percolates into the soil, then flows underground to river channels. Evaporation and transpiration from plants pick it up again to cycle back into the atmosphere.28 To satisfy the Big Gulp, we pump this freshwater from underground, or from a reservoir or river, filtering and treating it at great cost so it meets state and federal drinking-water standards. Then, we move water through a network of millions of miles of pipes under our cities and highwaysa"some the diameter of a small pizza, some wide enough to drive a Volkswagen Beetle through. All of this takes a remarkable amount of energy. About 13 percent of all electricity generated in the United States is spent pumping and treating water and moving it around.29 Thatas nearly double the most generous estimate of U.S. electricity spent powering computers and the Internet. (This means a good way to save energy is to save water, and vice versa.) And then, the vast majority of this painstakingly purified drinking water is never drunk. Some of it goes down our toilets. But the lionas share is soaked, sprayed, or sprinkled on gra.s.s. Waterfalls and grottoes aside, the distance between Americans and their global neighbors who use less than 50 gallons of water per person each day is about one-third of an acre. Thatas the average size of the American lawn.30 The Fifty-First State California State University research scientist Cristina Milesi grew up in northeast Italy and moved to the United States to pursue a PhD in ecosystem modeling. When she arrived, she was struck by the size of lawns compared with those in Italy and wondered how much they contributed to Americansa super-sized water consumption.

In the early 2000s, Milesi, a remote-sensing expert, wanted to design computer systems that use weather and climate information to help homeowners make better decisions about when and how much to water their lawns. But no one had ever figured out how much lawn actually carpeted the United States. There were no Google Maps for lawns to overlay with rainfall, soil moisture, and other data. So Milesi, who works at the NASA Ames Research Center at California State University, Monterey Bay, began to create her own using satellite imagery.

The findings so surprised her that she repeated her calculations over and over to make sure they were accurate. Her satellite a.n.a.lysis showed that, between our homes and our highway medians, our golf greens and our gra.s.sy sports fields, lawns are Americaas largest crop. Weare growing far more gra.s.s than corna"with 63,240 square miles in turfgra.s.s nationwide. Thatas larger than most individual American states.

To irrigate this afifty-first state,a Milesi estimates that we use as much as nineteen trillion gallons of water per year. Thatas more than it takes to irrigate all the feed grain in the nation. aPeople donat believe their water use makes a difference, especially because agricultural consumption is so high,a Milesi says. aBut water is probably the most important issue facing urban areas in the futurea"and the primary pressure point on urban water use is the lawn.a31 Itas not that we donat have enough water. Itas that we donat have enough water to waste. And we definitely donat have enough to pour off nineteen trillion gallons a year, most of it drinking water created at high cost to both wallets and wetlands. Sure, some of our lawn water, now spiked with pesticides and fertilizers, percolates back underground. But much of it becomes so-called stormwater, which local governments then have to handle through an entirely different network of drains, storm sewers, pipes, and treatment to make it safe enough to flow back to streams and rivers. Sometimes, the stormwater never makes its way back to its source; in the coastal United States, hundreds of millions of gallons of freshwater shoot out to sea every day.

Landscaping and sod soak up about half of all household water drawn in the United States. Scientists report that Americans who live in cooler climates use up to 38 percent of their water outside, and those who live in hotter, drier climates use up to 67 percent of theirs outdoors.32 Water managers say this pattern persists despite multimillion-dollar public-education programs to convince Americans that they need not water their gra.s.s every daya"or even every other daya"to keep it green.

We donat have heroes for saving the planetas blue, the way we do other environmental causes. You can find climate celebrities all along the political spectrum and from Hollywood to Washington. Water is harder. Who in the world would be willing to stand up against watering the lawn or filling the swimming pool?

Maybe Donald Trump could fire water hogsa"but head have to start with himself. The same year he proclaimed himself a water-loving environmentalist in his bid to build a luxury golf resort and community on a breathtaking oceanfront site in Aberdeen, Scotland, Trumpas estate on a breathtaking oceanfront site in Palm Beach, Florida, was the most water-wasting on the entire island.

Trumpas Maison de laAmiti, viewed from the air, looks barren compared to the surrounding estates and hotels. It takes a moment to realize thatas because the property has been razed of trees; most of its seven acres is solid gra.s.s that stretches all the way to the sea. In 2007, during the worst drought in the history of the southeastern United States, Trump gulped an average of two million gallons of water a month for his outsized lawn and twenty-two bathrooms. He racked up a $10,000 average monthly bill.33 By comparison, even thirsty Palm Beach looks frugal; the average family there uses about 54,000 gallons of water per year.

The a07 drought was dire along the southeast coast of Florida. Lake Okeechobee, primary water supply for Palm Beach and other cities and backup water supply for more than five million Floridians, began to dry up. The gra.s.sy lakebed was so parched that it caught fire and burned for weeks. To try to save precious freshwater, local governments in Palm Beach County slapped a 30 percent surcharge on customers who used more than 6,000 gallons a month, enacted lawn-irrigation restrictions, and imposed fines on anyone who didnat follow the rules. But the oceanfront dwellers found a loophole. Residents with new landscaping were allowed to water three days a week instead of one for a month after planting. After the month was up, if they planted more new vegetation, they could again water three days a week. The Wall Street Journal found that residents were putting in new trees and turf, at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars a home, just to avoid the water restrictions. aWeare all just ripping out the old lawn and shrubs and putting in new ones,a one Palm Beacher told the Journal.34 It may not be all that surprising that Donald Trump and some other Ocean Drive residents (or nonresidents, as is more often the case in summer) would have the highest water consumption in the land. But water hogs come from all corners. Golfer Tiger Woods used nearly 4 million gallons a year at his Jupiter Island, Florida, home during the regionas devastating drought.35 Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, consumed 13.8 million gallons of water in one year at his Las Vegas mansion.36 Canadian pop singer Cline Dion has the dubious distinction of being called out as one of the largest water users in two statesa"both Florida and Nevada.37 In 2010, she spent $20 million on her Jupiter Island, Florida, backyard water park with two swimming pools, two water slides, and a lazy river, all of which use 500,000 gallons a month.38 Then thereas Lance Armstrong, who makes his home in Austin, Texas. During an intense dry spell, the local daily newspaper reported that the seven-time Tour de France winner was the cityas worst water guzzler. Armstrong used 330,000 gallons in one month at his Spanish-colonial home with its swimming pool, gra.s.s, and gardens, according to the Austin American-Statesman.39 Thereas not a more perfect picture of the American dream than Lance Armstrong swimming laps in his pool or doing crunches on his lawn. Gra.s.s brings the healthy enticements of the outdoors to Americaas doorstep. Itas been a.s.sociated with physical health in the United States since the nineteenth century, when our fore-families created the first suburbs to escape pollution and disease in the cities.

In recent years, environmentalists have drawn a bead on high-maintenance turfgra.s.ses, not only for their intense water use but also for the pesticides and fertilizers that run off and pollute rivers and estuaries. Lawn loversa"and the $60 billion turfgra.s.s industrya"are arming up to defend their turf. But it doesnat have to be all gra.s.s, or no gra.s.s. Thereas nothing wrong with a little, especially if itas of a native variety able to thrive in local conditions. Weave simply gone way over the top.

Moms and dads with small kids will tell you itas better to play and picnic on gra.s.s than, say, gravel or smelly recycled tire treadsa"the lawn subst.i.tutes showing up on urban playgrounds. Life is good with a patch of gra.s.s to spread a picnic blanket and let your kids run. But should it really be Americaas No. 1 crop? Irrigated at more than double the rate needed?

Gra.s.s is not the root of our countryas water problems; itas a symptom. A 63,240-square-mile indicator of the real ailmenta"our lack of an ethic for water in America. The illusion of abundance gives us a false sense of security, a deep-down belief that really, thereas enough water for anything, anytime. Grottoed new subdivision in the desert? Weall find the water. Sprinklers leaking down the sidewalk? Weall get to it.

Kids bugging you to take them to the nationas largest water park, with its 1.2 milliona"gallon wave pool that holds more than 20,000 bathtubs full of water?

Jump right in.

Aldo Leopold and the Big Kahuna When they hear the names of rivers like the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Delaware, most people a.s.sume they were named for the states. It just goes to show how much closer weave gotten to our artificial systems than our natural ones. The river names came first in almost every case, reminding us that rivers were the lifeblood of both Native Americans and colonists.

Mississippi is an Ojibway word for abig river.a Ohio is derived from an Iroquois word for agreat river.a The Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, and Missouri rivers were all named for Native American tribes before the states existed. The Connecticut River came from a regional tribeas description of its waters, and the state came later. Same with Wisconsin, although historians and linguists still argue over the origin of the word. Most have come to agree that itas a rough iteration of a Miami Indian phrase that meant something like aThis stream meanders through something red.a40 The 430-mile Wisconsin River traverses the middle of the state, northeast to southwest, through forests, glacial plains, and hills before it meets up with the Mississippi just south of a historic French fur-trading town called Prairie du Chien. About three-quarters of the way through its journey, the river winds through striking cliffs, canyons, and sandstone rock formationsa"the likely asomething red.a This sand-plain region of Wisconsin was both muse and refuge for Aldo Leopold, whose A Sand County Almanac has inspired our evolving ecological awareness ever since it was published posthumously in 1949. Leopold thought through many of his ideas about people and ecology at what he called his ahumble shackaa"actually, a rehabbed chicken coopa"on eighty acres near the Wisconsin River. He, his wife, Estella, and their five children drove up from Madison, where he was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, to spend weekends and vacations here in the 1930s and a40s.

Leopold was trained as a forester and founded the field of wildlife ecology. But he was intensely interested in people, specifically in figuring out how to help them see their connection to and responsibility for the natural world. Leopold believed that the answer was aan extension of the social conscience from people to landa41a"or, put simply, a aland ethic.a If people could see how closely their childrenas and grandchildrenas well-being is tied to the health of the land, personal ethics would drive them to cooperate not only on behalf of their families and communities but also for the natural world they inhabit. The land ethic, wrote Leopold, aenlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.a42 By land, he meant the entire web of life, from climate to water, says his biographer, Curt Meine: aThe water is a constant.a43 Leopold died of a heart attack while fighting a gra.s.s fire on his Wisconsin River land in 1948, just a week after the ma.n.u.script for what became A Sand County Almanac was accepted for publication. Had he lived, he surely would have been thrilled: First, that he sold a few booksa"more than 2 million. Second, that his credo, what weave come to call sustainability, has become all the rage.

Well, it isnat exactly the rage in Leopoldas own backyard. Leopoldas land and shack are preserved in quiet posterity by the Aldo Leopold Foundation, housed nearby in a showcase carbon-neutral building the U.S. Green Building Council has p.r.o.nounced the greenest in the nation. Visitors can tour the building and then walk through the pine forest and prairie the Leopold family restored and along the sandy banks of the Wisconsin River.

Visitors can, but not many do. Thousands a day, though, flock to a tourist strip that lies exactly ten miles from Leopoldas shack. They come to worship water, although not the sort in the river. For here is the largest concentration of water parks on the planet, including the one at the Hotel Rome at Mount Olympus, where a gargantuan fake Colosseum and wooden Trojan horse loom over a highway choked with miniature golf courses, haunted mansions, and salt.w.a.ter taffy shops.

The sandstone bluffs that gave the Wisconsin River and the state their names began drawing nature-loving tourists in the mid-1800s to see athe dellsaa"from the French dalles, or flagstone. The town bisected by the river and the dells changed its name in 1931 to the Wisconsin Dells to capitalize on its scenic draw. In the 1950s, a showman named Tommy Bartlett added a water-skiing athrill showa to the natural water wonders and marketed it like P. T. Barnum would have. In the ensuing decades, one attraction after another opened along the tourist strip. Most were small time, featuring the likes of b.u.mper boats and go-karts. Then, in 1994, Stan Anderson, owner of a Polynesian-themed resort, decided to sh.o.r.e up foul-weather business by building an indoor kidsa water park. Children went nuts, and so did their parents.

Fifteen years later, the Wisconsin Dells are no longer the main attraction in the Wisconsin Dells.

Today, the town overflows with twenty water parks that slosh around about 20 million gallons of water. The biggest indoor water park in the world is here. So is the biggest outdoor water parka"Noahas Ark. The biggest attraction in the biggest park is calleda"what else?a"the Big Kahuna, a 1.2 milliona"gallon wave pool. My kids and I found it right next to the fried Twinkies. We had a blast leaping up over fake waves in time with the pop music thumping out of the Big Kahunaas loudspeakers.

The waves build up from the back of the Big Kahuna, roll forward, and crash on concrete beaches. Behind the scenes, a balance tank makes the megaa"swimming pool work, a lot like the tank in a toilet. The Big Kahuna is always losing water, so the park uses what are called autofill pipes to constantly pull new water into the tank. To make the waves, a centrifugal fan blower pushes air at high pressure down onto the tank water. An air valve alternately opens to fill the balance tank and closes to push waves out. The electricity bill just to produce the Big Kahunaas waves: $1,500 a day.44 During operating hours, the twenty parks of the Wisconsin Dells constantly pump groundwater from an aquifer that scientists say is robust. Madeline Gotkowitz, a hydrogeologist with the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey whoas done extensive groundwater modeling throughout the region, foresees a day when water-intensive industries like microchip plants flee Americaas arid regions to build a blue economy in places like Milwaukee. The counties with some of the highest unemployment rates in the Midwest happen to sit atop the healthiest water reserves in the nation (chapter 9, aThe Business of Bluea).

So, maybe the Big Kahuna isnat hurting anyone. Not like Georgiaas Stone Mountain theme park would have, if public shame hadnat iced its ill-timed plan to make an entire mountain of artificial snow during Atlantaas 2007 drought emergency, which threatened the cityas drinking-water supply. But the surfer-themed wave pool is a 1.2 milliona"gallon homage to Americaas illusion of water abundancea"particularly to the children exposed solely to the chlorinated wonders of the Wisconsin Dells.

If childrenas love for water is cradled only within the bright-colored resin sides of a thrill ride, never the wondrous red sides of a sandstone bluff, future Americans will have ever less understanding of, and value for, our freshwater resources.

American kids are often the household nudges who make sure bottles, cans, and newspapers get tossed into the recycling bin. Kindergartners come home singing a song about turning off lights to save energy. But most donat know anything about the watershed they live in, where their house water comes from, or where it goes when they flush. Early on, America had a water ethic. We lost it to indoor plumbing. When we relied on a stream to run a grist mill for the family farm, we understood the value of water. Even the littlest members of families knew that water was worth its weight in golda"because theyare the ones who had to lug it in buckets. Another Wisconsin native, Laura Ingalls Wilder, devotes a chapter of Little House on the Prairie to aFresh Water to Drink.a She remembers in vivid detail the moment Pa finished digging the family well and the Ingalls had the luxury of hauling water from their yard instead of the creek: aLaura thought she had never tasted anything so good as those long, cold drinks of water.a45 In summer 2009, one of the Midwestas most famous natural waterfalls, fifty-three-foot Minnehaha in Minneapolis, dried to a trickle because of drought.46 But at Noahas Ark, children could still whiz down Bahama Falls. They could ride the Black Anaconda water coaster instead of looking for black snakes, play at Tadpole Bay instead of dipping for tadpoles in the sandy banks of the Wisconsin River. In fact, they could no longer see the river from the Wisconsin Dells strip. The townas water parks, with their tall slides, tubes, and coaster tracks, blocked all views of the river and its sandstone walls that drew tourists here in the first place.

The overwhelming popularity of parks like Noahas Ark proves that humans love water. We begin life in water, and weare drawn to it from the day weare born: plop a chubby-legged nine-month-old down on a riverbank, or even on a concrete beach, and the response is usually a huge, gummy smile and a splash attack. Somehow, we have to figure out how to harness that natural affinity to create a shared water ethic: an aquatic revival of Leopoldas land ethic that would help Americans see that our future ecologicala"and economica"prosperity depends on how well we take care of the water flowing under our feet, down our rivers, and through our wetlands.

Itas not complicated, especially compared with our climate-change challenge. The easiest, and cheapest, thing we can do is use less. At its most basic, the blue revolution means no one uses more than they really need. Individuals wouldnat pour potable water on the gra.s.s. Our agricultural subsidies would help farmers transition to efficient irrigation, rather than give them incentive to deplete aquifers and their grandchildrenas ability to farm. With a shared water ethic, we live well, with much less water. Not just a lot less in our own backyards, but a lot less across industriesa"in much the same way that the smallest households and the largest corporations are evolving a mind-set for releasing less carbon into the atmosphere. Industrial and agricultural engineers are showing us how in ways that increase crop yields for farmers and save companies millions of dollars in water and energy bills (chapter 9, aThe Business of Bluea).

Sixty years after Leopoldas call for a land ethic, most of us take some personal responsibility for the planet. Think of whatas changed in that time: Anglers now catch and release. We recycle our cans at home, our paper at work. And no one with a conscience tosses garbage out the car window anymore.

But when it comes to water, weave gone in the opposite direction. Our homes and lawns are bigger, and so is our thirst: We use quadruple the amount of water today, per person, than we did in 1950.47 We no longer pay attention to where our water comes from or where it goes. Adults and children alike are disconnected from the nationas rivers and streams. And the nationas illusion of water abundance blinds us from seeing how our own backyard garden hose connects to the bigger picturea"a concept we are starting to grasp when it comes to energy use, recycled materials, and other green issues.

In 2010, I went in search of a water ethic for America. The journey took me halfway around the world, but also to some unexpected places closer to home, like the Texas Hill Country, where residents have figured out new ways of living with water based on their own unique cultures and watershed. The water ethic will look a little different from place to place. Some regions, like the Hill Country, will embrace rainwater catchment en ma.s.se. Older metropolitan areas will transform as they replace aging water infrastructure, sending water to rain gardens and natureas filtersa"wetlandsa"rather than stormwater drains. Philadelphia has switched out even the kidsa basketball courts with pervious concrete, allowing water to percolate underground rather than run off to expensive stormwater-infrastructure systems. (An added benefit, say the kids, is that water dries from the courts much faster instead of pooling.)48 Although there were some hopeful signs, my search led me to another, harder truth about a water ethic: Americans will embrace it only if itas also supported by the people who make decisions about our water, from private companies to utility managers to governors. Although the blue revolution may start in our own backyards, it canat stop there. It doesnat make sense for local government to require citizens to lay off the lawn sprinklers, then approve a new subdivision atop the communityas most important water-recharge areaa"no matter how green the new homes are. Itas unprincipled for water utilities to fight lawn-watering restrictions, as a group of them did during Floridaas last big drought. The fundamental belief in water as a national treasure to be preserved has to catch on at every level of society, including what Iall call Americaas water-industrial complex.

The American illusion of water abundance follows a long and peculiar tradition. Throughout modern history, humans flaunted water as a symbol of power, wealth, and control of naturea"especially, it seems, in places where there is not nearly enough water to control.

In seventeenth-century France, Louis XIV built some of the greatest water features in the world at the gardens of Versailles, spread across both sides of the mile-long Grand Ca.n.a.l (complete with sailing ships and the secondary ships that followed them with violinists and other entertainers). The sumptuous gardens were home to 1,400 water splendors when Versailles was the seat of French political power. The colossal fountains, pools, and waterfallsa"and grottoes, tooa"were positioned so that the sovereign and his visitors would never lose sight of water during exhausting garden tours that lasted from morning until night.

But hereas what the royal visitors didnat know: There wasnat enough water at Versailles to keep all those fountain jets soaring, pools overflowing, and waterfalls cascading. They were built in careful groups so they could be turned on and off according to the kingas progress around the gardens. A secret palace staff would scurry ahead of the kingas touring parties, signaling their whereabouts with an elaborate system of flags and whistle blasts to convey when it was safe to shut down one group of fountains and turn on the next one.49 Like Versailles, the American illusion of water abundance is also carefully maintaineda"not by palace staff, but by the water-industrial complex. These are the professionals who make sure water gets to agriculture, to energy plants, to the utilities that make our faucets flowa"to every interest group that has come to expect large amounts of water. The water-industrial complex includes the $680 billion U.S. construction/engineering industry; thousands of technocrats who populate the nationas mind-boggling array of water agencies; scientists, lawyers, and lobbyists who work for large water users; and the public relations professionals who work for them and for government agenciesa"often hand-in-handa"to spin the latest water narrative.50 Americaas agriculture, energy, and real estate industries have been built on a water-supply model that no longer works. So have the profits of the water-industrial complexa"all of which makes it difficult to change course. The sectoras revenues are directly proportional to the size of the water projects they build or land for local communities. In general, the higher the number of gallons captured for our growing thirst, the bigger the profit. Until recently, few companies saw the profitability in saving water, although that is beginning to change, in the same way weave seen corporations like GE and BP increase revenues by creating more energy-efficient products, from small lightbulbs to giant wind turbines.

Up to now, the water-industrial complex has been so good at harnessing water and moving it around cities and regions, even up and over mountains, that Americans, like the visitors to Versailles, have never had to think about how it all works. Most of us never fret about how we use water, where it comes from, where it goesa"or whether it is wise to drain so much from our aquifers, rivers, and lakes.

The constant reengineering of those natural systems, from the dammed-up rivers of the West to the ca.n.a.l-dissected Florida Everglades, bolsters the illusion of abundance. Two mighty rivers, the American and the Sacramento, run through the middle of Californiaas capital city. How can it be water stressed? The same can be said of south Florida, surrounded by the Everglades and pummeled regularly by rains that flood the streets. Yet, astonishingly for the amount of water you see when youare standing in Sacramento or south Florida, these watersheds on opposite coasts of America have been manipulated to the point of near ruin. The Everglades of Florida and Californiaas Sacramentoa"San Joaquin Delta were two of the most water-abundant ecosystems on one of the most water-abundant continents. Today, they are among the best arguments for a blue revolutiona"a water ethic for America. Thatas because theyare both dying of thirst.

Chapter 2. Reclamation to Restoration.

On opposite coasts of America, the Sacramentoa"San Joaquin Delta of California and the Everglades of Florida once flowed as two of the greatest water treasures in the nation, their interiors, rivers, and lakes flush with freshwater, their tidal wetlands rich as the sea. Dreams sent early settlers west, to a gold rush, and south, to a land boom, to seek their fortunes in the Delta and in the Glades. But neither gold nor land turned out to be the true mother lode. Ever since California and Florida earned their statehood, the most rewarding quest in both regions has been the control of water.

In 1850, the federal government ceded the waterlogged Everglades to Florida and the Sacramentoa"San Joaquin Delta to California in what was called the Swamp Land Act. The idea was that states could turn water into land with ca.n.a.ls and culverts, dikes and drains.1 Over the next hundred years, federal and state engineers made wetlands into farmlands, peat into soil, rivers into channels. They built some of the most complex waterworks in the world and engineered them to perform miracles: in Florida, shunting Glades water away from croplands in a place too wet to farm; in California, harnessing the Delta water to irrigate a place too dry.

The stories of water in the Everglades and the Delta followed two divergent plots, but the core narratives, characters, and conclusions are remarkably similar. They also seem to be repeating themselves over and over again: Powerful interest groups have a water problem. Elected officials send government engineers to the drawing board. The engineers come up with a solutiona"the biggest and boldest yet. Significant public investment follows. Water users are happy until serious unintended consequences begin to reveal themselves, as they do today: while the natural water systems of the Delta and the Glades are dying, the artificial ones keep the heavily populated regions vulnerable to flood and drought.

This time, itas not just special interests that have a water problem. Itas all of us.

Among all its natural resources, America was especially lucky when it came to freshwatera"Lotto-winning, born-beautiful lucky. Our supply was abundant, with 3.5 million miles of rivers running across the country and another estimated 60,000 trillion gallons of groundwater stored beneath our feet in aquifers.2 Beyond that, North America was blessed with the largest numbers of fish and other freshwater species anywhere on the planet.3 Thatas what makes it such a singular shame that freshwater habitats are now the most degraded of all Americaas major ecosystems. More than any single threata"pollution, overfishing, or any othera"tapping too much water for human use, from agricultural irrigation to power production to watering our backyards, is the primary culprit.4 This is as true for the great waterways of the eastern United States as it is for those in the West. The most widespread human-caused extinction in North America has been the loss of freshwater mussels in the southeastern states, most notably those drowned in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with the damming of the Tennessee River. Those mussels had lived through the ice age. They survived the Native Americans who made them a staple. The bearded old men of the water even persisted through Americaas early-1900s pearling and sh.e.l.l-b.u.t.ton crazes. But they could not survive the impoundment of their free-flowing, oxygen-rich waters.5 Today, nearly 40 percent of all fish species in North Americaas streams, rivers, and lakes are imperiled, according to the most exhaustive study to date on the conservation status of fishes, completed by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2008.6 This number includes shimmering salmon blocked from their upriver migration in the Northwest, and the ancient sturgeon that once sp.a.w.ned in thirty-five coastal rivers from Maine to Florida and are now confined to two.7 These are the fish that literally fed Americaas founding and expansion. More than four hundred years ago, Atlantic sturgeon in the James River helped save the colonists at Jamestown from starvation. aWithout sturgeon, we may be speaking Spanish now, or French,a says Albert Spells of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.8 Their disappearance foretells a turning point in Americaas water history; the waterways that once gave us a staple now barely manage to produce a delicacy. Likewise, the water manipulations that choked the sh.e.l.lfish and the salmon are now squeezing people and businesses.

So it went in the Everglades. This aRiver of Gra.s.s,a as Marjory Stoneman Douglas described the Glades in her 1947 book by that name, begins much higher up the peninsula of Florida than most people think, at a chain of lakes near Orlando. Here, the Kissimmee River started its journey south along a wide and twisting path to the second-largest freshwater lake in the lower 48 states, Lake Okeechobee. The lake, in turn, spilled water south to quench a great, wet prairie flowing slowly for eight million acres down the bottom half of Florida to meet the sea. All told, the Everglades ecosystem was once the wettest stretch of the United States.9 All this water stood in the way of southeast Floridaas burgeoning winter vegetable and sugarcane fields, and crops of another sorta"those with rooftops. Indeed, the water represented athe vicious scourge of mankind,a according to a black-and-white propaganda film, Waters of Destiny, produced by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.10 In the Everglades, the filmas narrator cried out in a hydrophobic frenzy, aWeave got to control water! Make it do our bidding!a Then and now, fear of water in south Florida is easy to understand. In 1926, and again in 1928, deadly hurricanes sent Lake Okeechobee bursting through and over its earthen dike, which was originally built to protect crops rather than human lives.11 The a28 storm killed 2,500 people, most of them poor blacks who drowned in the agricultural fields south of the lake.12 The storm inspired the t.i.tle of Zora Neale Hurstonas novel Their Eyes Were Watching G.o.d: [The hurricane] woke up old Oke[e]chobee and the monster began to roll in his bed. Began to roll and complain like a peevish world on a grumble. . . . The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in their shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching G.o.d. . . . The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind has loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the [worker] quarters; uprooted them like gra.s.s and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.13 The Army Corps of Engineersa"part of what was then the War Departmenta"began its war on water in the wake of the hurricane, building up old Okeechobeeas dike with gravel, rock, limestone, sand, and sh.e.l.l. In 1947, the engineers set out to defeat athe crazed antics of the elementsa for good, with the Central and Southern Florida Project.14 The scheme would protect Floridians and their growing cities and farms from flooding and provide them with freshwater. Today, south Floridaas seven and a half million residents live and play, work and farm on lands kept artificially dry by a maze of ditches, dikes, and pumps, all controlled by computers.

The engineers harnessed the southward-flowing prairie with 1,000 miles of ca.n.a.ls and 720 miles of levees. They built sixteen pump stations and two hundred gates and other concrete-and-steel structures to control the flow of water. They straightened the sinewy Kissimmee River into the Dirty Ditch, as it became known, which carried polluted water into Lake Okeechobee. They built towering gates on the east and west sides of the lake to push the water through ca.n.a.ls to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts when Okeechobee got too high.

In short, they set out to get rid of water, but they got rid of too much. Before the project was ever finished, government biologists predicted it would devastate south Floridaas ecology.15 The water that remained was laden with phosphorus from fertilizers used on farms and urban landscapes. More than 90 percent of the waterfowl that once made their home in the Everglades, like the leggy egrets and wood storks, vanished. Sixty-nine species that lived here, from panthers to manatees, are now endangered. Toxic mercury and other pollutants make Everglades fish unsafe to eat.16 When the lake levels are too high, the system flushes the polluted water west into the Caloosahatchee River and east into the St. Lucie River.17 Business leaders say the toxins wreaking havoc on the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries are also doing a number on their economies.

Most ironically for the wettest place in America, the labyrinthine waterworks of the Everglades have come to cause structural droughts that threaten the freshwater supply of millions of people and thousands of acres of farms. But the biggest concern of all remains the risk to human life if a major hurricane were to wallop Lake Okeechobee when its waters are high, sending waves bashing through the dike the Corps of Engineers is working to fortify.

Today, the Corps must delicately balance the often-unpredictable dangers of flood and drought, a challenge best explained by events in fall 2005. After a record-breaking hurricane season weakened Lake Okeechobeeas 140-mile dike, the Corps released hundreds of billions of gallons of freshwater from the lake into the rivers and ultimately the ocean. The releases seemed like the prudent course to save lives and property in case of more rain. Instead, that fall marked the start of a crippling drought. By spring 2007, the lake was so dry that wildfires broke out on its weedy bottom.18 Residents had to slash their water use by a third; farmers, by nearly half.19 aWe wouldnat be in this position,a said Malcolm aBubbaa Wade, an executive with U.S. Sugar Corporation, aif we still had that water in the lake.a20 His industry was the leading special-interest group that had been imploring the government engineers to get rid of water for a hundred years.

As the Everglades are to Florida, the Sacramentoa"San Joaquin Delta is the liquid heart of California. At the confluence of the rivers for which it is named, the low-lying Delta is the largest estuary on the West Coast, stretching from Sacramento eighty miles west to San Francis...o...b..y, and south for fifty more miles. Just like the Everglades, the Deltaas veins are more bionic than mortal. But through them flows the lifeblood of Californiaas largest watershed, draining from the Sierra Nevada in the east to the coastal ranges in the west. For thousands of years, acc.u.mulation of sediment from the watershed, which spans nearly half the stateas surface area, formed thick peat deposits, inundated and exposed on the rising and falling tides. In the 1850s, farmers discovered that the rich peat islands were ideal for growing crops. For a century and a half, first Chinese laborers with long-bladed knives, and later huge dredges, worked to dry out the islands for agriculture and build up levees to keep out water. They essentially transformed the peat islands into below-sea-level bowls protected by delicate saucers.21 Today, driving through the region on Interstate 5, the view is endless, flat farm acreage intersected by narrow channels dotted with recreational boats. At the south end, near the city of Tracy, motorists pa.s.s over two major arteries of Californiaas water infrastructure, the Delta-Mendota Ca.n.a.l and the California Aqueduct. These and several smaller aqueducts, built between the 1930s and 1960s, deliver water from northern rivers to cities and farms in coastal and Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley.22 Almost half the water used in agriculture in California comes from rivers that once flowed to the Delta, and more than 23 million Californians rely on the Delta for their water supply.23 But these days, the natural and human-made arteries alike are on life support. The waterworks that supply the farms and the people depend on more than a thousand miles of levees as fragile as those in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. In 2010, scientists who study the Delta concluded that amajor levee failures are inevitable due to continued subsidence, sea level rise, increasing frequency of large floods, and high probability of earthquakes.a24 aIt is a two-in-three probability that abrupt change will occur in the Delta in the next fifty years,a says geology professor Jeffrey Mount, founding director of the University of California at Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, who has modeled the risks of earthquakes, flooding, or a double-punch quake and flood on the Deltaas levees. For a 6.5-magnitude quake along the Hayward-Calaveras fault line, which runs north and south along the eastern side of San Francis...o...b..y, here is what the models predict: the shutdown of all Delta water supplies to people and farms; the loss of two major highways and two ports as well as railroads and gas and oil pipelines; and the flooding of 85,000 acres of farms and 3,000 homes. Mount estimates the five-year costs at a conservative $40 billion. He declines to speculate on the death toll.25 The highly engineered water system that now threatens the lives of people was a death trap for fish and wildlife first. The San Joaquin River was once the southernmost salmon river in the world; the Sacramento River used to be the worldas second-largest Chinook salmon river. Those superlatives were overtaken by another: the Central Valley Project, the largest irrigation scheme in the United States. Californiaas legislature approved the project in 1933 to export asurplusa water from the northern, wetter half of the state to the dryer and more heavily populated south. In 1935, the federal government took over the project as part of President Franklin D. Rooseveltas New Deal. It called for a series of dams and ca.n.a.ls, starting with the Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River and the Friant Dam on the San Joaquin River. Completed in 1944, the 600-foot-tall Shasta Dam blocked salmon and steelhead from their sp.a.w.ning grounds on the upper Sacramento. The San Joaquin lost 98 percent of its water to the project.26 The sound of salmon swimming upstream, once so loud that residents likened it to a waterfall, was silenced.

A Reverence for Rivers.

Aldo Leopoldas work as a land manager never brought him to the Everglades, or to the Sacramentoa"San Joaquin Delta. Nevertheless, he had an intimate and profound impact on the two ecosystemsa"as father to the river hydrologist Luna Leopold.

Aldo Leopold articulated aThe Land Ethica in his Sand County Almanac with these simple words: aA thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.a27 He and his wife, Estella, taught their children to respect the natural world and learn everything they could about it. At the Wisconsin River shack on weekends, the family worked together to plant thousands of white pines, restore native prairie gra.s.ses, trap and band birds, cut firewood, canoe, swim, and hunt.28 All five kids became conscientious and competent observers of nature. Four became professional scientists. Three of them, Starker, Luna, and Estella, were elected to the National Academy of Sciences, a unique achievement for siblings in that organizationas history.29 Luna would come to be known as the father of modern hydrology.30 Aldo and Estella named their second child and second son Luna Bergere Leopold, for her side. Estella, whose maiden name was Bergere, was part of the Luna family, prominent ranchers with a Spanish land grant along the Rio Grande in what is now Los Lunas, New Mexico.31 The Rio Grande ran through the Leopoldsa lives, as did the Mississippi River: Aldo was born in 1886 in the same place he was buried in 1948, at the limestone bluffs rising above the Mississippi in Burlington, Iowa.

Luna Leopold trained as a civil engineer and meteorologist before he earned a doctorate in geology at Harvard University. Then, he joined the U.S. Geological Survey, where he began his