Your first problem involves water. Residents of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta—California’s most vital estuary and source of water—fiercely oppose Brown’s plan to build tunnels that will divert water from north of the Delta to provide more reliable supplies to San Joaquin Valley farmers and Southern California. Their opposition is based on fear. In the short term, they fear construction of the tunnels will disrupt their lives. In the long term, they fear that the tunnels, by allowing other parts of the state to bypass the Delta, will lead Californians to forget the Delta. A forgotten Delta, they fear, will slowly die under the stresses of climate, habitat loss, and encroaching salt water from the San Francisco Bay.

Delta folks are likely to fight and sue to block the Bay Delta Conservation Plan and the tunnels it would create indefinitely—unless something dramatic happens to change the conversation. When you ask people in the Delta what would inspire them to conversation and negotiation, they say they need more than promises. They will only consider supporting plans that include “physical assurances”—the placement of water infrastructure that ensures the Delta will not be bypassed and that its health will remain a cause of concern for all.

That brings me to the second, seemingly unrelated problem. It involves housing—for governors. Yes, Governor Brown personally keeps a loft apartment in Sacramento near the Capitol. And then there’s the state’s Leland Stanford Mansion, a 19,000-square foot Victorian in Sacramento that serves as the governor’s official reception place. But California, unlike most states, has no official gubernatorial residence. Efforts to create one have foundered for years.

This failure is now an opportunity. Why not offer Delta residents a very clear and timely “physical assurance” that they won’t be forgotten by establishing an official governor’s residence in the Delta?

The idea may seem humorous or provocative, given the hostility of so many Delta residents to Brown and his tunnels. But I mean it seriously. Governor Brown, people in the Delta couldn’t accuse you of abandoning the Delta at the same time you were moving there. And living there would offer an opportunity to engage residents firsthand—and get the ground-level understanding necessary to make Delta plans acceptable to people living in Delta communities.

Beyond today’s debate about water, there are benefits to turning California governors into Delta residents. Politics is often too fast-paced for the minds and bodies of those who practice it. But the Delta is a peaceful mix of river towns, islands, levees, and sloughs—a natural refuge. It’s also not too far from the governor’s office. The commute from the Delta town of Clarksburg to the Capitol is shorter, according to Google Maps, than the commute from the monstrous Casa de Los Gobernadores that the Reagans built (and Brown abandoned) in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael.

Clarksburg is a nice town that produces a great deal of good wine—which could be a comfort to future governors when their job approval ratings take a dive. But Clarksburg is hardly the only good option in the Delta, a diverse place with 1,000 miles of waterways and a half million people. Walnut Grove, just a few minutes south of Clarksburg, is also close to the Capitol and has several large homes that would suit a governor. A place near the proposed tunnels would also be fitting, as a demonstration that the governor is ready to live with any disruption caused by construction or water diversions.

But taking over an existing house wouldn’t be as interesting, or as educational, as building a new one. (Yes, building a brand-new governor’s mansion seems like an extravagance, but the famously cheap Brown could get away with it.) Floods are a part of life in the Delta, and a host of environmental regulations govern construction. Many Delta homes are built high up on stilts. Wouldn’t it be cool—and a teachable moment—if the governor’s place were an eco-friendly, regulatory-compliant residence built high above ground?

When I tested out my idea of relocating the governor to the Delta on recent visits there, I got no shortage of cheeky suggestions for where to build a gubernatorial mansion-on-stilts. One person would love to see Brown in a house-on-stilts on Staten Island—a crucial Delta habitat for sandhill cranes that is owned by the Nature Conservancy. A few Delta residents suggested Isleton, a dysfunctional town where a former police chief bought guns on credit for his small department with the expectation that a future marijuana farm would provide the revenues to pay off the debt. (It didn’t work out.)

But other residents were more serious. My favorite suggestion was placing the residence in or near the historic small town of Locke, built in 1915 by Chinese immigrants who were forced to leave Walnut Grove after a fire destroyed their neighborhood. Locke has preserved its historic main street and has a couple museums (including one devoted to gambling), which help it to retain a special charm and a sense of the Delta’s rich history.

Delta folks do like to battle public officials, but they’ve been proud to count those who have chosen to live in the Delta—like Congressman John Garamendi and Secretary of State Debra Bowen—as neighbors. But requiring the governor to live in the Delta would send a profound message, and not just to Delta residents mad about today’s water infrastructure plans.

Such a move would demonstrate to all Californians that our water comes not from a tap but from real communities. It would emphasize that California’s future, as an economy and a place, lies in environmentally minded development.

And it would be a reminder to our leaders that reckoning with the challenges of climate change, water, and natural disasters is not merely part of the job—it’s something that they should live with, every single day.

The post The Governor Should Move to the Delta appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As legislators and voters debate proposals for water infrastructure and bonds, TV stations and the L.A. Times have already declared that we’re in a “Water War.” Soon you will hear the quote, attributed to Mark Twain, that “whiskey is for drinking and water is fighting.” And you are probably reading, again and again, that water, as much as anything, divides California.

That is entirely backward. Water, more than anything, unites California.

Which is precisely why it’s such a big problem.

Anything that unites a place as big and diverse as California is going to create trouble. So of course we fight and battle and litigate, and then litigate some more, over water. But the fighting is not a symptom of divide. We fight over water because we share the same water.

In California, people can spend their whole lives depending on water from places they’ll never visit. San Francisco takes water from the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. Southern California depends on the Colorado River, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta, and the Owens Valley. California’s water moves from mountains to the coast, and from the lightly populated far north of the state all the way down to the southern deserts.

It is the very length and scale of our water union that make water such a fraught question. Complex politics and conflict are givens when so many communities and interests are tied to the same supplies. What is remarkable about California is not our watery battles but the enduring cooperation that allowed us to build this system in the first place, and to more or less maintain it to this day.

Yes, we have neglected too much of this water infrastructure and are now seeing bills coming due. But the other big networks that unite California are arguably in even worse shape. The prisons are such an unconstitutionally crowded mess that the U.S. Supreme Court has ordered us to release tens of thousands of inmates—a mandate we’ve been unable to fulfill. We’ve gutted state support for our most important economic engines, our university systems; even if Governor Brown’s new budget plans come to fruition, that state support will remain a fraction of what it was before the recession. Indeed, public frustration with these systems and how they are governed runs so deep that they have become another binding agent; from the Oregon border to San Diego, Californians share a strong sense of the state’s governing dysfunction.

But water unites us more than any of these. After all, not everyone can get into California’s universities and prisons; water, for animals such as ourselves, is necessary. The current scarcity of water reveals our unity around it. A drought relief package passed our often-stalemated state legislature with only token opposition.

The real news in the drought so far is the announcement of the first-ever “zero allocation” in California. Our state and federal water projects have projected that they won’t be making deliveries of water—effectively shutting down water’s movement from north to south, and forcing regions to find alternatives. This has been described as a blow to San Joaquin Valley farmers and Southern California’s people. More profoundly, it’s a shock to our water unity, because it raises the scary question of how much of the water that has connected California for decades will be there for us in the future.

So as you try to understand the conversations around water now and in the years ahead, ignore the media fight promoters and focus on the question of water union. Will the drought or the water proposals before us loosen the ties that bind us—and force each region to rely more on local sources of water? Or will they bind us more closely to existing, aging water systems—connecting Californians more deeply but adding to our risk if climate change and environmental regulation diminish the water supply?

There is movement on both fronts. The water bond that Californians may vote on in November, and the proposed tunnels to take water from the Sacramento River under the Delta to the South, both come out of state government, and so they are—quite naturally—the embodiment of the keep-us-together-in-water approach. At the same time, enlightened water districts around the state are embracing recycling and storage, and investigating other means to boost local water supplies.

The irony is that California’s regions, by keeping and producing more of their water at home, may bring the state closer together and diminish conflict. California state government and politics, after all, have become dangerously polarized and contentious thanks to increasingly centralized tax and fiscal power in Sacramento. When the budget is tight, we all fight against one another. In the same way, being tied so closely to the same water system adds to conflict as we all seek to draw from a common pool. More regional independence—in water and in taxes—might well make us better neighbors, and better collaborators in managing the networks that bind us together.

It’s the paradox of this moment in California: to keep the state together, we may need to stand apart.

The post Our United State of Water appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Much of this transformation occurred in the early part of the 20th century: By 1925, the Delta had been pretty much carved into what it looks like today. As the state’s development progressed, more rivers were harnessed to remove the water from their natural watercourses and instead deliver that precious liquid to our chosen destination. This work eventually culminated in the construction of the massive Central Valley Project and State Water Project—two of the largest water systems in the world. Today, only a handful of California’s rivers are not dammed or diverted at some point.

The State Water Project literally connects one end of the state to the other, delivering water from Lake Oroville in Northern California south through the leveed channels of the Delta, down the aqueduct and out of Southern California taps. Yet despite this watery interconnectedness, Northern Californians and Southern Californians view water and the environment through very different lenses.

On the one hand, Northern Californians interact with water much more—most of the state’s precipitation falls in the north, so rivers, waterways, canals, and aqueducts are normal features of the landscape. Cities were built around the rivers; they run through them like the blood in our veins. Sacramento is built at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers, with abundant parks and bike paths for residents to enjoy. In Stockton, the Delta’s waterways extend like fingers into the city; after work, residents come down to use their sailboats and Jet Skis. Every weekend, many Northern Californians head out to kayak, sail, boat, Jet Ski, or simply wade in the waterways. The water is everywhere, and Northern Californians are very connected to it.

Any given afternoon, you can find people casting their lines along the riverbanks in Sacramento. Similar scenes play out all over Northern and Central California, in urban and rural areas. Whether for commercial purposes, pleasure, or to put needed food on the table, fishing is a big deal in Northern California.

On the other hand, Southern California’s rivers and streams run through concrete channels that are mostly dry except for the trickle of urban slobber that runs down the middle. If you could find fish there, you likely wouldn’t want to eat them. Connecting to the environment is more difficult in Southern California, especially for those living in the most densely populated areas; you generally have to drive to find parks and open space.

The fact is, most people in Southern California are unaware of the massive water systems that make our existence here possible. When they do learn about the origins of our water, many people vilify the very systems on which they depend. Yet the systems and water utilities that deliver the wet stuff to our faucets and hoses have done such an amazing job that we never have to think about it. When was the last time you turned on the faucet and nothing came out?

However, while we may be oblivious to our liquid connection to the north, Southern Californians are much better at water conservation. Southern California has among the lowest per capita rates for water use in the country, while Sacramento ranks among the highest. Southern California water conservation is embedded more in our fixtures than our minds: our toilets are low-flow, our washers are high-efficiency, and our irrigation is weather-controlled. For most of us, water conservation is less conscious than automatic, but nonetheless, it has been highly effective. In recent decades, the population of Southern California grew without increasing our total water demand. Even so, we can do more to conserve water. Our outdoor landscape has yet to be reconciled to more appropriate plantings for our arid environment. Water rates remain low enough that, for many people, wasting water does not have a significant fiscal impact.

Supplying California with enough water will be challenging in the coming years. Our problems are many: our aging water systems, built 50 to 100 years ago or more, are in need of repair; many groundwater basins are contaminated and need to be cleaned up; our ecosystems need restoration and protection; and levees that protect the Delta and urban centers in the Central Valley need to be repaired and reinforced. In addition, climate change threatens our water supply by reducing the snowpack that feeds our rivers and dams while, at the same time, increasing the threat of more intense rainfall or drought. There is a lot of work to do and it will cost billions of dollars, no doubt.

To address these challenges, Californians from the north and south need to come together to make necessary decisions about water. In the process, we need to understand, respect, and perhaps even learn from our regional differences. Southern Californians could learn about the importance of water and the environment to the Northern Californians who live, work, and play in the region’s many rivers and streams. Northern Californians could learn about effective water conservation from Southlanders. Every one of us should better appreciate our water—and the ecosystems it is drawn from—much more than we do.

But the issue is even bigger. We’ve lost touch with the fundamental role that water plays as the basis of life. Our modern society has grown disconnected from the natural world that supports fish, wildlife, and plants—and us humans. We simply cannot continue to draw more and more from our streams, rivers, and groundwater basins. We’ve already taken too much water; we’re going to have to give some back.

What we truly need is a new way of looking at water. As a society, we need to consider how to satisfy our needs and leave behind more to support the ecosystems from which we draw resources. We Californians can no longer ignore the reality that how we manage water is a matter of life or death for fish and other species that have been decimated by our waterworks. And, as individuals, we need to view water and other natural resources as too precious to waste—even if they seem to be all around us.

The post How California Can Teach Itself About Water appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.