How do you build your way to preservation and population control?
California's dual water projects are generally hailed as the foundation of both large-scale agriculture in the Central Valley and the massive growth of Southern California. Farmers and southern California land speculators were among the strongest proponents for construction of the system of reservoirs and conveyance facilities that crisscross the state. It goes without saying that federal and state subsidy of these twin water works was crucial to the growth of the economy and population of the state's arid and desert regions.
There is, however, a tantalizing alternative explanation for the motives of at least one key player in the construction of the State Water Project. Marc Reisner’s fabulous Cadillac Desert cites an oral history interview of former Gov. Edmund Brown, Sr., regarding his motives for tirelessly championing the construction of the State Water Project:
...Brown suggested another motive that had made him, a northern California by birth, want so badly to build a project which would send a lot of northern California’s water southward:
So you like the relatively sparse population and agreeable climate of Northern California? Thank Pat Brown for having the foresight to divert the sprawl to the expendable regions of the Southland...“Some of my advisers came to me and said, ‘Now governor, don’t bring the water to the people, let the people go to the water. That’s a desert down there. Ecologically, it can’t sustain the number of people that will come if you bring the water project in there.’
“I weighed this very, very thoughtfully before I started going all out for the water project. Some of my advisers said to me, ‘Yes, but people are going to come to southern California anyway.’ Somebody said, ‘Well, send them up to northern California.’ I knew I wouldn’t be governor forever. I didn’t think I’d ever come down to southern California, and I said to myself, ‘I don’t want all these people to go to northern California’.”
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My hometown in NorCal has long suffered from a lack of coherent water policy in it's zoning laws. This has caused an unincorporated area to impose a building moratorium and the city has disallowed new connections to it's water system.
Although these are political limits, the recent drought has shown that there are practical limits to growth. There aren't always water rich areas from which to import your water.
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