Two Step Authentication

Is the drought finally over? It must be, judging by the local resident whom I saw hosing dirt off his sidewalk on a recent rainy day.

It is true that this winter was exceedingly wet. Many regions across the state received rainfall totals that were between 150 and 200 percent of normal. So, yes, technically this drought is over. More so, if one subscribes to the official, declaration of the Governor, who pronounced an end of the “drought emergency” for most of the state.

The good news is that this excessive rain will bring succor to forests and fields following several years of extreme drought, when millions of trees died across the Sierra Nevada range. But, just because the 2016-2017 winter was wet, we can’t return to our old ways of profligate and inefficient water use.

I argue that we must abandon our old habits of wasting water. Instead, we must be wiser and treat water in California as the scarce and highly variable resource, which it is. We must use water more efficiently and sparingly. In doing so, we must also be prepared to share this resource among a set of competing, but legitimate, stakeholders like municipalities, farms, rivers, groundwater, reservoirs and natural ecosystems. We need to adopt this sparing mindset if we are to sustain our distinct California lifestyle into a warmer future, with more inhabitants, who intend to consume a cornucopia of unique, fresh, healthy and irrigated fruits, nuts and vegetables and demand fresh clean water for personal consumption.

Why must we think about water sparingly in California? We live in a Mediterranean-type climate with historically wet winters and dry summers. Another notable attribute of our semi-arid climate is that we experience much year to year variability in rainfall.

As Californians, we must be prepared to live with two types of drought. One type of drought is the one that occurs every summer, when we receive no rainfall and when evaporative demand for growing vegetation is greatest. We are able to sustain our population and agricultural economy because we have the luxury of receiving the runoff from the Sierra Nevada snowpack. This distant source supplies us with water to irrigate agricultural fields, golf courses and gardens during the summer growing season.

The other type of drought occurs every few years when we receive deficient amounts of rain during our rainy season. Our native savanna ecosystems know this fact well, as they are able to live in harmony with a variable water supply and are well adapted to survive during drought years. They have developed ecosystems with widely spaced trees, who have deep root and hardy leaves. As Californians, we’d be better prepared to allocate and distribute our water use, like the oaks, if we planned our expected water use on the basis of the amount of water available during the drier years.  Today, we suffer during the dry years because we allocate water across the state based on what is available on the average years.