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In northern California, farming has been toxic for years, but if you ask the Environmental Working Group, the government has been doing all the wrong things—for decades. The Bureau of Reclamation, in the words of EWG, is trying to throw good money at bad land.
Here's the problem: the soil in the western San Joaquin valley is loaded with selenium, which poses a toxic threat when the land is used for farming because irrigation drains the high concentrations of selenium into the groundwater, affecting the environment, wildlife, and human health. But because conditions in northern California are otherwise so farm-friendly, farmers have insisted for decades not only on farming there, but on not footing the bill for the drainage or irrigation water—and forget about the environmental costs of the pollution that would result.
This proved deadly or dangerous for wildlife, most notably for the birds found by the thousands with horrid deformities in the early 1980s.
EWG explains: "when a group of San Joaquin farmers signed a contract with the federal government to create the new 'Westlands Water District,' they made sure that the contract contained a provision requiring the federal government to provide both irrigation water and drainage... Unfortunately, the Bureau of Reclamation didn't consider the potential environmental damages of draining off the polluted water when it agreed"—a decision the agency's head at that time would later regret.
In 1997, Floyd Dominy (who was no softy for environmentalists) said, "I made a terrible mistake by going ahead with Westlands at the time we did."
A legal and economic battle ensued—read more about those details from EWG—but it has surfaced again now because the Bureau of Reclamation released a plan recently for how to proceed in dealing with the land.
Here are some of the biggest points of contention with the new plan from EWG:
- Require the federal government to pay to build drainage and treatment facilities for a subsection of the selenium tainted land within Westlands, with the District itself footing the bill for additional drainage and treatment facilities to service acres remaining in production;
- Forgive some or all of Westlands' $497 million debt to taxpayers;
- Transfer ownership of "appropriate" elements of San Luis Unit, a federal-state water infrastructure complex of dams, reservoirs, canals, pumping plants and a power generation station, to Westlands if requested.
- Extend Westlands' water contract length beyond the standard 25 years;
- Reduce Westlands' water deliveries proportional to the amount of land retired, but only in years with very high rainfall.
Read more of EWG's analysis to learn more of the numbers and background, but the take-home question is—when is the government going to learn to stop it with the subsidies?
More on water scarcity:
California's Real Sustainability Problem: Not Budgets, Water Resources Management
Southwest In a Water Juggling Act as Supplies Dry Up
6 Solutions for California's Water Crisis and How We Can Help
How Smart Metering Can Solve the Water Crisis
