Title: Drowning the Dream: California’s Water Choices at the Millennium, by David Carle, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. Reviewed by William Blomquist
Abstract: a park ranger and biology instructor, has produced an earnestly argued but substantially flawed brief against the decisions that Californians made in the 19th and 20th century about the relocation and allocation of water resources.Viewed together, the flaws leave the impression that his principal purpose was to voice his dislike of Southern California.This is a feeling that he undoubtedly shares with many.The larger Southern California has grown, the easier a target it has become.Mr. Carle's book may thus turn out to be well received by an audience not as well acquainted with the book's ostensible subject matter--water.The factual errors in Mr. Carle's book range from the relatively small (the Orange County Water District is not a member agency of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, as he states on p. 109, and Southern California has not for many years had "the worst air quality in the United States," as he claims on p. 130) to the more important.In an example of the latter, Mr. Carle has the Metropolitan Water District's Colorado River Aqueduct bringing water from Hoover Dam and Lake Mead (p.108).In fact, Metropolitan draws its Colorado River water from Parker Dam and Lake Havasu, 150 miles downstream of Hoover Dam and Lake Mead.A factual error such as this might be more easily overlooked or excused in a different book.But Carle stakes his entire brief against California's past water choices on the development of water importation to Southern California--"This book explores the changing California environment as the entire state was transformed by the movement of water into Southern California" (p.xv).It is, then, a fair criticism to observe that he failed to obtain and employ accurate information about the largest of Southern California's water import projects.Moreover, Carle makes much of the fact that Hoover Dam was built by the federal government.Since he thinks Hoover Dam is the source of Southern California's Colorado River water, he depicts the project as a federal subsidization of Southern California growth.In fact, the Metropolitan Water District built Parker Dam and the Colorado River Aqueduct with funds from its own bond sales, approved by the voters within the district and paid off over the ensuing 50 years from water sale revenues.Whatever other criticisms may be addressed to Southern California's importation of Colorado River water, it cannot be said that the federal government, the state of California, or anyone else living outside the boundaries of the