American History Tellers - California Water Wars - Los Angeles and the Future of Water | 6

Episode Date: February 26, 2020

UCLA environmental historian Jon Christensen discusses Los Angeles, its never-quenched thirst for water, and what that means for the future.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's 1934. You're a construction worker with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, hired to work on the Parker Dam. Just 150 miles south of the Grand Canyon, the dam site straddles the border of California and Arizona. For the last week, your crew has been working on the Arizona side of the Colorado River, attaching bridge footings. It's around 2 in the afternoon, and even though it's November, the hot sun isn't making your work any easier. But suddenly, the sound of your foreman's whistle cuts through the

den. Hey, what gives? The men around you stop what they're doing and look up to see the foreman, a bullish man named Marty, standing at the top of a bluff. Everyone stop what you're doing. Snorter, stop. Says who? Says the governor of Arizona, apparently. You and the men climb the short distance to the top of the riverbank. Guess they thought calling in the National Guard would help convince us. You can't believe it. Behind Marty are a dozen army transport vehicles and around a hundred National Guardsmen climbing out of them. Some of them are toting machine guns. They're here to make sure we don't finish this bridge. This is insanity. You've read in the newspapers about

the back and forth between the two states over water rights. Arizona has been sour on the whole Colorado River project since the beginning, and they probably should be. California is set to receive the lion's share of water from this dam and the larger Boulder Dam being constructed upriver. But bringing in an army? Against their own fellow Americans. You and the rest of the men gather around as Marty explains. All's I know is I got a phone call. The governor declared martial law until they get it sorted out.

I guess he's mighty sore about where this water's going. How long are they going to stay? I don't know, until someone makes a decision. The guardsmen fan out, take their positions along the construction site. But as you watch, they appear to be just as tired and confused as your crew. What do you think they're going to do if we keep going? Shoot us? Smart Alec and your crew pipes up. Hey Marty, do you budget for bulletproof vests? The men around you chuckle. Marty doesn't seem concerned about the small army that's

cornered you on the edge of this bluff. He seems more exasperated than anything. I don't think these boys are going to start a civil war this afternoon. It's more they're trying to make a point. You fellas just take a long break for lunch. You sure lunch is still legal? Maybe we ought to check with the Arizona governor. Yeah, yeah, all right. Anyways, take a break. And pipe down. This is no laughing matter.

The crew disperses and heads towards the mess. You shake your head. Out here in the desert, water is a precious thing. But is it worth the loss of American lives at the hands of American soldiers? We'll just have to wait and see. With Audible, there's more to imagine when you listen. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking.

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and what's left once the facade falls away. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history. Your story. Today, we wrap up our series on the California Water Wars. In the early 1900s, Los Angeles was a city on the rise. The only thing stopping it from becoming a major metropolis was its water supply. The city had long depended on its own river, but when it became clear that it wasn't enough to quench the city's ambitions, two men embarked on a conquest to secure the city's future, Frederick Eaton and William Mulholland. Under their direction, the city would spend $23 million and over the course of five years employ 5,000 men,

all with the aim of piping water nearly 200 miles from the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada down to Los Angeles. But the plan was controversial and sowed discord throughout the region. Today, I talk to John Christensen, an environmental historian at the University of California, Los Angeles. We'll get inside the minds of the men behind the project and talk about the environmental effects that can still be felt to this day. Here's our conversation. John Christensen, welcome to American History Tellers. Thank you. You've been known to call the Los Angeles Aqueduct Project LA's original sin. Why is that? Well, the aqueduct that brings water from the eastern side

of the Sierra Nevada, 240-some miles north of the city, was both the city's original sin and a signal accomplishment, an amazing feat of engineering that made the city as we know it possible. But it was also that original sin of taking water from another place, another ecosystem, another community, and bringing it to the city, as William Mulholland, the chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said in 1913 when the aqueduct was first opened and water tumbled out of the aqueduct into the San Fernando Valley where Los Angeles would soon be rapidly expanding. As he said, there it is, take it. And it is really that kind of arrogance and hubris, too, that the Los Angeles aqueduct and what is sometimes called the Owens Valley water grab has come to symbolize not just for Los Angeles, but really for

all of California and all of the American West. Well, let's talk about William Mulholland. He was certainly a central character in this story. And let's talk about how he and Frederick Eaton got the rights to the water in the Owens River Valley to begin with. Historian Mark Reisner has said that they stole it fair and square. What were the methods this pair used? Well, I think, you know, it is a good way to put it that they stole it fair and square. In the popularers in the Owens Valley. And historians have shown that they paid fair market value to willing sellers. So in the West, when you own a piece of land and the water that is used to irrigate it, you know, both of those are property rights. And they can either go together if you're irrigating a farmer or ranch, or they can be separated and the water can be sold off to some other use.

And Mulholland and Eaton went up there and they, you know, bought up farms and ranches. They didn't tell people what they were buying them for. And, you know, that in a way, you know, makes sense because if they had let out, let it be known that they were, you know, buying all kinds of properties in the area, the prices probably would have gone up. And they were trying to get those properties for, you know, the best price they could, you know, the fair market value at the time. And, you know, other historians looking back have seen really in many ways that the people who sold their water to their land and water, and then the water was separated from the land and brought down to Los Angeles, that they were probably better off in the long run than people

who stayed in the farming and ranching business. But the way that it was done, the secrecy with which it has done, you know, really angered people in the valley and, you know, fueled resentment that continues to this day. What do you think is the root of that resentment? Is it just that their valley changed, or is it that the city swindled them, or they feel that they did by not being as honest and upfront as they could have been? I think it's all of those things. And it's also the valley, Owens Valley is today and, you know, has been for the last century since the aqueduct, you know, was built and then opened in 1913, has been essentially a colony of Los Angeles, a colony of the land up in the valley, owns most of the water rights, leases

some of them back now to ranchers and farmers, and leases properties back to businesses in the Owens Valley. But it's hard to really do anything without getting, you know, some kind of permission or contract from Los Angeles, which is, you know, the big bad city more than 200 miles away. You know, so I think it's also that they lost control of their own destiny. Most people know this story through the 1974 film Chinatown. Does that film do justice to the dynamics of the time, or is it too much Hollywood drama?

Well, it's interesting that you phrase the question that way because I think it does both, really. There is almost nothing about the film that is historically accurate, and yet it captures the truth of the story, the moral heart of the story. And I think that's why I also call it Los Angeles' original sin, and the movie really captures that sin and that corruption in a way that is true, even though it's not at all accurate in terms of the events that it describes, the times that those take place, the characters, all of which are very loosely based on the historical story, but not at all accurate. But when I talk to people and I say

that I study water in the American West or in California or in Los Angeles, almost invariably people say, oh, you mean like Chinatown. So that story has actually become our imagination of the history. And it's really crucial in a way that we deal with it. And I think that has also captured that moral outrage that people have when thinking about a city reaching out into the distant countryside and taking its water, even though that has happened all around the American West and really made the metropolitan West as we know it today possible. I'm curious, how did you come to specialize in studying the water in the West? Water is essential to life in the West. And that's true both ecologically and

environmentally, but also, of course, socially, economically, politically. The American West as we know it today would not be possible without these incredible feats of engineering that have created what we call sometimes a hybrid landscape that is both engineered and natural. And so, to understand the American West today, you really need to understand that history. I'm still curious. In your professional career, was there a moment when you realized that water was the lever for this and this would capture your imagination? Was there a specific moment that you can recall? Well, so that's a good question, and you're making me think back. I mean, let me tell you what first brought me to the Owens Valley was early in my career when I was a journalist.

And I lived in the Great Basin, which is that area between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains. I lived in northern Nevada and on the eastern side of the Sierra in a valley much like Owens Valley, but farther north from there. And at that time, in the late 80s and early 90s, Las Vegas had filed water claims on underground water hundreds of miles north of the city and said that it would tap that water and bring it to the city. And remember, the Owens Valley was the battle cry of the opponents of what came to be called the Las Vegas water grab. And so I traveled down to the Owens Valley to try to understand that history and the concerns of residents there and why that anger,

you know, continued to today and why, you know, remember the Owens Valley could be a battle cry for these kinds of confrontations around the American West. You've just described another confrontation that is, you know, obviously very similar and the one that led you to the Owens Valley. These confrontations, though, are, well, they're complex. They're nuanced. Without them, without the water, Las Vegas, Los Angeles wouldn't be the cities that they are. There's clearly some advantage to having a city grow. There's clearly some disadvantage to having the water taken out of the valley. It makes me think about Mulholland himself, who saw Yosemite National Park and wanted them to dam their water to stop the goddamn waste. Of course, Yosemite is a national treasure and was then too. Is this just ruthless utilitarianism? Who was Mulholland in this moment? Well, William Mulholland was an Irish immigrant ditch digger, you know, who tended the ditches

that brought water into the city town at the time of Los Angeles from the Los Angeles River. And he worked his way up to be the superintendent and then the chief engineer of the water company and then the city agency, which became the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. And he had an engineer's vision of engineering the landscape to make the city work, make it possible. And that, as the city grew, became more demanding and more grandiose. And as the city was doubling every decade, growing rapidly in the early 20th century, he and colleagues believed that the city needed a new source of water if it was going to continue to grow. It couldn't just depend on the water that falls as rain in the Los Angeles basin and comes down the Los Angeles River, which is a very unreliable and flashy river like many in the West. So when they, you know, found when Owens Valley, you know, 200 miles to the north at the base of the Sierra Nevada, you know, which has this great snowpack that melts in the spring and all this water coming down the river and ending up in a, you know, in a lake

in the desert called Owens Lake. I think they had that same vision, right, that that water was being wasted as it flowed into the desert and that that water could provide what a great growing city needed. And it also had the added benefit of being uphill from Los Angeles so that the whole system could be fed by gravity and still is. And at the time, he said an interesting kind of enigmatic thing that I think exemplifies this thinking. He said, if we don't get the water, we'll never need it. So the city needed that water in order to grow. It didn't need it right away. And

if it never did get that water, it wouldn't be able to grow. And that is really kind of the essence of the drive of water seekers, as a great historian of water in California called Californians and seeking water in order to enable growth. And it's not just Los Angeles. At the same time, San Francisco was damming the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which was right next door to Yosemite Valley and a valley that John Muir called just as gorgeous and incredible as Yosemite Valley, in a valley that John Muir called, you know, just as gorgeous and incredible as Yosemite Valley.

That valley was, Hetch Hetchy was dammed and is a reservoir that still serves San Francisco. And this happened really all around the American West. And, you know, these great waterworks are what made the cities and agriculture of California and the West possible. Richard Bandler revolutionized the world of self-help all thanks to an approach he developed called neurolinguistic programming. Even though NLP worked for some, its methods have been criticized for being dangerous in the wrong hands. Throw in Richard's dark past as a cocaine addict

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And you're thinking of any sort of pursuit of water, whether it's San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Las Vegas, or anywhere else. Have you found the break-even point, the crossing point between the ends and the means? Do you think there's something that we should consider more or less? I don't think there's an absolute point or an absolute answer to that question. I think what we see are changing values over time. In the last 20, 30, 40 years, 50 years now, really, since the first Earth Day, we've seen a change in values where the people, voters, increasingly put value on the environment, on other non-human species and ecosystems, on the rights of Native American peoples that were ignored and trampled in the development of the American West. And we've increasingly seen court cases decided, laws passed, ballot measures passed that recognize the importance of those values, that recognize the changes in the ways that we operate, these hybrids engineered and natural systems that are now our water systems and rivers of the American West. And, you know, that great historian I was talking about earlier who called California water seekers

went on to call us, you know, a collection of water seekers. And he talked about this kind of incremental change. Norris Hundley Jr. was his name, and he talked about how it's often two steps forward a period of change, and we can be agents in that change and recognize the ways that we want to value other things, other people, other communities. My own view is that this history, this original sin, if you will, as well, that connects us to the Owens Valley. When I open my faucet and get a drink of water, I'm drinking water that comes from Owens Valley, but I'm also drinking water that mixed with it that comes from the Colorado River system. And mixed in there too is water from the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers

in Northern California. And that's an incredible history of engineering and human achievement that made a great city like Los Angeles possible that I love and value. Being here and the energy of the city and people being together and creating things. But it also gives us an enormous responsibility to those places as well, to those ecosystems and communities. And I think we are increasingly recognizing that responsibility. We have a long way to go still.

Let's return to Mulholland, because it occurs to me that his career and the public's view of him changed as well in his lifetime. Of course, the Owens Valley conflicts weren't the only problem for the aqueduct. There was the St. Francis Dam collapse. First, why did that dam collapse? Well, there's still quite a bit of debate possible about, that dam had been built as another source of water for Los Angeles, asuct was completed. The sort of investigation at the time and historical investigations that have taken place afterwards really point to that it was not, the site itself and the geology was not adequately understood so that there was water seeping into the rocks around the dam that held the dam, and that those appear to have softened and then enabled leakage around the dam, undermining the dam's plug, if you will, in that canyon, that the foundation of the dam itself was not adequate, and also

that it had been really overseen by only one man, William Mulholland, and that there should have been more oversight, more checks and balances on the design and building of the dam. It's easy enough to just go to Google and see the historical record and photographs of the impact of this damn collapse. And it's kind of catastrophic is the word. But it also certainly affected Mulholland himself. How so? It really ended Mulholland's career, you know, here was a man who had, you know, everything invested in his image and his accomplishments as a great engineer.

And he was ashamed. dam and reservoir that he had advocated for, that he had gotten approval to build, that he had overseen, had failed catastrophically and killed more than 400 people in the greatest disaster since the San Francisco earthquake. And it was really a man-made disaster, and he was the man responsible. After the incident, what changed in California water policy, in the aqueduct's history, and maybe Los Angeles' view towards water? You know, on the one hand, there were things that changed. There were, you know, dam regulations, dam safety regulations that were passed in the all of that. But on the other hand, you know, not that much changed. There were fears at the time that the collapse might derail the building of the Hoover Dam on Colorado River, which also was being approved and then built immediately in the years after that,

and that supplied water and still supplies water and electric power to Arizona, California, and Nevada. That dam was built. The Lake Mead Reservoir is an important water supply for the southwestern United States. That was built in the 1930s, and that brought water to Southern California and Los Angeles. And in the years after that, a huge state water project was built in canals to bring water from Northern California, as I said, the Delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers to Southern California. And so that great building of the hydraulic society that depended on increasingly large large dams and reservoirs and aqueduct and canal projects, you know, continued really into through the 1960s and into the 1970s. And it wasn't really until, you know, the late 1970s

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Well, let's take a survey then of the past 100 years, but particularly in the Owens Valley. You know, Los Angeles grew. It surpassed San Francisco. It became a behemoth of culture in the United States and globally, probably solely due to its access to water. But what happened in the Owens Valley in the hundred years that Los Angeles was growing to this status? Well, in many ways, you could say, and people do, and it seems so that the Owens Valley was kind of frozen in time. If you go there today, it is still a very wide open, incredibly beautiful landscape. It's dotted with small towns, and it has not

really changed that much in 100 years. And there are some folks who say that's really thanks to the fact that Los Angeles took all the water. If Los Angeles hadn't taken the water and also bought up all the property, the private property that was necessary to control that water, Owens Valley would probably be a lot more developed and covered with, you know, suburban tracks and second homes and sprawl. And so, in some ways, this history preserved the natural landscape of Owens Valley at the same time as it took the water. Now, it's also caused a lot of problems, the dewatering of the Owens River, then the lack of water that flowed into the desert lake called Owens Lake that then dried up and is now one of the sources of some of the worst air quality dust storms in the United States.

And those problems in turn have forced Los Angeles through court cases that have been won by environmental groups and by folks in the Owens Valley, you know, to keep water in Mono Lake, to, you know, ensure that there's enough in-stream flow in the Owens River for fish and other species, to dedicate more water to covering the Owens Dry Lake to keep down those toxic dust storms. And so Los Angeles is now also investing millions and millions of dollars in remediation of the damage that it's caused. And there's still a lot of animosity and anger between Owens Valley and Los Angeles, but there are also ongoing negotiations. Los Angeles clearly needed the water to grow to the state it is, but that was a long time ago. We are in 2020 today.

What is the state of water in Los Angeles right now? Well, the state of water in Los Angeles right now is of our water supply, particularly with the threat of climate change. All of California, and Los Angeles in particular, is aqueducts has been built to capture that snow melt when it runs off in the spring, hold it in reservoirs, and then deliver it over the dry summer and fall months to farms and cities. And we know from climate change science, and we see some signs of it already, that there is increasing likelihood that snowpack will lessen and that it will run off more quickly and sooner. And that is going to cause huge challenges for the system that was built for one climate regime, but we're going to have to figure out how to operate in another climate regime. So, the water that we get from Owens Valley and from Northern California and even from the Colorado River is going to be increasingly precarious. And there are a lot of folks here in Los Angeles advocating that we need to figure out how to be more self-sufficient to capture more of the rain that falls here, store it in the underground, in the groundwater, and then use that water for drinking water and for irrigation.

And we need to conserve more. And so, we're investing a lot in that now. There are some folks who imagine that and would like to see that we would become self-sufficient, that we would no longer need water from the Owens Valley or the Colorado River or Northern California. I don't think that that's likely. I think folks would like to see that happen because it could kind of absolve us of that original sin. But as I said, I think that we have a historical responsibility to those places, and that's important, and that's going to continue. Those places also give us the kind of portfolio of different sources of water that are not always threatened equally by the same forces. We may have less of a water supply from one in one year than the other. And so we have options, including this options of conserving water and storing more groundwater.

And so we're beginning to, over the last 20, 30 years have really built a kind of portfolio system that spreads our risks. And that means that we can survive the kinds of droughts that we've seen over the last 10 years, where most of those years we've actually been in a drought and we've done pretty well at managing through it. We've, you know, life has not stopped. The city has not stopped. You know, we've seen more people shifting to kind of desert, you know, drought tolerant landscaping in their yards.

You know, during the height of the drought, we saw the city of Los Angeles and cities across the state reduce their consumption by 20%. And we've also seen that over time as California experiences these droughts that are a normal part of our Mediterranean climate, that each time that we conserve more during a drought, a lot of that conservation sticks. So even as Los Angeles has grown over the last 20 years, our water consumption has actually decreased. And that's a good sign for being able to manage into the future in times that are going to be increasingly precarious for

our water supplies. You mentioned that there are many opportunities in the future in terms of technology or policy or engineering that might absolve Los Angeles of their original sin. But I'm interested in returning to the balance of the ends and the means and the balance between growth and conservation. How can we look to the history of Los Angeles and its water decisions as a guide for future conversations over these issues of growth, conservation, ends, means, and the morality that guides us? Well, that's a big, tough question, and I think it's one that we're going to have to continue to grapple with step back often as we make these incremental changes, even as we see the importance of really significant changes in our values.

And I think that the history of Los Angeles and its relationship to the Owens Valley and the LA Aqueduct can be read as a tale of coming to terms with those moral responsibilities and changes in values and increasingly respecting the importance of ecosystems and communities where our water comes from, of the history and heritage and rights of Native American communities that live there still. And we've not gone nearly far enough in Los Angeles yet in recognizing and coming to terms with those responsibilities. And so, you know, I think it is going to be, continue to be important for many, many years for us to continue to ask that question, those questions about, you know, where our water comes from. What is our responsibility to those places and communities? And it's not just the Owens Valley. It's also the Colorado

River watershed and the river systems of Northern California. John Christensen, thank you very much for joining me today. You're welcome. It's been a great pleasure. That was my conversation with John Christensen, an environmental historian at the University of California, Los Angeles. Next on American History Tellers, in two weeks, we'll be starting a new series about the tumultuous years of the early republic. In the 1780s, the dust had barely settled on the revolution, and a series of rebellions centered on class

and racial conflicts threatened to endanger the American experiment. But first, next week, an update on our series about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Archeologists in Tulsa have uncovered evidence of a possible mass grave where victims of the massacre might be buried. And now the city of Tulsa will excavate the site.

We'll catch up on these and other efforts in Tulsa. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. Sound design by Derek Behrens. This episode produced by Austin Cross. The Water Wars series was written by George Ducker. Edited by Dore Marina.

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