INTRODUCTION TO WATER IN CALIFORNIA, 2nd Edition 2015

By David Carle

University of California Press, 348 pages



Water comes to California by way of westerly, Pacific winds that drive cold, wet storms from the Gulf of Alaska into California’s mountain ranges, most notably the Sierra Nevada. David Carle, in a moment of awe and wonder, quotes David Duncan who describes our streams and rivers as “rising up in great tapestries of gravity –defying vapor to blow and flow back over us in oceans of clouds, falling once more upon the slopes as rain and snow.”

His effusiveness about the heavens is brief. Carle quickly gets down to business about water in California with thorough consideration of its many issues, each of which he illustrates with charts, tables, and photos. No wonder this book is the most detailed “introduction” I have read on any subject. For example, he carefully describes the 12 hydrological regions in California from the North Coast Region that borders Oregon to the South Coast and Colorado River Regions, noting the individual uniqueness of their watersheds and their significant rivers and lakes. The unsullied California that he describes is awe-inspiring, majestic, and beautiful. It also is different in ways that I had not anticipated: I did not know, for example, that the southern end of the Central Valley once contained Tulare and Buena Vista Lakes—500,000 acres of wetland that were fed by the Kern, Tule, Kings, and Kaweah Rivers.

