William Deverell is chair of the history department at the University of Southern California and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

The talk these days about western water—or lack thereof—tends to line up on one of two sides of the discussion, on this or that side of the river, as it were. Some suggest that current drought and climate change conditions might portend “the end of California,” as a recent article in the New York Times wondered. The headline was far more ominous than Timothy Egan’s essay, though I admit to being miffed by the eye-catching presumption that California is going to dry up and blow away. It’s as if the drought, even despite new water restrictions meant to dispel it, has become the latest iteration of the environmental cataclysm that kills us off, the new version of that giant earthquake that drops us into the Pacific once and for all.

Others, though these voices are getting fewer and quieter, suggest that the cyclical nature of western drought dictates that the water will come back. It’s gone away before, in droughts past, but it has always returned and will do so again; it’s only a matter of time. A recent variant of this sanguine view, that our troubles are caused by humans and can thus be fixed by them, has been expressed in the form of a political scold, a campaign plank from the likes of Carly Fiorina and the Wall Street Journal editorial board: If only this or that dam had been built, we’d have plenty of water. It is the environmentalists and the liberals who are to blame for not doing enough. Build the dams, and when precipitation comes back, we’ll have water enough set aside for the arid reverse of a rainy day.


The truth is that the water future of the American West probably lies somewhere between the dire despondency of Cassandra and the nonchalance of Pollyanna. How do we know? A look at California’s centuries-long experience with drought and aridity, agriculture and irrigation can give us some coherence on that middle ground—not necessarily by way of templates for action but by offering perspective and context. California has a vast historical record of water use and misuse, and we had better begin to work with the vantages history provides.

Let’s first slide away from Pollyanna, as that’s easy to do. The drought isn’t that bad, the romantic (or perhaps the climate change-denier) assumes. A dry period will be offset by a wet one on its heels, just as the Pacific Ocean responds to the cool waters and dry Southern California winters known as La Niña with the warmer, wetter conditions of El Niño. Bathtub rings around lakes and reservoirs will go away eventually. The historically minded among our Pollyannas call up the 19th century, when the weather pendulum swung from crippling drought at mid-century to a wet period after that. Amid the rains that arrived toward the end of the century, Southern California boomed, agriculturally and otherwise; greater Los Angeles grew at breathtaking velocity, advertising itself to the world as a paradise of fecundity exactly when wetter cycles pampered the region’s citrus and stone-fruit trees, its tourists and new settlers. More recently, drought in the early Depression years, linked to the Dust Bowl, eased by the mid-1930s, while drought in the late 1980s gave way to wetter conditions by the mid-1990s (and we’ve been dry most years since).

But Pollyanna take note: The last nine years of dry conditions in Los Angeles have averaged about 11 inches of rain a year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s records. The longitudinal data for the past 135 years pegs that average as nearly 15. The absent four inches, on average, per year, spread across the entirety of Southern California, is a veritable ocean of freshwater gone missing. That wet “boom period” of the Gilded Age, when the L.A. average crossed 17 inches per year looks, with a long view, an awful lot like a lucky climatological anomaly.

It may be, as some predict, that an El Niño year is in fact on its way, with lots of precipitation for California, especially the southern end. But hold off on anticipatory celebration. If rain does come in a year or two, it will fall and flow simultaneously, and dozens and dozens of dams, old or brand new, won’t be able to catch more than a fraction of it. Snow, if it comes and if it remains frozen for long periods in high country places, runs off and percolates underground at a pace measured in months, not minutes. Without snowpack (in the Sierras, in the Rockies and in every lesser range at their feet), water deficits will continue.

It’s true that not long ago, mere years, climate change and drought timetables were spoken of mostly in huge swaths of temporal metrics—hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years. But that sine curve predictability is now butting up against climate change data head-on. In just a decade or two, thanks to the complex relationship between a drought cycle and hotter planet, we’ve utterly altered our temporal perspectives on water and its absence in the West. We look now to mere years, even single seasons, and mark substantial change happening in our data and before our very eyes. Pollyannas need only look at photographic or other visual evidence of galloping drought to see what’s happening and what is changing (for the worse), month to month, week to week, even day to day.

That takes us to Cassandra, to whom we should listen carefully. Droughts we have had—even very, very long ones. But what are we to make of the fact that the winter of 2014 was California’s hottest on record? Hottest, that is, until 2015, which has so far proved even hotter? With these and other findings, Cassandra spins a tale of thirsty doom across the West. Lakes are disappearing, rivers are mere trickles, winter ski slopes are becoming barren dirt tracks, trees are dying in staggering numbers. From these data points, Cassandra prognosticates not just environmental decay but societal destruction: Aridity will provoke de-population, which it has done in the deep past, which will in turn bring about economic stagnation, if not collapse. Drier areas of the West will cede people, money and power to wetter, or, worse, the driest among us will capitulate to group or individual violence in some return to Wild West past. Steely Dan hinted that the cycle would return in their hit “ Do It Again,” remember? “In the mornin’ you go gunnin’ / For the man who stole your water / And you fire ’til he is done in.” We will do it again, Cassandra insists, succumbing to violence amid the hotter and drier conditions that spawn it.

Truisms first: There is darkness in the history of water in the West. Long ago, “mega droughts” of the medieval period were surely part of the equation, and likely the central actor, in forever altering indigenous societies across the Southwest, as people who had relied on regular, if modest, water sources were forced to abandon their sophisticated cliff dwellings and migrate into and through other societies, other landscapes. In the far West, along the Pacific, the crushing effects of drought and general climate instability of roughly 1,000 to 1,500 years ago appear to have ushered in concomitant spikes of infectious disease and social violence among the Chumash people: Less freshwater likely parked the Chumash closer together, atop fewer and more reliable water sources. They got sicker, they probably fouled their scarcer water sources, and they turned on one another more frequently. Their bones, studied over the years, suggest as much: Lesions and fractures bear silent witness to drought’s potentially brutal effects.

The pitfalls are many. Be wary, Clio says, of far-fetched schemes that promise to solve a problem of immense complexity, that promise that imaginary magic solution. In the early 20th century, one Charles Hatfield, a sewing machine salesman turned sower of clouds, proposed, for a fee, to make rain come across wide reaches of the Southern California landscape that had dried out after the wet 1880s. He built a tower up in the San Gabriel Mountains, five miles from where I live, and apparently succeeded with his promise to Los Angeles that he was a “moisture accelerator.” “Oh Mister Hatfield,” the Californians sang, “you’ve been good to us: You’ve made it rain in ways promiscuous!” It did seem to rain when Charlie Hatfield was around—the city of San Diego also hired him to make it so—but his success was, not surprisingly, more a sign of his meteorological skill (knowing when it might rain) than any mastery of “pluviculture,” or knowing how to make it rain.

Today’s schemes? Be cagey, Clio whispers, of latter-day Charlie Hatfields pitching iceberg lassos to yank frozen freshwater south from high atop the globe. Be watchful of plans put up and out by those who imagine freshwater pipelines stretching thousands of miles to the lakes and rivers of the misty Northwest. Cast even a skeptical look on de-salinization plans or plants, or at least at any certainties that claim de-salinization as redeemer. Salt- to freshwater is bug-eyed expensive, and what’s more, most of the freshwater that comes of it will have to be moved uphill from sea level to where it’s most needed. De-salinization is not the return of Charlie Hatfield—it actually works—but best to think of it as only one among many ways in which the West tackles its water problems.

What else does History tell us? It reminds us that cultural attitudes toward water can change. For example, it wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that lawns and home ownership meant nearly the same thing out here in Los Angeles. Before then, we didn’t have the water delivery or irrigation systems yet in place to make it so, and suburbanization hadn’t taken off. As Midwesterners turned big swaths of Southern California into the “west coast of Iowa,” as Joan Didion reminded us, they simultaneously turned grassy rectangles out front or back of homes into claims on making it in 20th-century, post-war America. An affordable bungalow, an irrigated lawn (sprinkler systems date back a century), a trolley nearby to commute to and from work, property-defining fences, a backyard swimming pool and all the sunshine to bask in: These are the parts by which the “California dream” got its DIY assembly. It was not always so, though. Look closely to our deeper past, and you’re more likely to find cactus fences—property lines by way of beavertails or native plants that are coming back into vogue again, thanks to drier times.

What does that mean? Government incentives to pull out our suburban lawns—offered by increasingly enlightened water and utility providers, and encouraged by Gov. Jerry Brown’s mandate to reduce state water usage by 25 percent by next February—can work; they are working. These remedies are not sufficient alone and they are not perfect, but they are sowing a critical awareness of scarcity. Pundits like to point out that residential irrigation means so little in the larger scheme of California or western water, given the state’s massive agricultural economy, which accounts for about 40 percent of its water use. (Thankfully, farmers recently agreed to reduce their water use, too.) In acre foot logic, these pundits are correct: If I plant succulents where I once had St. Augustine grass, my water savings, in the scheme of things, is meaningless to anyone but me. But if my doing so is matched by most of my neighbors, those few gallons add up. More important, our de-lawned neighborhoods become water-conscious in ways that carry over into how we vote—how we enact legal changes in water use, water policy and water prices. Just as the lawns added up across the second half of the 20th century, so too can non-lawns accrue in the first half of the 21st.

Of course, here in the West, we move water across vast distances, not just within the confines of our own yards, and we must study large-scale irrigation, too, to understand how to fight drought. California’s systems for capture, storage and delivery are the most ambitious and technologically sophisticated in the world. The Central Valley Project (CVP), a federal effort, moves more than 2 trillion gallons of water annually off the water-rich Sierras to the arid Central Valley, generating hydroelectricity all the while. It is important to remember that these vast projects—the CVP, along with the L.A. Aqueduct, the Colorado River Aqueduct, the California state water project and others, all impressive in scale and results—were launched because of water shortage. Or at least water shortage in “site A” creating the demand to go get water from “site B.” It is important to remember, as well, that these pursuits have not always been ethical or even legal, sometimes altering entire ecosystems in their wake. When Los Angeles aqueduct-ed its way to the Owens Valley in the early 20th century, it sucked up a snowmelt river and splashed it hundreds of miles away on a metropolis thirsty for growth.

The complexity of that story and its long-term ecological and other ramifications extends well beyond even the brilliant tale told in Chinatown. Replicating such actions is neither possible nor warranted: The present environment or ecology of our landscape has changed, and there are no obvious sites of new water to tap, no sources awaiting initial exploitation. But what if we were to tackle our water problems with the same, sheer audacity of our forebears? They designed revolutionary water systems. They convinced millions of westerners to vote about water by way of which politicians they put in office, which bonds they bought and which crops they supported.

The good news today is that water has somehow gotten beyond its general dismissal as too boring to talk about. Even better than talking about water is voting about it, either with pocketbooks (yanking out grass, cutting water bills or changing water pricing structures) or with consciousness sprung from recognition of aridity and limitations. Individual acts of conscience—“I’ll take shorter showers”—can and will accrue to affect policy change. Changing crop demands, or at least changing crop and water subsidy patterns and crazy quilt pricing, will help. Paying attention to groundwater pollution and groundwater clean-up is essential: Aquifers keep water safe only if they are safe places in which to keep it.

Pollyanna tells us not to worry, not to think about water. It’s tiresome, she says, or no matter what we think about it, it will come back. Cassandra also tells us not to think about water. It’s too late, and she can see the future; aridity, water profligacy and drought have already rendered any human responses meaningless. As she does always, Clio reminds us to think. Study water, from all disciplinary angles. Push well past fatalism of either positive or dire expectations. Think small about water (say good-bye to that lawn, or at least most of it), and think big about water (change prices, change laws).

How can we do otherwise? We always have.