NYT: who gets the water in California?
Dear friends,
My latest story, on the front page of Friday’s NYT, looks at a new frontier in California’s unending water wars, one that tries to reckon with choices made a century and a half ago, during the state’s earliest decades of pell-mell growth and subjugation of nature.
Reporting this one took me to cattle ranches in Siskiyou County, carrot fields in the high deserts near Bakersfield, sod farms in the Delta and a cramped room in Sacramento that is jam-packed with yellowing documents, crumbling maps and sepia photos — the whole messy history of California water in decaying physical form.
The story is part of a series we’ve been doing this year on the causes and consequences of disappearing water nationwide. Make time for ‘em.
Ray