California's Water - Distribution

In this second post on the subject, I wanted to talk about how Califnoria's water is distributed.  One thing you can definitely say about California, because water is such a precious commodity water is heavily studied, tracked, and reported on.  Knowing where water is going and how it's being used are the first steps in conserving it.  Below is a graph showing the breakdown of all water that falls in California in the form of rain and snow.

The first thing you'll notice is the largest piece, a full half of the water supply, is "environmental."  What exactly is that?  Environmental is my blanket term for what all the surveys break down into smaller categories.  This is basically water that is NOT captured or used directly by man.  This is water that is allowed to remain in streams, pass through dams, flow into lakes, estuaries, wetlands, and the ocean.

At this point you're probably asking yourself, if there is a water crisis why isn't California capturing and using this half of the available water?  The answer to that is more political.  Because of federal, state, and local regulations this water must be allowed to flow free - whether that's to preserve native habitat, help with an endangered species, etc.  Some people get very emotional on this issue - after all is a fish really worth preserving when we're running out of water?  I don't want to get into a political issue here and take sides either for or against these environmental regulations.  But I will say that the issue is far more complex and, like many things in life, the answer is a balance.

We cannot simply take all of the water for our use and the environment be dammed (no pun intended).  We need the environment more than people realize.  Wetlands filter pollutants and debris out of water.  Trees and forests clean the air.  And this is to say nothing about the recreation from going to the forest, lakes, rivers, etc.

Even though this "environmental" piece accounts for half of the available water in California, consider this water off the table when it comes to conservation and California's water issue.  In the next post I'll look at the next biggest piece of the pie - agriculture.