The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s–1990s

California is obsessed with water. The need for it - to use and profit from it, to control and manipulate it - has shaped Californian history to a remarkable extent. Not surprisingly, the story of Californians and water is filled with intrigue and plot twists. The author tells that story from before the arrival of Europeans to the drought that ushered in the 1990s. He describes the waterscape in its natural state: a scene of incredibly varied terrain and watercourse and wildly fluctuating rainfall. The aboriginal Californians did little to alter this natural state. Aside from limited diversions of streams for irrigation or fish harvesting, they simply took what water they needed from places they found it. Early Spanish and Mexican immigrants, although they exploited water supplies on a large scale for the settlements, considered water primarily a community resource, not to be monopolized by anyone. It was the Americans, arriving in ever-increasing numbers after the Gold Rush, who transformed California into a collection of the nation's pre-eminent water seekers. By the later 20th century, a large, colourful cast of characters and communities had wheeled and dealed, built, diverted and conived its way to an entirely different California waterscape. The author demolishes the image of monolithic "water empire" managed by a homogeneous elite. There were always competing individuals and interests in every question of water use, and the mammoth projects - dams, aquaducts and irrigation districts - all came about through uneasy, constantly shifting political alliances. The story is still being written and it revolves, as it always has, around the consequences of human values for the waterscape.