You are now in California and the U.S. category.

I spotted these seemingly conflicting headlines on DWR’s water news roundup yesterday.What gives? Who’s right? Confusing as it may seem, both stories are correct. The journalists are looking at the same numbers but are comparing them in different ways.The L.A. Times story (on the left) focuses on the fact that following a somewhat alarming drop-off in water conservation rates in August, savings have slowly ticked upward in the ensuing months. Back in August, conservation levels fell from 20.1 percent to 17.6 percent (compared to 2013), after officials eliminated water conservation mandates for most cities.

California is working to put into place a framework that will help the state deal with its current water shortage, as well as future droughts that are likely to be more severe with a changing climate. “Making Water Conservation a Way of Life,” a draft report released last week, is the collective effort of five state agencies to fulfill Gov. Jerry Brown’s Executive Order B-37-16, signed in May 2016.

In reading a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times, we just about choked on our Cheerios. One of our nation’s truly great newspapers, with inspiring editorial writers, the Times noted that California is more than merely lines on a map. Invoking the “California condor, the giant sequoia, the golden trout,” the writer implied that farmers in Stanislaus, Merced and San Joaquin counties have lost sight of what it means to be Californians.

The state of California’s proposed Bay Delta water plan is being portrayed as a water fight between supposedly wealthy farmers and fish. When there is so much more at stake to us all, I have to ask why? I suspect this is a deliberate tactic by those involved in professional politics and government. It is probably much easier to say that only a handful of farmers are being harmed by a massive water diversion than to acknowledge that an entire community – including some of the most disadvantaged youths and adults in the state – are going to be harmed.