Success in water management requires broad agreement and coalitions. But people often seem to group themselves into communities of interests and ideology, which see complex water problems differently. Each group tends to hold different truths to be self-evident, as outlined below. These beliefs, when firmly held, do not stand up to scientific scrutiny, appear to other groups as self-serving nonsense, and hinder cooperative discussions on better solutions. The counter-productive aspects of these ideas make them dangerous to policy discussions.

A coalition of conservation groups is suing the California Department of Water Resources over its approval of the controversial Delta Tunnels project. “Once again Big Ag in the San Joaquin Valley has come begging for more corporate welfare,” said Adam Keats, a senior attorney at the Center for Food Safety. “Only this time it’s at an obscene scale, with tens of billions of dollars to be pilfered from the people’s pockets, an entire ecosystem driven to collapse, and incredible harm caused to the Delta farming economy and California’s sustainable salmon fishery.”

After more than a century of building levees higher to hold back its rivers, California took another step Friday toward a flood-control policy that aims to give raging rivers more room to spread out instead. The plan, adopted by the flood-control board for the Central Valley, covers a 500-mile swath from Mount Shasta to Bakersfield that includes the state’s two largest rivers and the United States’ richest agricultural region. It emphasizes flood plains, wetlands and river bypasses as well as levees.

After more than a century of building levees higher to hold back its rivers, California took another step Friday toward a flood-control policy that aims to give raging rivers more room to spread out instead. The plan, adopted by the flood-control board for the Central Valley, covers a 500-mile swath from Mount Shasta to Bakersfield that includes the state’s two largest rivers and the United States’ richest agricultural region. It emphasizes flood plains, wetlands and river bypasses as well as levees. The plan is especially important for Stockton, which sits at the bottom of the San Joaquin River watershed.