OPINION: The Grand Bargain of Desalination

We are told that water scarcity in the arid American West is inevitable and that the great water projects of the past century were the product of misguided hubris. Environmentalists call for Westerners to shrink their agricultural sector and ration their urban water use and, increasingly, demolish the dams and reservoirs that enabled a civilization they have now declared is unsustainable.

They are wrong. In the far West, California’s chronic water scarcity — as well as many of the threats to aquatic ecosystems in that state — are caused by mismanagement. There is plenty of water.