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Business as usual on the Colorado River may be about to come to a screeching halt. One of the worst recorded droughts in human history has stretched water supplies thin across the far-reaching river basin, which serves 40 million people. Nowhere is this more obvious than Lake Mead, which straddles the border of Arizona and Nevada. The water level in the country’s largest manmade reservoir has been plummeting; it’s now only 38 percent full. With an official water shortage imminent, Arizona, Nevada and California are taking matters into their own hands.

Yesterday, San Diego County Water Authority’s General Manager, Maureen Stapleton, sent a letter to CA Natural Resources Secretary John Laird asserting that Dr. David Sunding’s economic analysis for the Delta Tunnels project “may significantly overstate Southern California’s future demand for water from the Bay-Delta.” Ms. Stapleton’s letter explains that Dr. Sunding’s economic analysis used water planning assumptions from Metropolitan Water District’s 2015 Integrated Resources Plan (IRP) regarding the need for San Francisco Bay-Delta water. However, as Ms. Stapleton points out, MWD’s 2015 IRP only included local projects that were recently completed or under construction.

If this summer’s Pokemon Go fad proved anything, it’s that there’s some truth to the Millennial stereotype. They are maddeningly obsessed with technology. They are self-absorbed. They have short attention spans. It’s reason enough to view the generation with some degree of suspicion. Objectively, we know it is unproductive to allow these broad brush characterizations to unduly influence our view of this, or any other, generation. No generation thinks, hopes or behaves uniformly. We’re individuals, not demographic blocs. Yet, there are shared traits that allow us to effectively incorporate Millennials into targeted public affairs and outreach efforts.

Its marshes drained and diked, its rivers dredged and diverted, today’s Delta has been called a “brittle skeleton” of what it was 200 years ago. In fact, scientists concluded in 2014 that the Delta is hardly a river delta at all, anymore. But in a follow-up report published today, those same experts with the San Francisco Estuary Institute say there is still hope of bringing back at least a portion of the largest estuary on the west coast of the Americas. Their broad plan calls for fundamental changes to the mostly agricultural landscape that exists today.