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For years now, Gov. Jerry Brown has been telling us that he will save the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta – the greatest freshwater estuary on this side of the continent – by taking water out of it.

Environmental scientists have hustled out to make his case. Wildlife experts have joined the “Oyez” chorus. And state water managers insist it is our only option. Among the biggest and most enthusiastic backers is the largest irrigation district in the world, Westlands Water District, and the largest urban water supplier in the world, Metropolitan Water District.

 

The National Weather Service distributed a remarkable photo the other day – a satellite view of California showing just how green it has become after heavy winter rains.

The occasion was St. Patrick’s Day, but the photo’s true meaning was the vernal equinox’s age-old promise of renewal. California is green again, except for its deserts and its snow-covered mountains, and its reservoirs are, for the first time in years, holding healthy amounts of water – so much, in fact, that releases are being increased to make room for melting snow.

Atop a dirt levee his great-grandfather built in the 1800s to hold back California’s mightiest river, Northern California farmer Russell van Loben Sels looks out over the site of a new water project, one that would be the state’s most ambitious in a half-century.

Promoted by Gov. Jerry Brown, the $15.7 billion project would run giant twin pipes, each four stories high, underground for 35 miles and eventually pull thousands of gallons of water a second from the stretch along the Sacramento River where van Loben Sels farms to cities and farms to the south.