When Jerry Brown began his first governorship in 1975, he quickly set himself apart from his father, former Gov. Pat Brown. The elder Brown’s legacy had been an immense expansion of the state’s public-works infrastructure—new colleges and universities, a web of freeways and, most of all, a massive project to carry water from Northern California to the fast-growing cities of Southern California. The younger Brown echoed economist E.F. Schumacher’s aphorism that “small is beautiful,” suggested that California’s high population growth was a thing of the past and virtually shut down highway and freeway construction.