"The State Of Water: Understanding California's Most Precious Resource"

Oakland-based Obi Kaufmann is a kind of data-based poetic naturalist. 

In his new book he offers a guide to "The State Of Water: Understanding California's Most Precious Resource" ($20 in hardcover from Heyday; also for Amazon Kindle). Replete with the author's own water colors of birds and beasts, and hand-painted maps of the state waterways, the book is a paean of praise to "Water, always the commodity, rarely the honored vehicle of all life."

He adds: "If genuine restoration is the goal, the solutions of conservation and efficiency are at 

hand, reflected in our hearts that sing, have sung, and will always sing trust in this 

place." He believes that common-sense conversation and technological measures can reduce California's yearly water usage from 40 million-acre-feet down to 30. 

In other words, without building a single new dam (or enlarging Shasta), California would have not only enough water for its present population, but enough for decades to come.

"The aging dams are filling with silt," he writes, "and building more dams won’t 

help. With less precipitation and already an excess of storage, they will never fill." We already have what we need.

"The Oroville Dam crisis of 2017," he notes, "was an excellent and terrifying example of the paramount need to inventory the readiness of the entire system. Instead of building new water projects, our money would be better spent repairing our existing system and even identifying projects that can go. ..."

Kaufmann calls "the bravest of all opportunities" the removal of the Hetch Hetchy reservoir in Yosemite National Park. He says that even without this storage, "San Francisco would still derive most of its water supply from the Tuolumne River. Constructing a new intertie at or below Don Pedro Reservoir would allow the city to have access to its supplies in the reservoir."

Then data yields to poetry: "I see a thousand cranes rise from the reservoir and on their wings, the valley empties. In the morning, the bears dream of their return with sapphire eyes uncut on salmon’s tooth." It is the freedom "of a restored landscape." 

"We are Californians," he writes, and we love "a good challenge."