Agri-business hogs water while Californians are forced to ration Contaminated

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Five years of subnormal rainfall have confronted California with a possible catastrophe more widespread and lasting than the earthquake of October 1989.

From the housewife who is told not to flush her toilet so often to the farmers who find the balance of power between rural and urban interests shifting against them, everyone is affected.

Westerners have thrived for years in a land of little rain—less than 20 inches a year. They have learned to move water from where it falls in abundance to parched earth and thirsty people hundreds of miles away.

This is not a new-found science. Four thousand years ago, the great civilization of ancient Egypt was built on controlled water and irrigated fields. We have improved on the Egyptians with electric pumps and reinforced concrete, but the social engineering behind our vast water projects has remained on the primitive level of human exploiting human.

Robbing the Owens. Valley Capitalist enterprises have maimed and killed people to keep water for themselves and deny it to others. Movie-goers remember the early westerns where the "baddies" dammed up the river and left the honest folk down stream with a dry creek bed.

A later movie, "Chinatown," depicted the sophisticated water swindle perpetrated on the people of Los Angeles in 1904.

By the turn of the century, Los Angeles was low on water. Local sources were no longer adequate for a city of 200,000. Water had to brought in from outside. Since the city was surrounded by semi-desert on three sides, "outside" had to be a long way off.

Business interests, led by Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, scouted water in the Owens Valley, 250 miles to the northeast. Since the water was already irrigating the fields of local farmers,