In California, a Race to Capture the Water Before It Escapes

[hunter]

6. Many water capture projects might also be used to kill off riparian environments entirely...

... in times of drought.

Most natural riparian environments in California have already been destroyed.

It seems the farmers would take 100% of California's water supply if they could. There's still a lot of land in the Central Valley that could be turned into more profitable cropland if more water was available.

I'm of the opinion that many existing farms should be shut down and returned to something resembling a natural state, especially farms that produce a lot of toxic, high salinity drainage water. I'm no fan of industrial scale dairy operations especially. Cheap milk and hamburger are not necessities in the human diet. That's not a popular opinion among those who've been trained to automatically support farmers. Aside from burning fossil fuels, agriculture is one of the worst things humans do to the planet. We should do whatever we can to minimize those environmental impacts, and that would include reducing our consumption of meat and dairy products.

My personal opinions as a radical environmentalist, of course, do not represent any platform of the Democratic Party.