HISTORY 142A Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: British Waterways, John Wesley Powell, California Geological Survey
Document Summary
Day 16: whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over . 9:56 am: the virgin waterscape: it looks remarkable verdant w/ all that green, california"s water problems very much connected to water problems around. Build dams, build irrigation canals, and deal w/ weird cycles of aridity (most of american west is arid/semi-arid) So there"s below the threshold of average water to sustain a civilization (esp. an agricultural civilization) There"s 1,200 major reservoirs in ca major manipulation of water supplies lets california grow to almost 40 million in population today: it"s about manipulating the landscape to survive. Water is incredibly valuable as a commodity: the strange thing that brings us to ca history: water is about power but it wasn"t supposed to be that way in the 1850s. Most settlers coming to ca in 1850s thought they were coming to a place where they could farm like they had in eastern states/other countries.
