Dennis Kennedy’s water article listed Santa Clara Valley Water District’s efforts for weathering the drought. The term “weathering” implies that plentiful times will return. I disagree; I and others believe this is not a cyclical weather phenomenon but a rude awakening of our future of climate change. It is so important that we look at this drought with that ominous perspective.
Climate change is here. I visited Glacier National Park in August 2014 and the glaciers are gone. Nine of the 10 hottest summers ever were recorded in the last decade. You have to go to the weather extremes to be visually impacted by its effects. Yet what happens outside Morgan Hill can and will affect our needs and it is not limited to just water.
At the moment SCVWD relies on 55 percent of its water from sources outside our county. When those resources dry up (literally), you might have to buy water from as far as Canada, and even arctic glaciers under the Golden Gate Bridge. There are even considerations to build a dam under the bridge just to prevent delta salt water incursion as the oceans rise.
The City of Morgan Hill is paving over farmlands for housing and considering adding 30,000 new residents in a mega effort of urban sprawl. We will add more residents to Morgan Hill in the upcoming decade than we did in the previous century. Where will you get the water to support that growth and the growth throughout the county when we don’t have water to sustain what we have? Sure you can build salt water desalination plants but those require great amounts of electricity. And where does California get 33 percent of its electricity? We get it from the sierra snowpack in the form of hydroelectric power. That snowpack is gone and unlikely to return to previous levels for any sustainable time.
This drought does not mean that we temporarily water our lawns less or import our water from other resources such as Bakersfield as Dennis Kennedy suggests. It requires an entirely new approach to water conservation and management. It is going to require a change in our lifestyles, values, public policies, and a major investment in new projects and infrastructure. It requires a different way of thinking, a new mandate with different people leading that effort.
To begin, we need an Adaptation and Mitigation Plan (AMP), which almost no one has or even understands. The AMP identifies how climate change will affect our region and city. It is not just greenhouses gases or a look at higher temperatures but a comprehensive view of all the effects from our economy and jobs to the invasions of insects and diseases which will prey upon heavily distressed flora and fauna. The plan helps us to understand and deal with the devastating effects of climate change. We can’t prevent it but we can adapt and mitigate its effects if we act now.
Our elected officials are lost in translation and rely on myopic approaches with pleas of conservation and higher water rates. Doing more of what we are already doing is not going to solve this problem because it is not solvable. It is a new way of life. Adding 30,000 new residents to Morgan Hill in a sprawl approach would only exacerbate the effects of climate change. This is a foolish growth policy by the Morgan Hill City Council. A policy based on hope that rains will return is just as foolish. Hope is not a strategy, and urban sprawl that destabilizes our community is irresponsible leadership.
Mark Grzan is a longtime Morgan Hill resident, former City Councilmember and Mayor Pro Tem.
