H-2-Oh-No: How California is wasting its most important resource

By Hatim Husainy, Sustainability

Humans have routinely settled near water. It has been one of the most important ingredients for civilization from our earliest days, with entries about early human settlements along the Nile, Euphrates, Yellow, and Ganges rivers proudly opening almost all textbooks about human civilization. Water isn’t just for drinking — the flow of rivers is what made the Tigris and Euphrates river system so fertile, and the Nile’s cyclical floods were a crucial element in Egyptian prosperity. The inconsistent flooding and eventual complete shift of the Yellow River early in Chinese history killed millions between consequent natural disasters and ensuing famines — earning the river its nickname, China’s Sorrow (Omondi, 2019). Beyond farming, water was eventually harvested to feed the early stages of humanity’s harnessing of nature, turning wheels and powering everything from flour mills to textile factories.

The history of California can be traced along the axis of water as well: during the Mexican-American war, one month before Mexico’s surrender of the land that is today California, a man named James Marshall found gold on the banks of the American River. The leakage of this information ignited the famous California Gold Rush, sending “Forty-Niners”—named for their 1849 arrival—searching for gold throughout the river, with explorers arriving from as far as China, Europe, and South America. California’s population exploded, and even after the gold ran out, the rush’s influence lingered during California’s later bid for statehood and the founding of San Francisco (Brittania, 2025).

Today, California is the third-largest state in the United States and the largest economy, comprising 14% of US GDP (Bohn & Duan, 2025). Taken alone, it would be the world’s fifth largest economy. Nonetheless, the state is currently marooned in a 25-year megadrought, leaving it dryer than it has been in the past 1,200 years (Fountain, 2022).

California is also prone to extreme fires, a wave of which recently devastated the region. Thanks in part to the Santa Ana winds,  southern California was recently engulfed in a wildfire expected to be the most expensive in American history (LA Almanac, 2002). This fire is distinct: after record-breaking rainfall last February, Los Angeles turned green as plants sprouted after a long period of drought. Then, within months, drought conditions returned and the region’s new plant life dried out into perfect kindling. California is naturally fire-prone in other ways. It receives little rainfall, even when it isn’t facing drought conditions, and most of the water in the region is provided by the rivers that flow through it, including the Colorado and American (California Department Of Fish And Wildlife, 2025).

These rivers are the primary source of water in an increasingly arid region, so strategic usage has been crucial. To this end, the state has devised, through a combination of historical and contemporary legislation, a complex “water rights” system to determine who can use California’s water, for what purpose, and how much. In its current iteration, it is built around the legal doctrine of  “First in claim, first in right,” rather than a needs-based allocation approach (Williams, 2024). The system is headed up by the California Water Board, which approves new claims and manages water usage. 

California has many vital uses for its water. In addition to “urban usage” — that is, residential consumption — the state uses river currents to create electricity, enough to power 2.5 million houses per year on hydropower alone. However, these applications pale in comparison to California’s thirstiest sector, agriculture (Richter, 2020).
Agriculture is today responsible for more than 80% of the American West’s total water usage. From corn and fruit to wheat and alfalfa, drought-struck states manage to allocate the lion’s share of their water towards crops, many of which are not eaten locally. Notably, 32% of the West’s water footprint goes to corn, grass hay, and alfalfa—crops grown exclusively to feed livestock. This  is more than all commercial and residential use combined (14%) (Richter, 2020). More than 10% of this cattle feed, in turn, goes to the Middle East, China, or Japan to feed cattle. Many Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia, have banned growing alfalfa within their borders due to similar drought conditions (Tabuchi, 2023).

The negative implications of western water use should be clear from the cuff: the most parched region of the United States is directing its water primarily toward animal feed production (some of which is not even used domestically), rather than conserving it for areas that desperately need to regrow after wildfire losses and build up resilience in anticipation of future fires (EPIC, 2025).

California is the first state in the US to enshrine a “right to water,” and with that in mind it should be especially unacceptable to allow archaic systems of law and power to worsen a historic drought and put millions at risk of losing consistent access to water. It is clear that drastic action is needed before a bad situation worsens even further; the good news is, there are a number of policy solutions worth considering. To start, programs that pay farmers to let certain fields rest (or fallow) during the growing season should be expanded, and can serve as a stopgap while California considers rewriting or, at minimum, reshaping its water rights laws to work better for its people (Skelton, 2023).

In the realm of legal reform, several key avenues should be pursued—one of the most critical being the inclusion of indigenous peoples in water rights laws. Currently, California’s water rights system largely sidelines Native communities that have stewarded natural resources for thousands of years, struggling to treat Native claims to water as they would other ancestral claims and limiting their usage of the water in a way they do not other rights holders. (Smith, 2003) Such an incorporation is essential not only for achieving justice and recognition for California’s indigenous communities, but also for leveraging millennia-old expertise that has improved water rights systems globally. A notable comparison can be drawn with Australia, where recent legal reforms have begun to acknowledge indigenous water rights, integrating traditional ecological knowledge with modern water management frameworks. Such a model demonstrates that embracing indigenous perspectives can lead to more equitable and effective water governance—a lesson that California could benefit from as it rethinks its own legal structures (Cho, 2024).

References:

Bohn, S., & Duan, J. (2025, February 3). California’s economy. Public Policy Institute of California. https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-economy/#:~:text=California%20is%20an%20economic%20powerhouse,%25%20and%208%25%2C%20respectively

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2025, February 3). California Gold Rush. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/California-Gold-Rush

Cho, A. C. (2024, June). Cho_WaterLandPower. Google Docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_6qNu39H1NArbKVNGTNKAxQ5smaoB3xM_ojl7ofmWsU/edit?tab=t.0

EPIC. (2025, February). Returning to a natural cycle of wildfire. EPIC Website. https://www.wildcalifornia.org/returning-to-a-natural-cycle-of-wil

Fountain, H. (2022, February 14). How bad is the western drought? worst in 12 centuries, study finds. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/climate/western-drought-megadrought.html

LA Almanac. (2002). What are the Santa Ana or Santana Winds?. What are the Santa Anas? https://www.laalmanac.com/weather/we23.php

Of Fish And Wildlife, C. D. (2025, February). Wildfire Resiliency Initiative. CDFW. https://wildlife.ca.gov/Lands/Wildfire#:~:text=Much%20of%20California%27s%20native%20vegetation,impact%20of%20high%20severity%20fires

Omondi, S. (2019, November 11). Which river is called “China’s sorrow” and why? WorldAtlas. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-river-is-called-china-s-sorrow-and-why.html

Richter, B.D., Bartak, D., Caldwell, P. et al. Water scarcity and fish imperilment driven by beef production. Nat Sustain 3, 319–328 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0483-z

Skelton, G. (2023, February 21). Column: Shrinking water supply will mean more fallow fields in the san joaquin valley. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-20/column-column-skelton-on-water-and-agriculture-in-the-san-joaquin-valley

Tabuchi, H. (2023, October 3). Water-stressed Arizona says state will end leases to Saudi-owned farm. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/climate/arizona-saudi-arabia-alfalfa-groundwater.html#:~:text=It%20is%20mainly%20used%20to,on%20the%20kingdom%27s%20water%20resources

Williams, R. (2024, August 14). Who’s Taking America’s Water? . YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XusyNT_k-1c