The Dried-Up Heart of California's Water Dilemma

California's Tulare Lake was once the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi. It was shallow, and it varied in size from year to year and season to season. But it was home to lots of salmon, turtles, otters and even, in the latter half of the 19th century, a few schooners and steamboats. It was also at the heart of a 400,000-acre network of lakes and wetlands ("the river of the lakes," the painter and naturalist John W. Audubon -- John J.'s son -- called it in 1849) that in wet years overflowed into the San Joaquin River to the north, making it possible to travel by boat from Bakersfield to San Francisco.1492624913002

Then industrious settlers -- and, it should be noted, industrial-scale cattle empires -- began diverting the streams that fed the river of the lakes to irrigate their fields. At first the main crops were feed for the cattle. Then came the endless wheat fields1492696874692 that muckraking novelist Frank Norris wrote about in "The Octopus," then cotton, oranges, grapes, almonds, pistachios, tomatoes and lots of other good things.

Tulare Lake is gone (although it makes a partial reappearance during very wet years like this one), but what the California Department of Water Resources now dubs the Tulare Lake Hydrologic Region is the most productive agricultural region in the state -- making it, by extension, the most productive agricultural region in the U.S. and probably the world.