“The lands have no value without water. If the water rights fall into the hands of irrigating companies and … individual owners, … eventually the monopoly of water rights will be an intolerable burden to the people…. The question for legislators to solve is to devise some practical means by which water rights may be distributed among individual farmers and water monopolies prevented.” John Wesley Powell, Report on the Arid […]
Like Lightning: “In the Struggle,” a book for our time & place
In late 1975, while at UC Berkeley, I was guided into the path of a prophet, Paul Schuster Taylor. Retired Professor of Economics at UC, widower of the renown documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, longstanding critic of California’s large-scale agricultural structure and its historic political power over the state’s water resources and farm labor conditions – Paul was a force even at 80, when hindered by Parkinson’s and glaucoma. I was […]