Israel Could Bring Solutions to L.A. Water Shortage

By Lilly Fowler

There was a time when the actions to solve Los Angeles’ water problems read like a dystrophic political novel.

At the beginning of the last century, L.A. Mayor Frederick Eaton and William Mulholland, superintendent of the city’s newly created Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), plotted to gain control of water sources in Owens Valley, which left Owens Lake dry and area farmers with little recourse.

The result was the completion of the first Los Angeles Aqueduct, which supplied the city with much of its water from 1913 until a second aqueduct was completed in 1970. (Los Angeles also draws water from Northern California via the California Aqueduct and competes with other Western states for water from the Colorado River.)

The city of Los Angeles recently began atoning for its sins by returning some of the water to the Owens region, which has forced L.A.’s 3.8 million residents to do more with less. With the city’s population expected to reach 4.2 million to 4.9 million by 2020, according to the Southern California Association of Governments, solutions are needed to address the area’s growing water needs.

A recent conference at UCLA’s School of Law, “Transboundary Environmental Management in the Arava and Beyond,” proposed that Los Angeles might gain some ground regarding its often-contentious water policies if the city turned to Israel’s example.

The Sept. 9 forum, sponsored by the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, a leading teaching and research program in the Middle East, suggested that both Israel and Los Angeles have made many of the same mistakes when trying to develop water in arid, dry lands and could learn a great deal from each other when dealing with issues of water scarcity.

“There are very strong parallels between what’s going on in the Western United States and what’s going on in the Middle East,” said Peter Gleick, the keynote speaker at the conference.

Gleick, a MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland-based environmental research organization, said both countries are struggling with the issue of how to best share their water supplies with neighbors. Although Israel, according to Gleick, faces the more complicated problem of sharing water from sources like the Sea of Galilee, natural underground aquifers and the Jordan River with its Jordanian and Palestinian neighbors, the dilemma in both countries is much the same.

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Source: The Jewish Journal