Resources: papers, books, film, Links

Research Library

A Message from C-WIN co-founder Yvon Chouinard C-WIN, 2017
Environmental activist and owner of the clothing company Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard shares his thoughts on how California is managing its water. Everything he says about the Twin Tunnels applies to Gov. Newsom’s single tunnel Delta Conveyance Project, with greater urgency. Click the image to view.

RESEARCH PAPERS

Authored by C-WIN and others, these are some of the most important and revealing research papers on water issues in California.

This is a partial list. If there is a particular topic that interests you, please contact us.

C-WIN Paper Water Quantification Study Tim Stroshane, 2012
The first study to show the over-allocation of California Delta water resources.
Summary
Full Testimony

UC Davis Quantification Study Theodore E. Grantham and Joshua H. Viers, 2014
The UC Davis study demonstrating the over-allocation of California’s water.
Full Report

C-WIN Santa Barbara Report Arve Sjovold and Carolee Krieger, 2017 & 2022
An analysis of the costs to Santa Barbara county of contracting with the State Water Project.
Summary
Full Testimony
2022 Update

C-WIN Comment Letter on Phase II SED Max Gomberg and Carolee Kreiger, 2024
A response to the September 2023 Draft Report and Supplemental Environmental Document.
Full Comments

Environmental Water Caucus Report Nick DiCroce, Glen Martin, and Max Gomberg, 2022
A thoroughly researched comprehensive plan detailing realistic solutions to California’s water crisis.
Full Report

How the Delta Conveyance Project Could Bankrupt the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California Max Gomberg 2023
This deep dive explains how the affordability and reliability of the MWD is at great risk.
Full Report

Leading the Way to a Just Transition for Water Max Gomberg 2023
How the US government should manage the Central Valley Project to improve equity and climate resilience.
Full Report

UC Davis Public Trust Report Richard M. Frank, 2012
An analysis of Public Trust law.
Full Report

Stanford Law Center Water Management Study Earth Law Center, 2017
An analysis of present-day impacts of California’s water rights laws and management policies.
Full Report

Water Heist, How Corporations are Cashing in on California’s Water John Gibler, Public Citizen, 2003
An investigation into the privatization of the Kern Water Bank.
Full Report

READING LIST

Impeccable scholarship and great reading, look to these titles to understand water in the context of California’s colorful history.

The Dreamt Land Mark Arax, 2019
"[An] exhaustive, deeply reported account... Few other journalists could have written a book as personal and authoritative... As Arax makes plain in this important book, it's been the same story in California for almost two centuries now: When it comes to water, 'the resource is finite. The greed isn't.'"—Gary Krist, The New York Times Book Review

Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Chaotic World Steven Hawley, 2023
During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the whole messy truth about the legacy of last century’s big dam building binge has come to light. What started out as an arguably good government project has drifted oceans away from that original virtuous intent. Governments plugged the nation’s rivers in a misguided attempt to turn them into revenue streams. Water control projects’ main legacy will be one of needless ecological destruction, fostering a host of unnecessary injustices. Examples from the American West reveal that the costs of building and maintaining a sprawling water storage and delivery complex in an arid world—growing increasingly arid under the ravages of climate chaos—is well beyond the benefits furnished. 

The Great Thirst Norris Hundley, Jr., 2001
The obsession with water has shaped California to a remarkable extent, literally as well as politically and culturally. Hundley tells how aboriginal Americans and then early Spanish and Mexican immigrants contrived to use and share the available water and how American settlers, arriving in ever-increasing numbers after the Gold Rush, transformed California into the home of the nation's preeminent water seekers. The desire to use, profit from, manipulate, and control water drives the people and events in this fascinating narrative until, by the end of the twentieth century, a large, colorful cast of characters and communities has wheeled and dealed, built, diverted, and connived its way to an entirely different statewide waterscape.

Cadillac Desert Marc Reisner, 1993
The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruption and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecological and economic disaster. In his landmark book, Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in the competition to transform the West. Based on more than a decade of research, Cadillac Desert is a stunning expose and a dramatic, intriguing history of the creation of an Eden—an Eden that may only be a mirage.

California: A History Kevin Starr, 2007
From the age of exploration to the age of Arnold, the Golden State’s premier historian distills the entire sweep of California’s history into one splendid volume.

California’s Salmon and Steelhead: The Struggle to Restore an Imperiled Resource
Edited by Alan Lufkin, 1991
Twenty-eight authors contributed to this definitive and clear overview that draws a direct line from the construction and management of large infrastructure projects to the decline of salmon in California. Available for free at the University of California Press.

LINKS

The Water Education Foundation

California Department of Water Resources
California State Water Resources Control Board