Bloomberg has an excellent article on what, exactly, “environmental uses” means. Essentially that’s every gallon of water that, once it has settled into a river, successfully flows into the ocean. If any water is released from behind a dam, any part of a river is downstream of any dams… if, in short, a river in California has a mouth, then the water coming out of it is part of that oft quoted 50%.
We can absolutely choose to see that as a waste, but it doesn’t change the fact that agriculture uses four times as much water as everything else. KQED had some great stats and graphs on residential water use. A little more than half of it is used outdoors. So if everyone in California stopped watering their lawns and gardens, stopped washing their cars, and gave up their swimming pools, the state would save as much water as if farmers decreased their water use by 12.5%.
Agriculture is absolutely important to California’s welfare, but is it four times as important as everything else combined? As many others in the thread have said, California doesn’t have a water problem. It has an agriculture problem.
My guess is that more and more of us are living in Ellen Ullman’s”Museum of Me”:
Combine that concept with one from Alexis de Tocqueville, 167 year earlier:
On the internet, he need not withdraw into silence. He needs merely to find where everyone else who stated his particular opinion has withdrawn to. Further and further towards the edges of Pew’s graph, most likely.