Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Water: The Past, Present and Future of our Most Previoud Resource

The panelists were (info stolen from the program guide):

Michael Hiltzik. Author of an upcoming book called 'Colossus,' which is about the Hoover Dam. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the LA Times.

Jenny Price. She gives frequent tours of the concrete L.A. River.

Steve Solomon. He is a regular on NPR. He is the author of 'Water.'

D.J. Waldie. He received the California Book Award for nonfiction, 'Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.'

This was the best panel I went to on Saturday.

Here are some notes I took:

Steve Solomon.

Was trying to determine a resource that impacted us like oil. Thought about water.
He looked at water throughout world history.
U.S. states rose and fell due to water. Agriculture, steam engines.
3.5 billion people won't be able to feed themselves in 15-20 years because of lack of water to irrigate their crops.
India, N. China are outstripping their water.
Yemen and Pakistan, perhaps leading to terrorism.
China's ability to become a world power might lessen due to its polluted water.
The U.S. has a great deal of water even though certain regions like California lack it.
CA can be a laboratory.
How can we use current constraints.
Israel/Australia have already taken steps to deal with water shortfalls.
Chicago has roads that allow rain water to seep through, instead of running off.

Michael Hiltzik.

Was looking for a project where all the characters were dead, because a previous book he wrote about where all the main players were still alive stressed him out.
Looking for a complex system.
Water from Colorado is essentially free, it is sold below cost.
Dams highlight conflicts between farmers, fishermen, city dwellers and environmentalists.
We live today with mistakes of the past.
Hoover Dam was the largest public works of that period. The Public Works budget was only $150m. The dam cost $165m.
The dam helped create Los Angeles and San Diego.

D.J. Waldie.

Many of us live in river beds.
Rivers have shifted.
In 1914, his house would have been four feet deep in flood water.
The levy projects in the 1940s-1960s protect the city from flooding.
You can't make good water public policy if all you know is Chinatown.

Jenny Price.

Was looking for an environmental piece to write about.
Redefining nature as how we use/manage to live in a city.
The LA River paving causes pollution.
Revitalizing the river can give us green space.
80% of our rainfall goes to the Pacific Ocean. We designed the river so that we could get rid of it as quickly as possible. There should be better ways of flood control so that we can keep more of our rain water.
It is hard to make decisions if we don't even know we have a river.

My observations.

I'd call Hiltzik an idealistic progressive while I'd call Price a realistic progressive. Solomon mentioned that another major dam project (can't recall the name of the dam) eventually ended up provided a significant amount of the electricity we used to help us build our war equipment for WWII. I believe Hiltzik still attack the project, saying it didn't matter because of the damage it did later.

Price and Waldie had a disagreement. Waldie called the concrete walls around the river as levies while Price called it concrete. Price, however, realizes that if you got rid of all the concrete you'd destroy most of Los Angeles. Her goal is to try to modify the river, but leave the city intact.