An Inconvenient Thirst
Riley Kern/OC Weekly Jay Famiglietti
Looking out the large windows from Jay Famiglietti's corner office at UC Irvine on a sun-drenched late-spring day, you take in an inviting deep greenbelt and, just beyond that, the green, green grass of Aldrich Park.
Contrast that with the view from the UCI hydrologist's new office at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, where Famiglietti is a senior water scientist. It's also serene and lovely here, but the hills cradling the sprawling facility are brown and tinder-dry heading into the always-gusty fall season.
"When I go back to Orange County, it is like Disneyland--everything is super-wonderful," Famiglietti says from behind a small table at a JPL bustling because of a newly launched Mars mission. He has moved into a rental home in Sierra Madre while still holding onto his apartment above UCI.
"It's like the county is in a bubble," he says of OC. "I leave Los Angeles County, and everything is brown. Then I get back to Irvine, and everything is green and lush. There is a little disconnect."
It's a disconnect Famiglietti has been talking about for a few years now, not just as it applies to the greenness of Orange versus LA counties, but to all of drought-sapped California, the United States and the world. He is convinced no amount of melting snow and torrential rains can bring California to the levels of fresh water we once enjoyed because as low as the lakes and rivers are, it's even more dire underground, from where most of our life-sustaining water comes.
Research Famiglietti has led or participated in is sobering. Should California keep drawing water out of the Central Valley ground at the rate it is now, the massive aquifer will be tapped out in "maybe 50 years," according to the professor. "With more rains, maybe longer." Orange County's imported water, which accounts for about half of what we consume, is in jeopardy thanks to over-pumping. The Colorado River Basin--which supplies water to 40 million people and 4 million acres of farmland in California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming and Colorado--lost more than 13 trillion gallons of water in less than a decade. Cities and farmers are sucking up a combined 15.6 cubic kilometers of water annually from the Ogallala aquifer, which stretches from South Dakota to Texas. The worst spot on the planet for groundwater depletion is the Upper Ganges, which irrigates crops in both India and Pakistan. Between 2003 and 2009, one of the world's great river basins--the Tigris-Euphrates, covering a swatch from eastern Turkey to western Iran--lost 144 cubic kilometers of fresh water, about the volume of the Dead Sea. Coastal areas of China, Thailand and Indonesia are dealing with a disastrous double whammy: ground sinking because of overpumping as sea levels rise.
Meanwhile, the global demand for fresh water is only going to grow, based on United Nations projections that say the world's 7 billion population will rise to 9 billion by 2050.
That's why Famiglietti is hellbent on spreading this message: We absolutely have to better manage the groundwater we have left, to do more with less. Perhaps his mission has not yet made him a household name à la Al Gore, but give Famiglietti time. An Inconvenient Thirst, anyone?
* * * * *
The UCI professor of Earth-system science and civil and environmental engineering has worked so hard to get the word out far and wide that Audrey Kelaher in the School of Physical Sciences dean's office politely asked him to create a website (JayFamiglietti.com) separate from the school's just to round up the links to his op/ed pieces for such outlets as the Los Angeles Times and Huffington Post; articles in The New York Times and elsewhere that quote him and his works; video clips on CBS, CNN and a TED talk; his constantly updated Twitter feed; and much more.
Reading the headlines of all those links, one might be tempted to brand Famiglietti the planet's next great sage of environmental doom, something that is reinforced on a canvas portrait that leans against a wall near Famiglietti's since-mothballed UCI office. It has his silhouetted mugshot next to text with his takeaway line from Jessica Yu's 2012 documentary on the world water crisis, Last Call at the Oasis (which now belongs to Participant Media's progressive channel Pivot).
Picture the scene: Farmers, agricultural officials and experts such as Famiglietti are meeting in Fresno to talk water or, rather, the lack thereof. "Let me be perfectly clear about this: California faces a water crisis of potentially epic proportions," the professor tells the assembly. "You know, how we respond today will define who we are tomorrow."
Polite claps, followed by brief cuts to other stakeholders saying we need more storage, more money to pay off farm debt, and more conservation and efficiency, the latter sparking off a furious debate, with one speaker grabbing the microphone away from another and associated back-and-forth vitriol.
Yu then shows us Famiglietti, slumped in his folding chair with his arms crossed, a look of disgust on his face. Next, we see him up close, in talking-head mode after the Fresno meeting.
"They wanted to make a statement that we do face a crisis now of epic proportions, and I said that. Um . . . and I'm not sure that it really resonated, which to me is a little startling. We need a plan, and we don't have one. And it is complex."
He then utters the words that are on that picture of him at UCI: "We're screwed . . . yeah."
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