Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1 Context

Anything else you’re interested in is not going to happen if you can’t breathe the air and drink the water. Don’t sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.

—Carl Sagan

Most people still believe the myth that Los Angeles is a desert. In fact the availability of local water supply and the uncommon beauty of our local waterways was the reason Los Angeles was founded where it was. But Los Angeles—once considered an Eden—has changed considerably over the past 100 years. Ask a random group of Angelinos today where their water comes from or where the closest creek or river is and odds are good you’ll get blank stares or furrowed brows in response. It is apparent that we have room for improvement in how we consider, appreciate and manage this most fundamental asset.

Today, nearly 20 percent of the state’s electrical energy and 33 percent of its natural gas energy costs go to moving water around the state and treating it, and a significant percentage of that energy goes to import and treat water for Southern California. Climate change and numerous recent court decisions will force us to find ways to do a much better job of conserving and utilizing our own local supplies. We currently spend $1 billion a year to import 85 percent of our water supply from other regions whose ecosystems are seriously threatened by that loss. During the storms of 2004/05, years’ worth of water supply was sent speeding out to the ocean rather than being captured for future use. Meanwhile, the aquifer beneath the San Fernando Valley that could be supplying as much as 40 percent of our water needs is dangerously depleted. Most of our waterways have been encased in concrete and much of our land has been covered in asphalt. We have fewer parks and less open space than any other major city in the country. Ninety-eight percent of our riverside habitat and 75 percent of our overall habitat has been lost. The water quality in our waterways and beaches is so poor that we’re under Federal court order to find ways to improve it. Water supply, water quality, land use, and habitat are all related, but we’re unaccustomed to looking at them that way. To move to a more sustainable model in this century, we need to begin to embrace a more integrated perspective.

Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch. If you don’t put something in the ecology, it’s not there.

—Barry Commoner’s Five Laws of Ecology

This Watershed Management Plan recognizes these innate connections and shows us how to do things differently. Changing our approach to land use—throughout the watershed—is one of the most critical changes we need to make if we want healthy communities, revitalized rivers, and a sustainable economic, social, and environmental future. With land and housing costs on the increase, single-family homes being replaced with larger ones, low-rise apartments being replaced with multi-story condominiums, and commercial corridors being rebuilt over time, much of the San Fernando Valley faces the potential of widespread redevelopment. Finally, as distant water supplies become more and more scarce, now is the time to explore a more creative, holistic approach to managing land use and our limited resources.

The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking that we have done so far has created problems we cannot solve at the level of thinking at which we created them ... We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humankind is to survive.

—Albert Einstein

Watersheds are a common sense, natural framework for better understanding, managing and protecting the value inherent in our natural resources. Native Hawaiian cultures divided and managed land by watershed, which they referred to as an Ahupua’a. Each Ahupua’a supported all of the resources necessary to support life. All over the world, people are beginning to take a more integrated approach to managing watersheds. To do this successfully in Los Angeles will require a major shift in thinking. We have reached a watershed moment.