Excerpt
DISCOVERY of toxics in irrigation return flows has given drainage management a visibility and urgency that D western irrigation agencies are poorly equipped to deal with. Farmers and irrigation officials have struggled with waterlogging and salinization for millennia and generally have enjoyed the public's sympathies in their strife. In contrast, toxic drainage has led many people in today's ecologically conscious society to emphatically oppose farming as just another environmentally questionable economic activity.
This situation has put decision-makers in western irrigation agencies in a dilemma, effectively preventing them from implementing any long-term remedies-not just for toxicity problems, but for waterlogging and salinization as well. The latest evidence of this paralysis is California's recently completed San Joaquin Valley Drainage Program. After seven years and $50 million in expenditures, program administrators could only conclude that “no single, sure, and lasting solution to the drainage problem has been put forward” (7).
Before the techno-economic dimensions of the return flow issue can be dealt with, a fundamental restructuring of agency responsibilities and regulatory processes is required. In practice, this calls for a rethinking of the mandates of the U.S. Bureau of …
Footnotes
Janne Hukkinen is a research fellow with the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Berkeley, 94720. Research on which this article is based was conducted during the author's tenure as a fellow under the American Association for the Advancement of Science/U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Fellowship Program. The conclusions are entirely the author's, not those of either EPA or AAAS.
- Copyright 1991 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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