Authors advocate generational thinking to manage water in the southern San Joaquin Valley

Two college buddies who spent a day fly fishing on the Sacramento River came home with more than fish tales. 

For retired city planners Greg Collins and James Holloway, it prompted a new book, “Seven Generations: The Past, Present and Future of the Tulare Lake Basin,” published in May.

This might beg the question, what does the Tulare Lake Basin have to do with the Sacramento River? 

On that fishing trip, Collins and Holloway wondered if the four rivers that feed Tulare Lake — the Kings, Kaweah, Tule and Kern — ever resembled the Sacramento with its lush green banks, abundant birdlife, and currents full of fish such as salmon and sturgeon.

“That really got us thinking, and wanting to learn more about the history and early ecology of the area,” Collins said. “It was probably pretty amazing in the early days of the Valley.” 

The Tulare Lake Basin encompasses parts of Fresno, Tulare, Kings and Kern counties. Collins and Holloway explore the region’s history, beginning with how Native American tribes lived off the land. They also discuss its future through environmental and economic lenses, offering point and counterpoint strategies indicative of their college degrees (biology and economics, respectively), lengthy careers in city planning, and volunteer roles. 

Collins, a former Visalia City council member, is past president of Sequoia Riverlands Trust, a Visalia-based nonprofit, and serves on the advisory committee for the Mid-Kaweah Groundwater Sustainability Agency. Holloway began his career in Visalia and recently retired after 30 years as community development director of San Clemente, in Orange County.

The duo discuss floods and droughts, surface water rights on the region’s creeks and rivers, and how changing crop patterns affected groundwater levels through the decades. They are hopeful their 125-page tome will serve as a catalyst for conversations among city dwellers, landowners and water managers to consider foregoing what they call “business as usual” in the Tulare Lake Basin. 

“Future generations and the Basin’s farming culture will vanish if we stay on this path,” they write in an executive summary. “Five generations have passed. Man has two generations to get it right!” 

The concept comes from an Arapaho Native American belief that decisions must be made for the well-being of seven generations. 

With maps and statistics, the authors illustrate how the natural hydrology of the basin has been permanently altered with dams, canals and water diversions for irrigation demand over the past 150 years. 

Getting it right in the future gets lots of attention, which naturally leads to chapters on groundwater overdraft and the problems that come from it, including land sinking known as subsidence, declining water quality and impacts to wildlife. 

Implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, passed in 2014 that mandates aquifers be brought into balance by 2040, is scrutinized for its effectiveness. 

Groundwater subbasins, including the Tulare Lake, Tule, Kaweah and Kern subbasins, all lie with in the overall Tulare Lake Basin. And each has come under potential state enforcement action for not developing adequate groundwater plans.

Holloway, with his experience in negotiating contracts with developers in Southern California, has seen plenty of examples of what he deems “analysis paralysis,” when agencies spend so much time analyzing data that progress is stunted. He sees the same approach with some groundwater agencies, and offers suggestions to move the needle: 

• A DEW (Don’t Export Water) tariff on crops such as pistachios and almonds that end up in the export market. 
• More state intervention.

“You need an outside mechanism that forces a change in attitude,” he said.

While squarely fingering deep aquifer pumping from large industrial scale agriculture (which they call LISAs) for contributing to overdraft, the authors shy away from naming names. 

“I came up with that acronym, and it’s pretty obvious who that is, but there’s been no pushback because they don’t take us seriously,” Holloway said. “Until there’s a large groundswell of understanding and support for changing the status quo, we won’t get pushback.”

Said Collins: “We looked at this from a 30,000-foot perspective, wanting to understand the history, assess the problems and come up with viable solutions which is the cornerstone of the book.” 

Those suggestions revolve around a topic that has its own chapter: Bring Back the Lake. 

“We know we will be sacrificing something by bringing back the (Tulare) lake, and we get into that a bit,” Holloway said. “Do you want sustainability for future generations, or is this it? If it’s sustainability that you want, then we have to create a new balance from an economic standpoint. Part of that balance is going to mean going back to its natural environment.”

Both Collins and Holloway acknowledge the region’s economic dependence on the agriculture industry, and the challenges fallowing, rewilding or transition to solar farms will create.

But Collins sees opportunity, and takes a cue from Mother Nature and 2023’s flooding which resurrected Tulare Lake to more than 100,000 acres. Fallowing land in the lake bottom can serve dual purposes: conserving water while connecting and expanding two existing wildlife preserves: Pixley and Kern National Wildlife refuges. They liken it to other recent environmental success stories, including the return of beavers to the Tule River Indian Reservation in May, and restoration of kelp beds along the coast of the Pacific Ocean.

But the authors know that’s going to take a major paradigm shift.

“For five generations, it’s been business as usual,” Collins said. “There needs to be a ‘come to Jesus’ perspective that this is not sustainable, period. When everyone realizes that and gets on the same page, that is when you will see change.”