My talk on oil and water in SoCal

I spoke at Oil + Water: The Case of Santa Barbara and Southern California, a humanities-oriented event at UCSB last week. My talk, entitled "Joseph Jensen, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and Urban Sprawl," was based on this paper.

I found myself in a room with experts on critical film theory, whale singing and techno music and the art of dying lakes. (I hardly understood what they were saying and jumped at the chance to hear the sociologists and political scientists :)

Anyway, here's the mp3 [15 mb] of my 15 min talk and my slides [pdf].

The key point was the open-ended promise that Met made in the 1952 Laguna Declaration:

The District is prepared, with its existing governmental powers and its present and projected distribution facilities, to provide its service area with adequate supplies of water to meet expanding and increasing needs in the years ahead. When and as additional water resources are required to meet increasing needs for domestic, industrial and municipal water, the District will be
prepared to deliver such supplies...

They forgot that the supply side may not be able to keep up with demand.

Met has never renounced it.