“Obama designated more than 1.8 million acres of California desert for protection with the creation of three national monuments: Castle Mountains, Mojave Trails and Sand to Snow,” the Washington Post reported. “The new monuments will connect three existing sites — Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks and the Mojave National Preserve — to create the second-largest desert preserve in the world.”

“President Obama has set aside more of America’s lands and waters for conservation protection than any of his predecessors, and he is preparing to do even more before he leaves office next year. The result may be one of the most expansive environmental and historic-preservation legacies in presidential history.”

Obama’s desert monuments marked a victory of sorts for California’s senior senator, who had to turn to the president to accomplish what she could not in Congress. “The designation was requested by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who for a decade has sought to protect land that wasn’t included in the 1994 California Desert Protection Act. That measure covered nearly 7.6 million acres, elevated Death Valley and Joshua Tree to national park status and created the Mojave National Preserve,” recalled the Los Angeles Times. “Unable to gain momentum on her California Desert Conservation and Recreation Act last year, Feinstein and conservation groups asked Obama to act unilaterally to create the three monuments overlapping biological zones between roughly Palm Springs and the Nevada border.”

Fears of more

Yet the executive action rankled critics — not only among out-of-state Republicans, who have chastised the president’s unilateral measures in the past, but among local California officials. “Utah’s congressional delegation is urging President Barack Obama not to use his powers under the Antiquities Act to designate a national monument on federal lands in San Juan County,” the Moab Sun News reported. “The calls from the state’s four Republican congressmen and two U.S. senators come on the heels of the president’s designation last week of three new national monuments in southern California’s Mojave Desert.”

“The move amplified the Utah delegation’s fears that a 1.9-million-acre Bears Ears National Monument may be next on the president’s agenda. ‘Use of the Antiquities Act … will be met with fierce local opposition and will further polarize federal land-use discussions for years, if not decades,’ the delegation says in a letter to Obama.”

Local divides

Meanwhile, in California, the president’s action triggered the kind of local dismay warned of by the Utah delegation. “San Bernardino County politicians said it could jeopardize a lucrative mining operation in the Castle Mountains and off-highway vehicle recreation areas,” according to the Desert Sun. “In separate written statements, San Bernardino County Supervisors Curt Hagman and Robert Lovingood and Rep. Paul Cook, R-Apple Valley, accused the president of bypassing the legislative process via the Antiquities Act.”

Lovingood, noted the Sun, “said the Castle Mountains gold mine, which sits in the center of the newly designated national monument abutting the California/Nevada border, has the potential to generate more than $225 million in tax revenue and create roughly 300 jobs if scaled up to full production. But under the president’s executive action, it appears there is no mechanism for the National Park Service to issue the necessary permits[.]”

But at least some area locals had thrown their weight behind the new monuments. “Several Latino coalitions participated in the effort to protect the desert areas, including the Council of Mexican Federations, the Latino Conservation Alliance and the faith-based organization Por La Creación,” according to KPCC. Maite Arce, president and CEO of Hispanic Access Foundation, told the station “wide local participation was made possible by the large Latino population in the region.”

Stepping up water collection has emerged as a priority in Southern California, drawing much of its water from outside sources, including Northern California and the Colorado River, as the Washington Post observed. “The State Water Resources Control Board plans to allocate $200 million for such projects,” the paper noted. “And Los Angeles plans to capture 20 billion more gallons than the 10 billion it collects during normal years.”

“In Los Angeles, the city gutted a 16-foot-wide concrete street median and replaced it with vegetation that captures rain over 111 acres. The $3.4 million project is designed to collect enough water to fill more than 27 Olympic-size swimming pools a year.”

More than one drought

But the larger picture regarding El Niño has become much more complex. California’s vast size, varying climates and competing consumption needs have conspired with the imprecise definition of drought to leave many communities unsure of how much more rain they’ll need to turn the corner.

“Ask water managers in different parts of California when they expect they might shake free of the worst drought in a generation — and whether a wet El Niño winter could be their savior — and you’re likely to get a lot of answers,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “Those answers depend on where people live and what source of precious water they’re tapping.” Analysts told the Chronicle much will hinge on the remaining two to three months of the state’s rainy season, which could keep snowpack levels high enough for many areas to begin banking on lasting relief.

A stark turnaround recently witnessed at Folsom Lake, fed by river water swelled by the snows, has fueled those hopes. Folsom, the state’s ninth-largest reservoir and the Sacramento area’s primary source of drinking water, had shriveled down “to a mere 135,561 acre feet” early this December, as the Chronicle noted in a separate report. Then came El Niño. “With the recent rains, Folsom’s water level has risen 28.5 feet and the reservoir is now holding 246,497 acre feet of water,” the paper added.

Still, according to the U.S Drought Monitor, the Golden State has remained parched. “In California, moderate drought covers 97 percent of the state, with 87 percent in severe, 69 percent in extreme and nearly 45 percent in exceptional drought,” Capital Public Radio reported. Because of the cutoff date for the data it used to tally those numbers, however, that harsh analysis “does not include the recent storms that have brought rain and snow to the state.”

Tapping the desert

Experts have long acknowledged the limits of rainwater in resolving California’s drought challenges. But one ambitious workaround — tapping into groundwater locked below the Mojave Desert — has finally picked up steam. Two years ago, the Cadiz company, led by Scott Slater, sought to “tap an aquifer beneath 34,000 acres of the eastern Mojave and sell the water to suburbs and subdivisions in the Los Angeles Basin,” as Bloomberg Business then reported. “Several politicians, ranchers and environmentalists call Cadiz’s proposal ludicrous,” the site noted. But Slater, it went on, had already obtained “the necessary permit to pump from San Bernardino County, where the aquifer is located. He also has six utilities in the Los Angeles area eager to buy the desert water.”

Cadiz hit a major roadblock when the Bureau of Land Management finally weighed in on its schemes last October. “In a long-awaited decision, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management says Cadiz cannot use an existing railroad right-of-way for a new water pipeline that would carry supplies from the project’s proposed well field to the Colorado River Aqueduct,” as the Times reported. “By using the railroad right-of-way, Cadiz had hoped to escape federal environmental review of the 43-mile pipeline, one of the project’s most expensive components.”

But Slater’s support in and around the Southland has not ebbed, and he has redoubled his efforts this year. “Cadiz will have to seek federal approval for the pipeline, which will trigger a long and expensive environmental impact review,” according to the Guardian. “If we can’t get them to follow the law, we’ll do what we need to do, pursue administrative and judicial remedies,” he told the paper.