A. Dan Tarlock and Sarah Bates, two of the best thinkers around on water and land, have adapted an earlier (2006) longer tome into this excellent commentary, 'Water and Western Growth', 2007, Planning & Environmental Law, 59(5).
Download Water_commentary_land_water_growth.pdf
Thanks to Leslie Kryder (who got it from Conci Bokum) for sending this along,
From the last paragraph of the Introduction:
This commentary examines the barriers that water, public utility, and land use law pose to using water availability as a strategy to limit population growth and the water-land use linkage programs currently emerging in the region. We conclude that the current growth management debate continues to accept growth as inevitable and seeks only to accommodate it through conservation, reallocation of agricultural supplies, and possibly denser urban development. Nonetheless, the exit of the federal government from subsidizing regional development, along with state inaction, is forcing urban areas to begin linking land use and water resources planning for the first time. Western cities may not stop growing, but growth accommodation will be more difficult and more expensive than it has been in the past. Increasingly, some form of water supply planning will be necessary before growth can continue. Water will be more costly, and the trade-offs between growth and its alternatives will become more intense and obvious. Global climate change adds an additional wild card to the mix. We are still a long way grom achieving sustainable human settlement in the American West.
Their last sentence reminds me of the late Marc Reisner's comment that people call the American West a civilization, but it's really a beachhead.
"California...has the water and the climate and the soil to support a population like Japan, if it has to." -- Wallace Stegner (quoted in the article)
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