With the recent elections resulting in a sweep of both houses of Congress, you can be sure that the Keystone Pipeline is going to be at the forefront of discussion, and bills for the President to sign. Let us hope that such effort will be as worthless as the 52 attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Far more critical to the State of California and most of the west is the need for new sources of water. We are experiencing our third year of drought with the year 2014 giving us every sign of ending as the worst on record.

California is the world’s salad bowl, the world’s producer of vegetables, fruits and nuts, raisins, dates and more, whether for local consumption or for export. California produces grapes and wines to compete with the vineyards and reputations of the best of Europe. California feeds millions of people every single day. And California is setting an example of renewable energy to the whole of the continental United States.

Should not water be far more important than a pipeline designed to transport dirty tar sands shale oil from Canada to our refineries solely for the purpose of export? We have no need for this oil, America has become an oil exporting nation. Our dependence upon OPEC oil is diminishing day after day, month after month and year after year.

I do not claim to be an expert on details such as the engineering, design, feasibility, etc. but it doesn’t take a college degree to assess the need. And water is far less dangerous to the environment than an oil pipeline traversing Tornado Alley. As a matter of fact, the availability of water is far closer to California than the distance between Alberta, Canada and the Gulf of Mexico. Pipelines bringing water to California will provide just as many jobs in the construction and maintenance, if not more.

Do we have the expertise to bring water into California? Yes of course we do. The aqueducts bringing snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada are concrete proof. We accomplished such projects early in the 20^th Century with the California Aqueduct, the Hetch-Hetchy water system and many others. Even a small rural county like Mariposa installed a pipeline called Saxon Creek to bring water to their parched community.

Yet all of these systems have now run their course. With climate change upon us, the Sierra mountain range is no longer a reliable source of lifesaving water. We need new sources of supply, where rainfall and snowpack can be relied upon to provide moisture for the foreseeable future, and available to be tapped. Add to that, advances in technology should provide simpler and easier methods of building and transport than those of 100 years ago.

Let us turn our efforts to fill a critical requirement. Let us keep California green, let us keep California produce growing, let us continue to provide the world with California fruits, nuts and vegetables, let us protect our environment, and above all, let us forget about the Keystone Project.

Lucille Apcar,
Mariposa