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Issues in California

I. 2. One of the major themes in California politics and economics is water, and this has been true for some time. It contributes to the schism between Northern and Southern California, with Southern California, where most of the population is to be found, siphoning off water from the north where much of the agriculture is to be found. This has long contributed to animosity between the two regions and still fuels the occasional debate over whether to split California into two separate states.

The importance of water is noted as a perpetually controversial factor in California history. In the 1880s, two of the controversies came to a head. The first of these was the struggle of Sacramento Valley against the hydraulic mining industry, and the second was the battle of farmers against "water monopolies" over the control of water for irrigation. Government had to intervene to settle these bitter disputes. The hydraulic miners had been dumping floods of mud, sand, and gravel into various northern rivers and had buried farms in debris. These actions contributed to flooding of various communities. The United States circuit court decided in 1884 that this dumping was to be outlawed, but the battle continued until 1893 and the creation of a federal agency to regulate the matter, the California Debris Commission (Rawls and Bean 194).

Irrigation developed slowly in the state because state policy failed to prevent the monopolization of water rights and in fact encouraged it, and water laws were confusing for the first 40 years of statehood. Two conflicting legal doctrines developed, on the one hand the doctrine of riparian rights signifying that the owners of land not contiguous to a stream had no rights to the water, and the second the doctrine of "prior appropriation" giving the first user of water the unrestrained right to divert it from the stream and to sell this right to others. There were many court battles over this issue ...

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Issues in California. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:59, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702496.html