A week spent in San Diego was productive and helpful especially in developing a structure for pulling together the course content about Israeli water practices.
Two days at UCSD's Geisel Library was a great way to scan current literature and to assemble reading material for students in the course.
Then, two days in San Diego's nifty Central Library allowed me to absorb a lot of new material that I needed to come up to speed with the topics I've identified for the course.
Finally, a meeting with Craig Balben, Public Affairs Representative for the San Diego County Water Authority, was a good way of confirming the currency of the academic literature on water management and the relevance of the Israeli example as a case study for the topic, even for students in the United States.
San Diego County shares many conditions with Israel, including a similar climate, increasing natural water scarcity, and having to balance development with diverse natural ecologies. Its also very different, obviously, not least because of the exceedingly byzantine (more, more precisely, "federal") governmental structure that determines water resource allocation in California as well as elsewhere in the United States. But both similarities and differences between Israel and San Diego make the comparison illuminating. San Diego's strategic embrace of desalination as part of its water portfolio diversification highlights the role that Israel's expertise plays around the world: development and operation of the large desalination plant in Carlsbad, CA, is subcontracted to Israeli company IDE Technologies.
Craig also directed me to the journalism of Ry Rivard, who has written recent accounts of the continuing saga of California's water sources. This recent article shows how water management continues to grow "new horns," so to speak, as water rights have recently transformed into futures commodities, even while the sources of water continue to atrophy.
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