YIELD OF DREAMS

Looking for an interesting way to spend a half day and get great outdoor exercise that has a higher purpose? Volunteer on trail work for the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy. This year especially the trails took a pummeling from the hard rains and many were closed until crews could get in there and shore them up. On one Saturday morning, I was curious why some of the drainage channels and culverts ended up petering out onto the flatter areas. "Why aren't we cutting channels so the water doesn't back up and erode the trail?" A more experienced volunteer, who was assessing what switchbacks needed what work, told me "We're creating swales."

Swales? Of course! The goal isn't to create another Los Angeles River, a concrete channel designed to whisk away the water as quickly as possible. It is to slow the water down, so that it recharges the groundwater. So that is put to use as naturally as possible. The goal is to replenish, not expedite.

The Ventura River watershed covers an area of 235 square miles, enclosed by the western Tranverse Ranges (the only major east-west major mountain range in the continental United States, which gives us our famous eastwest valley. This year we're looking to top out at more than 30 inches of rain, perhaps as much as 60 inches in the headwaters of the drainage in Matilija Canyon. That's well more than double last year's continuation of our persistent and perplexing drought.

How much rain is that for the Ojai Valley? Let's do a simple calculation to translate those rainfall totals into acre-feet. There's 640 acres in a square mile, so the total for the watershed is 150,400 acres. Now, if it rained 12 inches, which is pretty close to last year's totals, the yield would be 150,400 acre-feet. This year, however, we're already at 2.5 times that, or 376,000 acre feet. That's enough to provide water for 752,000 thrifty households for a year. Casitas Lake's capacity is 253,000 acre feet, so if we captured every drop we'd fill up the lake to the brim with 123,000 acre feet to spare.

Of course this calculation takes in a lot of assumptions. Rainfall varies widely; as noted above, Matilija Canyon typically gets twice as much as downtown Ojai. And big portions of the drainage, all of San Antonio Creek for example, are outside the Robles Diversion that supplies the lake.

But it gives you the big picture of the big problem. It's a problem of storage, not supply.

The drought-created urgency for conservation, for long-term sustainability, is already starting to ease up. That's not good. We humans are short-term thinkers. It's the proximity problem. It's going to take long-term thinking to ease us through the inevitably drier years ahead. After all, according to the aforementioned OVLC, Ventura County is heating up faster than any other county in the continental United States. We need to continue conservation measures and figure out ways to hold as much water in the basin as possible. Swales are a necessary component of permaculture, and we need more of that kind of thinking. It's a permacrisis that requires permasolutions.