All around us we see that things are not good. Why are there no fish in my creek? It depends.
Often dams are blamed. They reduce the flow, which has two major effects. First, the water gets too warm. Second, the volume is insufficent to wash the silt off the gravel. The salmon need clean gravel to spawn. But I can't blame the dams this time, because that particular battle was won, and there aren't any.
Then there's logging. I can certainly blame the lumber companies. One of the biggest and most ruthless - Louisiana Pacific - has been stripping our hillsides bare for many decades. They've gone now, and so have most of the trees. And the effect again is twofold. With little or no vegetation on steep hillsides, there is nothing to hold the water and let it trickle slowly through the summer months and keep the creeks running. And secondly, of course, the rains are able to wash more dirt into the river.
These western rivers carry unimaginable amounts of dirt to the sea, and the Eel carries more than any other. During the '55 flood, 600,000 cubic feet of water rushed into the ocean every second, all of it laden with silt. But in drier years, the danger is that the dirt will not get past the spawning beds.
Then there is over-fishing in the ocean. If the fish can't even make it into the river mouth to start their last journey, obviously they are doomed.
And finally, there is the possibility that it has nothing to do with us at all: that it's simply one of nature's cycles, and that eventually the salmon will come back through their own mysterious processes. After all, there is plenty we don't know about them still - how do they find their way back to where they were born? We can only speculate.
So what are we to do?
What is the GOOD thing to do?
What would really make a difference?

Have you noticed that often the simplest, most important, self-evident ideas are the hardest to communicate? Because they don't depend on reasoned argument. Either you get it ­ or you don't. The whole field of human rights is in this area. Cannibalism, slave-holding, euthanasia, sending little boys up chimneys, they can all be defended by reasoned argument. Once we ­ or some of us ­ did all these things, without question. Now we don't. What is the difference between us now, and then? At worst, we simply follow different customs because we are all, to some extent, conformists and creatures of habit. But at best, what we have done is to extend our sympathies, our sensibilities, to a wider range of our fellow humans.
Animal rights are also in this category, but they are still in bitter contention. Some people get it. Others don't. I personally don't. But it would not surprise me if, fifty or a hundred years from now, people will look on the idea of eating an animal with the same revulsion we feel for eating a person.
All the arts are in this Pandora's box. What is the point of modern art, or minimalist music, or crazy sculpture? It's to cut to the quick through the feel-good crust of stale custom, to the place where we really feel it, and see it, and get it.
It is this process of expanding our sensitivities, our consciousness if you like, that makes it worth belonging to the human race. Without a willingness to accept pain and deprivation in order to increase our comprehension, we sink into decadence. Pure reason won't do it. Without poetry, philosophy is sterile.
For a while, every one of us has to go through this process forced. It's called growing up. Think of those moments when you suddenly saw something ­ an idea, a person, an object ­ as though for the first time. Those flashes of insight, of illumination, are to my mind the most precious moments in life. Think how you felt when you first fell in love.
As a society we go through this evolution too. I think of it as the cumulative effect of a million insights. A good example, right now, would be sexual harrassment. We seem to be on the verge of getting it.
So what is it right now that we are NOT getting. Well, many things, no doubt, that I am ignorant of, but the environment is certainly one ­ big time.
Are you surprised? Isn't everyone talking about it? Aren't we almost sick of hearing about it? I wish there were another word. The Environment is already doing its job as a label. What do you think of? Bottles, paper, cans and plastic. Wild people sitting in trees. The rain forest, and an endless sequence of nature movies that, I'm sorry to say, end up by insulating us even more from the realities they seek to portray.
In almost every respect our concern for the environment is homocentric. That is to say, we worry about what may happen to us if it goes wrong. We want to fix it so that it doesn't interfere with our plans. We, of course, are not a part of it. It's out there, growing, creeping, wriggling, leaping and splashing about, and we can visit it occasionally, usually to view it through car windows. That idea of the environment is a travesty.
I won't use the word again if I can help it. But if there is one element surrounding us that most affects our life, I would say it was water. Let's try to see water as though for the first time.
When I was a kid at school my physics master, Mr Jeavons, dwelt heavily on the anomalous properties of water. As many of you must know, all substances contract as they get colder - and so does water, until it gets down to four degrees centigrade. Then, miraculously, it begins to expand again, unlike any other known substance. So just before it freezes, water becomes lighter and rises to the surface. And when it does freeze, as you do all know, it expands again, shattering the beer bottles in your freezer. That also causes it to float on the surface of the lake, or river, or ocean.
The implications of these phenomena ­ those four degrees of separation ­ are astonishing. Quite simply, without them you and I would not exist. Instead of freezing from the top down, water would freeze from the bottom up. The oceans would long ago have frozen solid, and the life forms from which we are all evolved could not have occurred.
My physics master offered this as scientific proof of the existence of God. And if we imagine that God's only business was to create life on earth, I suppose he had a point. But even without that, water has always been a source of wonder, admiration and solace. Who hasn't been entranced by the ceaseless thunder of a great waterfall, by waves breaking on a beach, by water's delicious limpid coolness as it slides along a stony brook, over smooth pebbles in dappled sunlight.
Water has provided us with our most powerful metaphor for life ­ the river flowing to the sea, gathering strength, passing through dangerous rapids, narrow gorges, great placid landscapes, losing itself finally in a great mingling, only to be swept skyward and released, purified, on some distant mountain top where it will begin again its eternal journey to the ocean. It has been a source of mystery, of chilling encounters and of deep dark secrets, long before the sinking of the Titanic. Here's a passage from Pablo Neruda in Mexico:
"Having crossed the last roads, we come to the vast territory where the ancient peoples of Mexico left their embroidered history hidden away in the jungle. There we find a new water, the most mysterious water on earth. It is not sea, stream, river, or any of the waters we know. In Yucatan the water is all under the ground, which may crack open suddenly, producing enormous jungle pools whose sides, overgrown with tropical vegetation, leave open to view, down below, a very deep water, deep as the sky, and green. The Mayas discovered those fissures in the earth called cenotes and deified them with their strange rites. . .From the banks of the cenote, after nuptial ceremonies, hundreds of virgins decked with flowers and gold and laden with jewels were hurled into the whirling, bottomless waters. Garlands and golden crowns would float up to the surface, but the maidens stayed [below], held fast by their gold chains."
There is the water of poets and songwriters, of the glacier and the snowflake, of the whale and the giant octopus, of the limitless ocean, of the monsoon and the rainbow, and the ever-changing clouds.
But then there is water by the acre foot, by the cubic foot per second, in concrete channels, plastic pipes, filthy sewers, cooling towers, hydro-electric dams. Water as a commodity, to be mined, pumped, polluted and discharged into rivers and oceans. That's where the money is. And that is probably how many of you will be expected to think of it.
Let me return briefly to my childhood, at the end of the war. Although much of my world was in ruins, it seemed as though man could accomplish anything he set his mind to. We had so little, but we had a vision of great prosperity rising like the sun on the horizon. Wonderful discoveries had been made, and were being made every day. There was jet propulsion and radar, antibiotics, and incredible new substances like plastics, and detergents, and alloys with marvellous properties. The beginnings of cybernetics, with the promise of machines that could learn and communicate and take over the drudgery of the world. I remember the drawings in the newspapers of the plastic house of the future, where all the work was done by robots.
We looked forward to a time when there would be almost no work for people to do. We called it the leisure crisis, and we were sure it was coming. We knew how to build things bigger and faster, than ever before. And most marvellous of all, of course, we had unleashed the atom and the promise of unlimited free power.
What an incredible world. For thirty years we went at it, unquestioningly, using and exploiting every resource for the benefit of mankind and, of course, for the great profit of a relatively small number. I have a list of all the great dams of the world. Of the 300 or so mentioned, all but 44 were built in the fifties, sixties and seventies. Between them they capture enough water to cover the entire state of Kansas 160 feet deep.
Then things started to go wrong. Rachel Carson blew a loud whistle with Silent Spring, and we discovered carcinogens. There was Love Canal. The Cuyahoga river burst into flame. Lake Eyrie died. London's river, the Thames, died too. Do you know that in the nineteenth century there was a major uprising by the apprentices of London. They were sick of being fed on salmon. It was the cheapest food available, because the Thames was full of them. Not when I lived in London, though. If you fell in the river you were rushed immediately to hospital to have the lethal water pumped out of you. But in 1967, when the Corps of Engineers first delivered its plan to flood my valley, little was known of these complications. Nobody in the valley questioned the wisdom of the project, because it was understood that the Corps, like the Bureau of Reclamation, always did great things for the people, always for the greater good of the greater number.
So they consoled themselves with the promise of compensation. With the exception of one man, a rancher called Richard Wilson. He was independently wealthy and so, unlike the others, he was not bedazzled by the prospect of being handsomely compensated for his land. He loved the valley and its surroundings. He had made the choice to bring up his family there, rather than in the high life of southern California, because he thought the valley enshrined virtues that were lacking in modern American culture.
He was absolutely certain that to flood the valley was wrong. Morally, ethically, aesthetically wrong. This was an unusual position to take in those days. In fact it still is. The Corps was used to people saying it was unfair, or unjust, or uneconomic, or unsafe. They could argue against that, and their arguments were usually plausible. But just plain wrong? That was something they never really dealt with. They dismissed it as irrelevant. But actually it was at the very heart of Wilson's eventual success.
Let me explain. In Southern California, people and industry were spreading like crab grass. At the heart of L.A's growth was the Metropolitan Water District, the most powerful water contractor in the country, because Los Angeles is just an artificial community in a desert, totally dependent on imported water. The Met, as it has always been known, was virtually the private kingdom of an autocratic, arrogant, vinegary old man called Joe Jensen.
How did L.A. come to be what it is? For those who don't know, let me introduce you to the San Fernando Gambit. At the beginning of the century, this small sleepy cattle town began to grow fast. Realtors discovered its perfect climate and sold it as everybody's place in the sun. It had two small rivers, and pretty soon it was obvious that growth would have to stop without more water from somewhere.
Well, you probably all know about the Los Angeles aqueduct ­ the 250 mile-long pipe that drained the Owens valley in the Sierra. It was a fine project, and the people of Los Angeles were persuaded to vote the money by propaganda, and various shenanigans, promoted largely by the Los Angeles Times. Perhaps you've seen the film "Chinatown." It's fiction, but it's based on the same story.
The Times was owned by a choleric old gentleman called Harrison Gray Otis. His son-in-law and business manager was a very sharp character called Harry Chandler.
Chandler had set up a syndicate of financially powerful men - among them Huntington who owned the light rail system that still runs today, Harriman who owned Southern Pacific, and various bankers and utility owners. They had gotten their hands on some worthless desert land in the San Fernando valley and then, wonder of wonders, the aqueduct ran through it.
Now, the beauty of the set-up is this. Water projects are huge, expensive and permanent. You can't make them bigger as the demand increases, so they are built to supply not the needs of today but the projected need 20 or 30 years down the line. So meanwhile there are large amounts of surplus water for anyone who can tap into it. And because it's not guaranteed for ever, and because the project has already been financed by the end users, the water goes very cheap.
Well, you can see how it works. Chandler and Co. built Hollywood and other new developments in the San Fernando Valley. They bought the land for $30 an acre and sold it for a $1000. In today's dollars Chandler became worth more than Bill Gates. The story of how it was done is fascinating, but I commend it to you for other reasons. It supplies the blueprint for all major water development projects in California, the Central Valley Project, begun before World War II, and the State Water Project begun in the fifties, both multi-billion dollar schemes. It was not hard to foreseee where the water would run. If you were in on it, and had the capital, you could buy huge tracts of arid land on either side of the valley which would later become prime real estate as the surplus water became available at derisory prices. $3.50 an acre foot in 1967, as I recall. The current price in Los Angeles is $200 and rising.
People became immensely rich and powerful, and they considered themselves to be unstoppable. So now you have to understand that my valley was not just any old hole in the ground. It was the key to California's next great project, Phase Two of the California Water Project.
It would capture nine million acre feet from the Eel river and send it down a 21-mile tunnel through the mountains and then on to the Central Valley and Los Angeles. Round Valley would become the biggest reservoir in California, and it would provide the means for bringing the other wild rivers of the north coast - the Mad, the Klamath, the Smith, into California's plumbing system.
The dam would be 730 feet high and cost $400 million. The project was a two billion dollar project, and these were 1967 dollars. Joe Jensen was determined to have it. So were the agribusiness tycoons. California's Department of Water Resources was at the peak of its operating power and influence, having just completed Phase One, and the Corps was a sacred cow. Between them they constituted the California water lobby, and it was, without doubt, the most influential political machine in the state, and perhaps in the nation. This was what Richard Wilson had to stop.
It makes a thrilling tale, but what I want to emphasize now are two major features of his crusade, from which we can all learn something.
First, Wilson was able to consciously recognise and articulate the exceptional beauty of Round Valley, because he had come to it from a very different, upper class Southern California background. The old-time residents of the valley might protest at being evicted from their ancestral homesteads, but they could not explain why their homes, as opposed to a thousand others, should be spared.
Of course Wilson had a personal stake in the outcome, but he really wasn't in it for the money, or for political gain. His motivation was powerful, unambiguous, and altruistic. Even in the darkest moments, through all the rumours and aspersions started by his detractors, he could live with himself. He knew he was right, and that to flood a beautiful valley was wrong.
In the end it this profound, unalterable conviction that won the day. Eventually we hear Ronald Reagan using exactly the same words, in private, to justify stopping the project. It must be wrong to flood a beautiful valley. And Ike Livermore, Reagan's resources secretary who played a major role, says the same thing. It would be a crime to flood the valley.
For years the battle lines swayed back and forth, with reasoned arguments on every subject under the sun. Wilson had to learn about geology, hydrology, ecology, resource economics. He learned about fish, and game, and forests. He mastered the arcane language of engineers and the calculations that lead them to their holy grail - the cost/benefit ratio. He studied ground water management, desalinisation, water treatment, irrigation and evaporation rates. He gathered information about earthquakes and landslides, and every dam disaster on record. But in his heart he knew that none of these arguments were what mattered most. He had to save a beautiful valley.
By contrast, many of the Corps engineers brought their families up to the valley, to camp by the river. They thought it was beautiful too, and told me so in glowing terms. But they couldn't wait to flood it. They were prisoners of a dogma: You have to do whatever does the greatest good for the greatest number.
As I wrote in the book, it's like saying, "We can't leave the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, where only a few people can see it, so we'll cut it up into confetti and then everyone can take a bit of the Mona Lisa home."
So what we learn from Wilson's victory is the power of a simple, poetic idea, profoundly held.
The second lesson springs from the first. Because Wilson's aim was not personal gain, he could rise above the conflict to some extent. And because he came from a quite different background, and had connections with big money and serious politics, he avoided a trap that so many environmentalists fall into.
He did not find it necessary to demonize the opposition. Often we lend big organisations even more power than they actually have, by taking them at their face value, as great, monolithic, impregnable institutions. Wilson knew they were run by people much like himself. In other circumstances he might agree with them on a number of issues, or find himself at dinner with them. Jim Boswell, one of the great nabobs of the Central Valley, with a family stake in the Los Angeles Times, he counted as a friend, although Boswell was determined to get that water.
As a result, Wilson infiltrated the opposition. He found allies everywhere, and in the most unlikely places. He recruited blue collars from the Auto Workers Union , and sporting gentry from Ducks Unlimited. He found support in Reagan's kitchen cabinet, and among Indians scratching out a living on the reservation. And, very importantly, he found whistle-blowers in the very bureaucracies that were trying to bury him. We can't all have Wilson's advantages, but learning from his tactics we may not necessarily need them.
In these and other ways I think Wilson really did make a difference. Partly because of him, engineers are far more circumspect today. Domestically dams are viewed with great suspicion, and they would not dream of launching into a dam project without first appeasing the "environmental community," whatever that may be. But don't think for a minute that engineers are any less keen to build them, or that developers are any less greedy for water.
I still get the public relations material from the the Met. It has changed out of all recognition. Where once there were pictures of tough men in hard hats, today, as you see, there are glossy pictures of birds and fish and waterfalls. This issue contains paeons of praise for an engineer, Dennis Majors, who got a two billion dollar dam through by anticipating environmental problems. Instead of pooh-poohing them, and fighting them at every turn, he identifies them ahead of time and deals with them in his plan. And whaddya know? It saves money for the Met.
I don't know Mr Majors. I wanted to talk to him, but it seems he didn't want to talk to me. For all I know he really loves the kangaroo rats and California gnat catchers that he helped to save, and I don't mean that cynically. But what's important here, what he was honoured and applauded for, was getting the job done, saving several million dollars, and doing good along the way. The question is: Does Dennis Majors make a difference? Is that what it means?
Let's look at our real problem. People are saying that pretty soon, in your lifetime, there won't be enough water. What they would be saying if they were telling the truth - not necessarily to the grand jury - is that soon there will be too many people. Why don't they say that? Partly because it would cause religious offence. Partly because there's no money in population control. And partly because we still live in the fix-it age.
The American culture, which is the strongest example by far of western culture, has the world in a grip of steel. Three of its most powerfully held doctrines are:
1. Human beings always come first - an extension of the idea of manifest destiny.
2. Problems can always be fixed.
3. The American Way of Life is fundamentally good and must be maintained.
I believe these three positions are rapidly becoming incompatible, but unfortunately, for some, they are still extremely profitable.
Consider that certain corporation which calls itself Supermarket to the World. It presents itself as a benefactor, with its collossal food processing industry, preparing for the day when there will be ten billion of us, standing shoulder to shoulder.
"We are setting more places at the table," it says unctuously. Meanwhile three of its top executives were convicted, not long ago, of a huge commodities price-fixing scam. Benefactors? I don't think so.
Of course if we all ate less now, there might be enough food and water to go around. But what would that do to the American Way of Life?
Anyway, why would eating less save water?
For one thing, we wouldn't be sending so much water down the toilet.
Here's an example of why Royal Families can be useful. They can say pretty much anything they like, without being kicked out of office.
In 1965 the Queen's husband, Prince Philip, lambasted the water closet. I should explain that in England, going to the loo can also be called spending a penny, because we used to have coin-operated public restrooms. The flush toilet, he said, was "the biggest waste of water in the country, by far. You spend half a pint, and flush two gallons."
But that's not even the half of it.
In America we produce 130 times as much animal waste as human. A large proportion of it comes from hogs. And hog farms - or rather hog factories - are growing larger and more numerous. The hog waste is collected in vast ponds, to decompose and play hell with property values. Maybe you heard the same report I heard recently on the radio. When one of those ponds burst its banks, it caused a bigger ecological disaster than the Exxon Valdez.
When you are next out on the streets of Winfield, look around you and ask: "Do these people really need more pork?"
OK, we're getting to it.
What do you have to do to make a difference?
First you have to make a difference to yourself. In this country that is both the easiest and the hardest thing to do.
Easy, because you KNOW what's good. You don't have to be told. You know you should consume less, eat good stuff, spend more time expanding your horizons and figuring out who you are, resisting the rubbish that comes pouring over you like a broken hog pond, and becoming a true, thinking individual.
Hard because, at first you may be the only person you know who's doing it, and you won't be popular. So get out of this culture for a while. Take a trip to Mexico, go alone - it's important to go alone - get away from the tourists, go where the campesinos live and discover that the poorest people, with the least to offer are the most generous and the most honest. If you find otherwise, you have my permission to sue me.
And when you've done all this, and you've honed down your appetites, and sharpened your perceptions, what difference will that make?
Well, you will see that a plastic bag in a stream bed is offensive to you. Not because it's "bad for the environment". Not because someone was careless. Just because the very idea of it is offensive. There will be a whole range of things you won't do; not to save money, not for practical reasons, but simply because they are offensive to you. You will tell the truth, to yourself and others, and recognise lies more easily. You will see that woman on the TV saying "My doctor prescribed Claritin", and you won't believe her, and what's more it will make you mad. You will see that what the world needs now, more even than love, is restraint, and truth.
Broadly speaking I would say there are two ways to approach life in this culture.
One is to work like hell making as much money as possible, and then to spend it compensating for the damage and discomfort you cause.
The other is to keep life simple, reduce your overheads, give yourself time and freedom to do what you know is right and worthwhile.
And when it comes to water, that means thinking of it not as a commodity but as liquid poetry.
Whatever else you accomplish, you can be sure then that your life itself will make a difference.