Here is where the straws tap into the common pool of California water, where consequence begins. Here, on the backside of the Diablo Mountains, amid a landscape of bleached-out pastures, wind farms and transmission lines, the two-lane Byron Highway crosses the concrete headwaters of two canals. Not that everyone's sanguine about the arrangement. Grumblings about plugging Sierra rivers to fill Los Angeles swimming pools and supplying farmers subsidized water to grow subsidized cotton have been staples of the state's political rhetoric for decades. Of more pressing concern at present is the environmental cost -- an escalating collapse of the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the West Coast's largest estuary. It is a crisis marked by creeping saltwater, toxins and, most visibly, the disappearance of fish.

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