The aquifer depletion was caused by irrigated agriculture in the first place. It's pretty rich hearing vineyard owners like the Steinbecks complain about Harvar

The aquifer depletion was caused by irrigated agriculture in the first place. It's pretty rich hearing vineyard owners like the Steinbecks complain about Harvard buying land to take the underlying water. Until very recently [1], profitable vineyards could deplete water under their neighbors' property without limits or compensation. Profitable vineyards could afford deeper wells and larger pumps; if it hurt shallower wells on nearby properties, tough luck. My grandparents' land neighboring vineyards owned by the Steinbecks and others underwent a distressed sale in 2013 because the groundwater had been badly depleted. The Paso Robles groundwater crisis is just the end-stage symptom of an unsustainable process that has been going on for decades. https://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Case%20Study%201.%20Paso%20Robles.pdf https://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Case... Irrigated agriculture came to dominate this region only in the last decades of the 20th century. Relatives on my father's side started dryland farming on a property near Paso Robles in the 1910s. That property enrolled in a well-monitoring program in the 1970s. The trend line was clear by the 1980s: water levels dropping over time. But irrigated crops like grapes were more profitable -- at least as long as growers didn't have anyone pricing or otherwise limiting groundwater withdrawal to sustainable levels. Now the same growers who fought water limits are alarmed that Harvard might take the water they counted on claiming. I hope that it's a wake-up call for growers to support truly sustainable water usage plans, lest they lose at their own game to even richer out-of-state entities. [1] It appears that there are new limits on groundwater extraction for agricultural use in California, but if I read the article correctly they're not really enforced yet.