“Droughts come and go,” Stroeh tells me on a hot dusty August afternoon. “They’re part of the way we live, though now we also have global climate change, along with extremes such as floods and droughts.” Michael McCarthy, the author of the Man Who Made it Rain, and Stroeh’s biggest fan, argues that there are two obvious truths about hydrology today: “water is the new oil”; and “when water becomes a commodity, wars start.” Wars haven’t broken out yet in Marin but skirmishes have. This summer deputies from the Marin County Sheriff’s office raided commercial pot farms in Nicasio where growers purloined water from adjacent farms and diverted it from streams and springs to irrigate their crops. Then, too, several years ago, residents of Marshall nearly came to blows when Hog Island wanted to dig a new well on the uplands across from highway one.
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