On the Frontlines of the Water Wars : A LIFE OF ITS OWN : The Politics and Power of Water <i> by Robert Gottlieb (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $20.95; 292 pp.; 0-15-195190-X) </i>

Like the Red Queen in Alice’s Wonderland, Robert Gottlieb asks us to believe any number of impossible things as he guides us through the no less peculiar world of Western water politics. “A Life of Its Own” is barely under way before he’s already proposing to outrage the conventional wisdom with suggestions such as these:

- Water developers in the Golden State can no longer sell a new water project to the voters on the well-worn old claim that Southern California needs more water;

That ecological castle-wrecker, James Watt, probably did more to stop dam building in the West than Jimmy Carter and a whole shudder of environmentalists ever could, simply by insisting that the people who promote these projects should be required to put up some of the money for them;

- Many environmental groups today, led by the Environmental Defense Fund, have abandoned their historic stance in defense of nature and are instead seeking new ways to accommodate economic development.

Any of those notions would clearly upset the unwavering conviction of all the countless journalists and commentators who persist in believing that the good guys always wear green and all California water issues can be defined by the imagined differences between the northern and southern ends of the state. But what’s really important about these ideas is that they’re all old hat within the shuttered community of Western water interests, many are commonly accepted in those precincts, and a few are even demonstrably true. Gottlieb should know--he’s been behind a lot of those closed doors, and now he’s come back to tell the tale.

“A Life of Its Own” marks a distinct departure from Gottlieb’s earlier work. In “Thinking Big” he showed his skills as a meticulous and resourceful researcher. In “Empires of the Sun” he demonstrated the ability to marshal facts in support of an overarching hypothesis. But this new book isn’t interpretive analysis so much as a report from the front lines, vivid, impressionistic, and truthful in ways that can’t be nailed down with citations and bar graphs. It’s not advancing some grand conception of the future of Western water issues because that’s still forming; in a sense, Gottlieb can’t write the last chapter to this book because he and the rest of us haven’t finished living it yet.

Gottlieb’s central message is that these issues are currently in a state of transition. Many of the essential principles that have guided the course of water development in the Western states throughout most of this century no longer apply. The intricate web of relationships that has knit together academics, engineers, industrialists and government bureaucrats in a common understanding of the importance of water to economic and social progress is being torn apart in some places, disintegrating in others and reforming in new and unpredictable patterns all over the West.

Gottlieb stumbled upon all this unexpected tumult in the course of working against approval of the Peripheral Canal in California. That’s certainly as good a place as any to begin showing readers how genuinely confused water politics have become. And these early passages in the book give a good sense of his method. For, what he has to say about the politics of the canal fight isn’t in any way descriptive of the underlying issues at stake in that conflict; he’s showing us instead what the battle looked like at the time to someone who was in the thick of it.

Perplexed, intrigued by what he’s seen, Gottlieb happily accepts appointment as the radical, environmental representative from Tom Hayden’s Santa Monica to the sanctum sanctorum of the water lobby, the board of directors of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. He arrives raring to play the odd man out and is surprised to find instead that some of his ideas provoke interest, discussion, and even a little grudging support from a wide spectrum of influential officials who, quite literally, don’t appear to know what to think anymore.

In the pages that follow, Gottlieb conducts a tour d’horizon of the Western water scene--the rising concern over water waste in the Imperial Valley, the crisis over center-pivot technology in Western irrigation, the Galloway Group proposal for providing San Diego with water independence; these and many other equally arcane but potentially significant recent battlegrounds get a visit. The book in this respect is like a clipping service, touching briefly on every new water issue that’s popped up in the last few years. But because Gottlieb’s mind is so agile and his questions are so acute, it’s this very quality of an intellectual travelogue that makes “A Life of Its Own” such an excellent introduction to the state of Western water issues. But read it quick because this book isn’t likely to have much of a shelf life. In six months, the discussion will have moved on and the issues will have changed.

There’s a common quality linking the great schemes and new ideas that Gottlieb visits. Nearly all of them falter. Some continue to stumble forward; others fail altogether. But none succeed in creating a rallying point that might restore order to the current confusion of Western water interests. That sounds depressing, but it’s also what makes Gottlieb’s book an important antidote to conventional environmental writing. There are no simple morality plays in the world Gottlieb describes. The people his politics might define as good guys aren’t always fighting for the right. Equally important, the bad guys don’t always win. In fact, half the time they don’t even know what they want.

Gottlieb might disagree but the quality that seems to me to run most prominently through his narrative is a sense of optimism. People change in Gottlieb’s book; their perceptions grow. When the members of the Metropolitan Water District meet on the morning after their hopes for the Peripheral Canal have been dashed, they don’t come together to gnash their teeth but to reflect on how much the world has changed and what they must do next to catch up. That’s the kind of observation that suggests the system might work after all.

Gottlieb thinks he knows where they all went wrong, environmentalists and developers alike, and his answer is simple and compelling. For the Metropolitan Water District as much as for the Environmental Defense Fund, what’s gone out of the debate is any sense of responsibility for forming a better social order. That, after all, is what water development in the Western states was supposed to be all about. Utopia, however that’s defined, has always been its drive wheel. And in losing touch with a sense of what their goals should be, Gottlieb argues, these same movers and shakers have lost touch with where they come from, what politicos call the grassroots, the people whose interests they are supposed to serve.

This sense of disengagement from any worthwhile purpose seems to be clearest in Gottlieb’s description of the Environmental Defense Fund and the others who like to style themselves as members of the so-called Third Wave of environmentalism. But if his perception of loss is sharper there, it’s probably because he cares more about them than he does about the developers. The sense of rootless drift, however, is universal. The developers, after all, haven’t been too sure either about what’s right and wrong ever since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stopped counting economic growth on the plus side of its cost-benefit analyses for new dams.