There are just a few things we literally can’t live without. The short list is air, food … and water. Our four-year drought is forcing Californians to own up to the fact that we’re not Oregon, England, or New England, where enough water falls from the sky to keep lawns green, reservoirs filled and farmers happy. Like water off a duck’s back, to use an appropriate cliché, we largely ignored the prophets of liquid doom who warned us that water is tomorrow’s oil, that more wars in the near future will be fought over water than land, and that we’d better start addressing the issue today if we don’t want to be thirsty tomorrow. And few regions have been more changed by water and the marvel of human engineering than the San Fernando Valley. It was a seminal event when water cascaded down a 233-mile aqueduct from the Owens Valley to a thirsty Southland on November 5, 1913. Constructed under the supervision of William Mulholland, Los Angeles’ Water Department Superintendent, the aqueduct’s water was reserved for the residents of Los Angeles. The site was never forgotten by Ted Gibson, a community leader and Encino’s first postmaster. “Prior to 1913, the Valley was a semi-desert, suitable mostly for dry farming. As a youth, I sat on a hill and watched the water come down the spillway after Bill Mulholland opened the valve to let the newly completed aqueduct change the history of the San Fernando Valley,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir. And he was right; water did change the history of the San Fernando Valley … and the paucity of it might well change it again in the first quarter of the 21st century. By 1930, linked to the city of Los Angeles by their need for the municipality’s water, the San Fernando Valley’s independent townships of Lankershim, Owensmouth, Girard, Marion, Weeks Colony, Zelzah, and more than a dozen others, had disappeared, swallowed up by a Los Angeles and its water. That was the first – but by no means the last – time that water influenced the Valley’s people and economy. The chaparral and scrub oak that covered the Valley up until the late 19th century gave way to wheat, citrus, walnuts and a score of other agricultural products. And by the end of World War II, the rush for residential development had begun – underlying it all was the availability of water. The statistics are telling: In 1910, there were an estimated 3,300 people living in the Valley. In 1920, the number had grown to 21,000. In 1930, the Census showed a Valley population of 78,497. By the end of World War II, more than 200,000 called the San Fernando Valley home. The April 1950 Census showed an almost 100 percent increase – to 403,000 people. Now we are more than four times that number, and live amid an ecosystem that didn’t previously exist. Interspersed with the concrete, stucco and wood structures that cover today’s San Fernando Valley are plants and flowers that were never native to this area: palms, oleander, pines, grasses and many others, imported with little or no concern regarding the amount of water needed to keep them green. It would be an understatement to say that the Valley and its leadership have taken water for granted. After all, the Sierra Nevada snowpack, the flow from the Owens Valley and the pipelines traversing the desert from the Colorado River would keep us green forever, wouldn’t they? We have sown a suburban society that consumed precious water as if it had no end, and suddenly Mother Nature appears to be turning off the tap. So where do we go from here? The first step is to realize that the green Valley of the past has to be altered in light of the diminishing water resource, meaning dramatic changes in how we allocate water. The second is to utilize the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit that have characterized the Valley to address change. If the current drought continues for several more years, simple conservation measures may not be enough. With the majority of our planet covered with water, we can make the oceans serve as the source of the water we need. There are more than 21,000 desalination plants worldwide, producing over 3.5 billion gallons of potable water a day. Desalination equipment is now in use in more than 120 countries. Saudi Arabia relies on desalination to meet 70 percent of its drinking water needs. Perhaps that’s fitting. William Mulholland employed the technology of the early 20th century to transform a sleepy semi-arid valley into an iconic suburban civilization. Now, it may come time to employ our human hubris once again – and the latest technologies of the 21st century – to do something Mulholland would never have thought possible: create water right here in Los Angeles. Martin M. Cooper is president of Cooper Communications, an Encino public relations firm. His book, “Read All About It! The Valley Times, 1946-1970,”a post-war history of the San Fernando Valley, will be published next month by Photo Friends, a non-profit L.A. Public Library support group.