Steinbeck had it right.
“California farmers produce more than a third of the nation’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts. To do that, they use nearly 80 percent of all the water consumed in the state.”
The amplified version of the American Dream is the California Dream. 1 in 8 people in the US live in California. Live in all that sun. Fun, casual, expensive, (unequal), pools, ridiculously beautiful everything – bodies, buildings, views, cultural output…, paradise with a lobotomy, shorthand for America if you look very quick.
California’s the seventh largest economy in the world. GSP of about $2.2 trillion – larger than Brazil, Italy. Larger – it’s got 423,970 km² to the UK’s 243,610. Population’s more than double what it was in 1960.
Growth, sprawl – the post war boom and full throttle economic drive to spend/build/earn/repeat saw California line everything richly with new schools, transport, parks, the state water project…
“How many ex-urban furniture showrooms does a small town in the middle of France really need? How does the sin of car dependency which such development fosters accord with the universally preached, seldom practiced, tiresomely trite and entirely unrealistic doctrine of sustainability?”
Sustainability. California’s the state where the desert goes right up to the chain fence. Then there’s instantly grass and plants and sprinklers and pools and water fights. Then the desert starts right up again on the boundary the other side. I guess that’s Palm Springs – 201 gallons of water per head per day, in the middle of the desert.
Artificial lakes right next to the sand, so the homes in that development can get boathouses. Friggin’ FARMS in the desert. Subterranean pipes sending water to them because there’s none to start with. Fields and livestock and produce growing in abundance and the water has to be pumped in to get that happening.
Water rich territory ships out its juice to water poor territory. It’s all irrigation canals, dams, artificial lakes, aqueducts, pumping plants, tunnels…
“The average American consumes more than 300 gallons of California water each week by eating food that was produced there.”
A bunch of grapes? 24 Gallons
Four glasses of milk? 143 gallons
Three and a half walnuts? 7 gallons
Almonds take up about a gallon each, nearly 10% of California’s agricultural water consumption. As the Independent neatly calculated, that means that California’s almond crop uses more water each year than …Los Angeles.
For much of the 1960s the Governor was Edmund G. Brown Sr (Pat). It’s now Edmund G. Brown Jr (Jerry). Jerry was also Governor from 1975 to 1983.
The New York Times characterized the two Governors as being about big government projects for industrial/residential expansion and monetary growth (Sr/Pat), and ‘Small is beautiful,’ conservationism and eco minded reforms (Jr/Jerry).
In the early 1960s it was growth, like it or not – well, it was liked. People were moving to California at a rate of 1,000 per day: “Pat saw an almost endless capacity for California growth.” By Jr/Jerry’s tenure in the ‘70s Ecological awareness and consideration for resources had set in – shit runs out, it seems. By Jerry’s second tenure, starting in 2011, there was the drought.
Yes. While Texas and Oklahoma are being washed away by flooding from record-setting rainfall, California’s now had four years of diminishing returns from rain, and four years of drought.
Snowpack - that was the key. California’s mountains should be covered in 6/7 feet of snow. Even with the rain issues, the spring melt should see the state through. But Governor Jerry was standing there in April – it wasn’t less; it was non-existent. 6% of the amount it should be. There was nothing to come. No run-off.
With retrospect comes wisdom, the NYT notes criticism of Edmund G. Brown Sr’s expansionism. All those large scale, New Deal-y construction and infrastructure projects – were they accommodating new people or encouraging them, thus exacerbating today’s problems?
Another situation where cause and effect play tag is described by Drs Doug Parker and Faith Kearns of the University of California, discussing the burden of supplying ‘enough’ water to California.
“Given the size of the state, we will always have more land available to bring into production than we will have water to put on it.
This […] means that efforts to increase supply of water or reduce demand for water will ultimately lead to more agricultural lands being brought into production, more water available for cities to grow and more water to remain in streams to ensure a healthy environment.
But eventually we will face more drought and water supplies will again be inadequate to meet the new higher levels of demand.”
Is the drought the end of the State’s celebrated growth – indeed, of its celebration of growth?
You’ve got the tech capital and the movie capital - the pinnacles of the pinnacles of American/Western/American culture, and people might not be able to shower there for more than five minutes.
People are installing artificial lawns. Thin cattle (dried out grazing land) are auctioned off to farmers further east, pastors drive around giving out bottled water, mayors are drinking and promoting recycled sewage.
Farmers, fountains, the rich… all objects of rage and frustration. Starbucks and Nestle have been petitioned and pilloried over their water bottling activities:
“While Starbucks recently pulled its water bottling operations from the state on ethical grounds, Nestle and other companies like Walmart continue to source water for bottling in California, buying at the same rate as residents and selling at one hundred times the profit.”
Farmers. There are 19th century water laws established in this state, allowing “nearly 4,000 companies, farms and others to use an unmonitored amount of water for free.” Over half the claims on waterways in the state come from these.
The earlier your claim the stronger you are (2014’s 95% water cuts to farmers didn’t affect those with pre-1914 rights). It’s all about people nailing bits of paper to trees in the gold rush.
“Known as "first in time, first in right," it was established in California by the Forty-Niners — who used prodigious amounts of water to blast gold out of the Sierra foothills — and essentially says that whoever is the first to divert a set quantity of water from a source has priority rights to it.”
But then history’s getting a shock or two. 22nd May saw Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta farmers agree to give up a quarter of their water this season in return for no further restrictions. People are budging on their historic water rights to stave off bigger enforced cuts.
“In the weeks since Gov. Jerry Brown announced across-the-board cutbacks for urban water systems, the state’s farmers have become something of a scapegoat. Residents who are expected to time their showers and let their lawns turn brown have angrily accused the agricultural industry of not doing enough to curb its use of water, although many growers have faced substantial cuts for the last two years”
(It’s the second year farmers have received a 0% share from the Central Valley Project irrigation canals, for instance).
So yes. The first mandatory water usage reduction in state history was ordered by Governor Brown on April 1st (25%). “This [sic] savings amounts to approximately 1.5 million acre-feet of water over the next nine months.” Freedom, where freedom amounts to the civic part of your American citizen’s world remaining as untouchable as possible, your right to green lawns and waterslide parties and uninhibited FUN, is being revised.
Where does the lifestyle go now? No one likes the government saying no to their lifestyle. It’s the height of political toxicity in the States, and yet…
It’s those scary arguments. The ones people like discussing – so long as they can forget about the implications and carry on living the same. Climate change, over consumption, pollution, overpopulation – all great to be clued up on when you need conversation topics for the new friends you make as you fly somewhere or trade sports car stats or work towards baby number four or…
“I think the drought does say: Sober up. Have a mature conversation in which climate change is one of the things discussed, but population growth is discussed, and the extreme emotional commitment to green lawns, and ornamental gardens with plants that you cannot eat and probably even goats cannot eat—let’s put all of those factors into the conversation, and let’s not lose our bearings by picking only one topic and throwing out all the others … If we were a people devoted to croquet and badminton, and we couldn’t live without lawns on which to perform our sacred ceremonies of croquet and badminton, and golf and so on, that would be one framework. But it’s not actually sacred to us. We don’t really have to have those great green expanses, and it’s very discussable what a good landscape should look like.”
The Atlantic there.
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