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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/opinion/egan-days-of-desiccation.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
SAN DIEGO — The bathtub rings in the reservoirs that hold California’s liquid life have never been more exposed. Shorelines are bare, brown and bony. Much of the Sierra Nevada is naked of snow. And fields in the Central Valley may soon take to the sky. A Dust Bowl? Not yet. Though this drought will surely go down as the worst in the state’s recorded history. Until next year.
But
something else is evident in this cloudless winter: when you build a
society with a population larger than Canada’s, and do it with one of
the world’s most elaborate plumbing systems, it’s a fragile pact.
California is an oasis state, a hydraulic construct. Extreme stress
brings out the folly of nature-defiance.
The
whole fantasy of modern California has long been dependent on an
audacious feat of engineering. You could drain the Owens Valley to allow
Los Angeles to metastasize. (See “Chinatown.”) You could grab water
from Yosemite to keep San Francisco alive. And you could move all that
snowmelt up north to the south, and feed the world.
When
it works, it’s a marvel. Golden Gate Park is green. Los Angeles has a
river (sort of). The fragrance of fruit trees fills Fresno. But what if
there is no snow, no rain, and nothing left in the aquifers underground?
To date, going back to the start of its water year last July, Los
Angeles has received 1.2 inches of rain. Yes, for the year. San Diego
will soon notch its driest winter ever. And 80 percent of the state is
in extreme drought.
California
will get through it, though not without significant pain. And while
there will be some reordering of power, nothing will put to lie the old
line about the arid West: Water flows uphill to money.
But
at the least, these days of desiccation call for some honesty — to look
at this state and see, in all its dimensions, the fragility of this
kind of pact. And beyond that, to see in California a precursor of what
could happen elsewhere if we think we can out-engineer a fevered planet.
The drought itself may not be a result of climate change, but it is
made worse by all the meteorological complications.
Media
myopia tends to feed a one-sided narrative: There’s no global warming
because, after all, much of the United States is cold and snowy. The
West is the exception, but it’s a long way from Al Roker’s studio at 30
Rock. Even farther is Australia, where the warmest winter on record has
been followed by a summer of wildfires and heat waves pushing 120
degrees Fahrenheit. The Millennial Drought, which lasted from 1995 to
2012, now looks like the new normal down under.
No
surprise, some of the worst deniers of the obvious come from places
where it pays to look the other way. Let me introduce Representative
Devin Nunes, Republican from Fresno. Like most elected members of his
party, Nunes apparently skipped out of science class.
“Global warming is nonsense,” he said last week, when President Obama visited the Central Valley. “We want water, not welfare.”
They’ve
certainly got plenty of welfare. The Central Valley Project is a tangle
of aqueducts, pumps, canals and dams, the largest water development
project in the United States. Yes, we taxpayers built it, and still
subsidize it. Its 20 reservoirs hold enough water to irrigate three
million acres.
But
Nunes prefers the myth, firmly planting himself with the fact-denial
majority of Republican lawmakers. He took to the floor of Congress a few
days ago to explain. “Our ancestors in California built an amazing
irrigation system that can deliver a reliable water supply even during
severe droughts,” he said.
Our ancestors! You know, those long-dead wise ones, the socialists from the New Deal and the bureaucrats of the federal Bureau of Reclamation. Better not to name them.
Then,
more explanation: You see, he said, holding up a large sign with a
picture of the sun, snow and a droplet of water, “Government doesn’t
create water.” Oh, of course not. Then let’s just take government out of
the picture and watch what happens to farms in the congressman’s
district.
The
enemy, he concluded, is nature. Fish in particular — “stupid little
fish,” he said. Some pretty smart big fish, Pacific salmon, are in
trouble as well. He didn’t mention them. Nunes was referring to the
delta smelt, a key link in keeping the hydraulic heart of California
healthy, but small and imperiled by the switcheroo of the smelt’s
habitat to Nunes’s home. As for stupid, the fish yields its time to the
congressman from California.
Following
his lead, the Republican House has passed a bill moving precious water
from the north to big farmers in the Republican-rich lower Central
Valley. Government may not create water, but Congress can dole it out.
The bill is dead in the Senate.
California’s
big urban areas, after years of smart conservation measures, will get
by. But in a state where agriculture consumes 75 percent of the water,
farms will go fallow. This drought for the ages should prompt some
imaginative thinking on what foods grow best in an arid land.
The
congressman from Fresno could take his cue from another ancestor,
William Randolph Hearst. Up high on a dry perch overlooking the Pacific,
Hearst built his Mediterranean castle. Last month, the keepers of the
compound started draining the big Neptune Pool and many of its
fountains, a concession to the drought. Fantasy has its limits
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