BY: JOHNATHAN MOSS
California has often been seen as a land of wild possibility, whose city streets unravel for the ambitious like the scarlet rug of Hollywood’s Academy Awards. The promise and pull of a coastline peppered with long legs and silicone valley start-ups is often tempting, but what herds people most is California’s $2.2 trillion economy, which brings with it the chance for a better life.
California is entering the fourth year of one of its most punishing droughts in history, forcing Governor Jerry Brown to order a 25% cut in water consumption for the first time ever. The Golden State’s reservoirs are nearly empty, losing 6 trillion gallons of water, while the journal of Nature Climate Change estimates that the Sierra Nevada Snowpack is the lowest it has been in over 500 years. With over 117,960 acres charring to barren ash in California in 2015 alone, there is no question about it, California is in crisis.
Today, 39 million people (who own 32 million vehicles) live in California, and are all attempting to live at a comfort level that exceeds their resources. How is it that California has such a booming agricultural sector when the landscape surrounding it is no wetter than a parched tongue? Driving through the 6.3 million acres of The Central Valley farmland, the weather feels barely different from a desert yet it manages to produce 25% of the nation’s food.
Governor Jerry Brown’s executive order plans to reduce water use throughout the state by focusing on new restrictions for lawn watering, but its fatal flaw is that it does not apply to the agricultural sector, which consumes up to 80% of the state’s water.
If you think the California Water Crisis can’t get worse, just wait until they drain the last drop from irreplaceable aquifers. As lakes and rivers continue to deplete, groundwater usage has skyrocketed to make up for the shortcoming. A recent report from Standford University says that use of nonrenewable groundwater to meet the state’s needs has risen to 60%. The Central Valley farmland is extracting groundwater at twice the rate of natural recharge. What most people don’t realize is that by massively overusing groundwater today, California is living off its savings. Underground fresh water is relatively finite. No amount of economic bailout will replenish a dry well.
California vastly needs to change the way it consumes water. If the Golden State continues its rapid rate of overdevelopment in agriculture, housing, and industry, fresh water will continue to be an issue. Unfortunately, much like human-produced climate change, when a threat like aquifer exploitation is invisible to the eye, it tends to be ignored. The truth is the United States has a lot of water, but it is not in places that carry the bright allure of California. Population pressure is wringing the state dry—in 55 years the population has grown from 16 million to 39 million. Can California remain the seventh largest economy in the world when its natural system remains overstressed?
The photos that photographer Damon Winter captured for The New York Times of lush suburban lawns and lavishly green golf courses in an otherwise heat-scorched landscape make me question if the California dream is hanging out on the last remaining limb of a withering tree.
Sources: mercurynews.com, stanford.edu, nationalgeographic.com, nytimes.com
