The Chris Moeller Archives

California water wars

Our trip to Southern California was lovely, and I look upon it like I look at a trip to Venice: See it while you can. Both locations will become inhabitable, possibly within my lifetime. In Venice, the water level is coming up and the city is sinking. Throughout the American West, they've been living like Easterners, but the desert is slowly returning to claim its own.

The pioneers of the frontier west have done just about all the irrigating they’re going to be able to do. The mountains and the dams have provided the water supply for generations, but the climate is getting hotter and drier. The snow in the high altitudes of the Sierras is now coming down as rain, and the rain dissipates. It doesn’t offer the gradual replenishment through the spring and summer months that the melting snowpack does. In Central and Southern California already, nothing is green that isn’t being farmed, and there’s hot political debate over the governor allowing the farmers to continue irrigating while the sprinklers have been ordered off for everybody else into the fourth year of the state's epic drought. The bottled water we drink in the rest of the United States comes largely from California too, so their thirst is being aggravated by ours, by capitalism and our reluctance to drink from the tap.

I won’t feel bad for the conspicuous and idle rich when these drought conditions become the norm, when drought becomes fire, but the poor, as always, will feel the effects first and suffer the most—the poor in south central Los Angeles, the people that rely heavily on fruit and vegetable production in the farming and ranching areas. The economic stratification of the region will become even more stark as water becomes more scarce. That industrial divide has been a blemish on the region since the founding of modern Los Angeles. In 1974, Roman Polanski and Robert Evans made a dramatized noir picture about the William Mulholland water hustle of the early part of the century. The movie was called Chinatown, and it's in the National Registry now. The water has always been limited, and the land generally uninhabitable (or unsustainable) for more than a few humans, let alone North America's second-most-populous urban area, but the moneyed interests behind Mulholland saw to it that what existed was piped to where the moneyed interests lied, away from the farming lands of the Owens Valley in eastern California into the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles proper. Then after Owens Lake was dry, Mono Lake was the next to drain. Now the best solution anybody has for the current and everlasting shortage belongs to Captain Kirk. Actor and sage William Shatner wants to beam the water in via a giant pipe from Seattle, a city eleven hundred miles away, as far to the north of Los Angeles as Midland, Texas is to the east. The wet stuff will have to come from another region for sure. During the last century, vegetation has died in the Owens Valley, the lake remains a dry bed, and the valley's been left with frequent alkali dust storms. That valley has always been akin to a pair of those two-by-fours that hold up the phony building fronts on a Hollywood studio set-- the reality behind the perception of magic. The other side of paradise.

posted by CM @ 10:05 PM