{"id":6987,"date":"2014-02-06T13:33:47","date_gmt":"2014-02-06T21:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=6987"},"modified":"2014-02-06T13:33:47","modified_gmt":"2014-02-06T21:33:47","slug":"a-tale-of-two-droughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-tale-of-two-droughts\/","title":{"rendered":"A Tale Of Two Droughts"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0Tribune Content Agency<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Despite recent sporadic rain,\u00a0California\u00a0is still in the worst extended drought in its brief recorded history. If more storms do not arrive, the old canard that California\u00a0could withstand two droughts — but never<\/p>\n

\"Photo
Photo Credit: NASA\/NOAA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

three — will be tested for the first time in memory.<\/p>\n

There is little snow in the state’s towering\u00a0Sierra Nevada\u00a0mountains, the source of much of the surface water that supplies the state’s populated center and south. The vast\u00a0Central Valley\u00a0aquifer is being tapped as never before, as farms and municipalities deepen wells and boost pump size. Too many straws are now competing to suck out the last drops at the bottom of the collective glass.<\/p>\n

The vast 4-million-acre farming belt along the west side of the\u00a0Central Valley\u00a0is slowly drying up. Unlike valley agriculture to the east that still has a viable aquifer, these huge farms depend entirely on surface water deliveries from the distant and usually wet northern part of the state. So if the drought continues, billions of dollars of Westside orchards and vineyards will die, row cropland will lay fallow, and farm-supported small towns will likewise dry up.<\/p>\n

There is a terrible irony to all this. Never have\u00a0California\u00a0farm prices been higher, given huge Pacific export demand. Never have\u00a0California\u00a0farmers been more savvy in saving water to produce record harvests of nutritious, clean and safe food. And never has farming been so central to a state suffering from the aftershocks of a housing collapse, chronic high unemployment, overregulation and the nation’s highest sales, income and gas taxes.<\/p>\n

Yet there are really two droughts — nature’s, and its man-made twin. In the early 1980s, when the state was not much more than half its current population, an affluent coastal corridor convinced itself that nirvana was possible, given the coastal world-class universities, the new dot.com riches of the\u00a0Silicon Valley, the year-round temperate weather, and the booming entertainment, tourism and wine industries.<\/p>\n

Apparently, Pacific corridor residents from\u00a0San Diego\u00a0to\u00a0Berkeley\u00a0had acquired the affluence not to worry so much about the old Neanderthal concerns like keeping up freeways and airports — and their parents’ brilliantly designed system of canals, reservoirs and dams that had turned their state from a natural desert into a man-made paradise. They have become similar to the rarified Eloi of science-fiction writer\u00a0H.G. Wells’\u00a0“The Time Machine,” who live dreamy existences without any clue how to supply their own daily necessities.<\/p>\n

Californians have not built a major reservoir since the\u00a0New Melones Dam\u00a0more than 30 years ago. As the state subsequently added almost 20 million people, it assumed that it was exempt from creating any more “unnatural” Sierra lakes and canals to store precious water during\u00a0California’s\u00a0rarer wet and snow-filled years.<\/p>\n

Then, short-sightedness soon became conceit. Green utopians went further and demanded that an ailing 3-inch bait fish in the\u00a0San Francisco\u00a0delta receive more fresh oxygenated water. In the last five years, they have successfully gone to court to force millions of acre-feet of contracted irrigation water to be diverted from farms to flow freely out to sea.<\/p>\n

Others had even grander ideas of having salmon again in their central rivers, as they recalled fishing stories of their ancestors from when the state population was a fifth of its present size and farming a fraction of its present acreage. So they too sued to divert even more water to the sea in hopes of having game fish swim from the\u00a0Pacific Ocean\u00a0up to arid\u00a0Fresno County\u00a0on their way to the supposedly ancestral Sierra spawning grounds.<\/p>\n

The wages of both nature’s drought and human folly are coming due. Unless it rains or snows in biblical fashion in the next 60 days, we could see surreal things in\u00a0California\u00a0— towns without water, farms reverting to scrub, majestic parks with dead landscaping — fit for\u00a0Hollywood’s\u00a0disaster movies.<\/p>\n

Instead of an adult state with millions of acre-feet stored in new reservoirs,California\u00a0is still an adolescent culture that believes that it has the right to live as if it were the age of the romantic 19th-century naturalist\u00a0John Muir\u00a0— amid a teeming 40-million-person 21st-century megalopolis.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0California\u00a0disease is characteristic of comfortable postmodern societies that forget the sources of their original wealth. The state may have the most extensive reserves of gas and oil in the nation, the largest number of cars on the road — and the greatest resistance to drilling for fuel beneath its collective feet. After last summer’s forest fires wiped out a billion board feet of timber, we are still arguing over whether loggers will be allowed to salvage such precious lumber, or instead should let it rot to enhance beetle and woodpecker populations.<\/p>\n

In 2014, nature yet again reminded\u00a0California\u00a0just how fragile — and often pretentious — a place it has become.<\/p>\n

(Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0is a classicist and historian at the\u00a0Hoover Institution,Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of “The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern” You can reach him by e-mailing\u00a0author@victorhanson.com<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\n(C) 2014 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0Tribune Content Agency\u00a0 Despite recent sporadic rain,\u00a0California\u00a0is still in the worst extended drought in its brief recorded history. If more storms do not arrive, the old canard that California\u00a0could withstand two droughts — but never three — will be tested for the first time in memory. There is little snow in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[16],"tags":[643,1014,289,251,405,427,926],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1OH","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8287,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-tale-of-four-droughts\/","url_meta":{"origin":6987,"position":0},"title":"A Tale of Four Droughts","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 16, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJMedia California is not suffering one drought, but four. Each is a metaphor of what California has become. Nature The first California drought, of course, is natural. We are now in the midst of a fourth year of record low levels of snow and rain.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Popular Culture"","block_context":{"text":"Popular Culture","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/popular-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"A warning buoy sits on the dry, cracked bed of Lake Mendocino near Ukiah, California. 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