The Destruction of California

Raymond Dasmann (1919–2002) was a professor of conservation biology, and the author of many books.  The poor fellow suffered from a devastating mental disturbance known as rationality, a condition that affects dozens of people in the civilized world.  He frequently experienced painful attacks of foresight and common sense.  Living in California, he was on the front line of the world war against the planet, an ecological blitzkrieg.  “When this war is finally won, the consequences will be as severe and irreversible as though we had fought a nuclear war,” he said.

Dasmann was born in San Francisco, in an era when there were few cars, the neighborhoods were pleasant, and men, women, and children felt perfectly safe, day or night, almost everywhere.  He was cursed to be born whilst the fossil energy blip was skyrocketing toward its climax, creating a bewildering whirlwind of immense change.  Young folks perceived the whirlwind to be normal, while older folks remembered better times, and were sickened by the senseless destruction, and the profound decay of society.

He wrote The Destruction of California when he was 45.  During his lifetime, the state’s population had grown six fold, spurred by a tsunami of immigration.  This was not good.  In the book, he described the various crises that were propelling the state toward disaster.  He wanted people to better understand the consequences of perpetual growth.  The book was published in 1965, 50 years ago.

Before colonization, California had been a cool scene for thousands of years.  Over time, the native hunter-gatherers learned how to live in a careful and respectful manner, and the ecosystem enjoyed jubilant health.  Their children were lucky to receive superb educations, which inspired them to live mindfully, in balance with the land.  The lasting marks that tribes left on the land were mostly mounds of discarded shells.

Later, the Spanish arrived, built missions, enslaved the Indians, introduced contagious diseases, and forced the natives to accept a foreign religion obsessed with world domination.  With the invaders came livestock and shipments of hay, which included the seeds of Spanish weeds.  The weeds were mostly annuals, and they were well adapted to thriving in a Mediterranean climate similar to California.  The grasses indigenous to California were primarily robust perennials that provided an excellent source of nutrition.

During drought times, there was less vegetation for the Spanish livestock to eat, leading to overgrazing.  The weed seeds sat patiently in the dust, waiting for a year when the rains returned.  Sadly, the weeds won.  The indigenous grasses are nearly extinct now.  Decade by decade, the quality of rangeland declined.  “In some places all that was left was worthless tarweed, star thistle, or cheat grass.”  Today, few people cruising through ranch country are capable of perceiving this glaring ecological train wreck.

Eighty years after the Spanish settled, a swarm of Americans rumbled into California, and they were out of their minds with Gold Fever.  They didn’t enslave Indians; they shot them.  Indians had been known to trade gold for glass beads, because gold was not super-big juju in their culture.  But gold made white folks crazy.  They would kill for it.  Gold was a magical rock that gave crazy people enormous illusions of grandeur.  With hydraulic mining, they channeled flowing streams through high-pressure nozzles and washed away entire mountains to extract the shiny rocks.

Early visitors to California were overwhelmed by the incredible abundance of wildlife.  Portions of the Central Valley looked like the Serengeti — herds of tule elk, pronghorn antelope, and black-tailed deer.  There were many wetlands.  “Here were birds in the tens of millions that darkened the sky when migrations sent them winging northward.”  In 1852, a man in Humboldt sat on a hill and observed 40 grizzly bears below.  The swarm of gold digging crazy people inspired other crazy people to get into the meat business via full-scale industrial hunting.  By 1910, the wildlife was in tatters.

Crazy people also became giddy with greed at the sight of 4,000 year old redwoods, 27 feet (8m) in diameter.  They sharpened their axes and went wacko.  Profits were invested in technology that enabled them to cut more and more.  There was no plan to leave anything for future generations.  The plan was to make as much money as possible, as fast as possible.  Floods washed away highways, bridges, and entire communities.  Fish perished in the silt-choked streams.  When Dasmann was writing, it looked like the old growth would be gone in 16 years.  At the same time, the community of Arcata was fiercely resisting the proposed creation of Redwood National Park.

Hordes of well-educated elites, who did not suffer from rationality, were delighted to get rich quick promoting the rapid growth of ghastly megacities in arid regions having minimal freshwater resources.  As the consumer mobs swelled in size, more streams were dammed, new aqueducts were built, rivers were pumped over mountains, and ancient water was removed from aquifers.  Nobody questioned this.  “Since growth is by definition progress, and progress is by definition good, this is deemed to be answer enough for any but a fool.”

Dasmann was driven out of his wits by this highly contagious pandemic of Get Rich Quick Fever.  Yet he was not an eco-revolutionary who recommended turning the clock back 400 years.  He didn’t preach the gospel of ecological sustainability.  His dream was quite modest; stop making things worse — think!  He worried about environmental destruction, the growing populations of people and automobiles, and the ongoing threat of water shortages.  Today, we can add to this list climate change, economic collapse, and growing limits on energy and other resources.  It’s 50 years later, and the crazy growth has not stopped.

The Indians lived in the same land for thousands of years without destroying it.  This is called “primitive.”  If whites had never arrived, the land would still be incredibly healthy.  But the blitzkrieg arrived in 1769, and the destruction has been accelerating at an exponential rate.  This is called “progress.”  The root problem here is not genes, but culture.  During the pilgrimage from womb to grave, every human floats in the currents of culture, like fish swim in water.

Indian children received superb educations because they lived in rational cultures that were mindful about not rocking the ecological boat.  Today’s kids are taught to work hard, shop like there’s no tomorrow, and leave the bill for their descendants.  Those who rock the boat the hardest earn the highest social status.  This screwy ritual is reinforced by teachers, preachers, peers, parents, the media — everywhere, all the time.  To break out of this toxic trance, a cultural meltdown is required.  Maybe we’ll be rescued by a beneficial calamity.

It’s difficult to question the madness.  We have a hard time comprehending how destructive and irrational our society is.  It’s nearly impossible to wrap our heads around the notion that the Indians enjoyed a way of life that had a long future.  It’s very hard for us to understand ecological intelligence, and desire it.  Thinking outside the box requires us to summon our inner power and leap into the unknown.  We have nothing to lose.

Dasmann, Raymond F., The Destruction of California, The MacMillan Company, New York, 1965.

Cadillac Desert

Marc Reisner’s classic, Cadillac Desert, takes us for a walk on the wet side, revealing far more than you ever wanted to know about dams, flood control, irrigation, and municipal water systems — and the serious long-term drawbacks that came along with building thousands of water projects in the frenzied pursuit of short-term wealth and power.  It’s a brilliant, funny, and annoying expose of government corruption.  It’s an ecological horror story.  It’s a collection of powerful lessons for our society, lessons on how not to live, warning signs.

The western regions of the U.S. tend to be dry.  Agriculture is risky where annual rainfall is less than 20 inches (50 cm).  Locations like Phoenix, Reno, or El Paso, which get less than seven inches (18 cm), are especially poor places to settle, let alone build cities.

Native Americans in the west were blessed with excellent educations, and they wisely lived in a manner that was well adapted to the ecosystem, for thousands of years, without trashing it.  Europeans suffered from dodgy educations that celebrated the magnificent civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, all of which transformed lush oases into moonscapes and went extinct.  Almost all of these dead cities were hard-core irrigation addicts. 

Around the world, most civilizations arose in arid regions.  Desert soils were often highly fertile, because the nutrients were not leached out by centuries of significant rainfall.  Desert farmers did not need to clear forests before planting.  All they needed to do was add water.  Irrigation turned their deserts green, but it also accelerated the growth and demise of their societies.

By the late nineteenth century, Los Angeles was growing rapidly, but it was doing this by mining the groundwater, a practice that had no long-term future.  The city finished the Owens Valley project in 1913, which brought in water from 223 miles away (359 km), and included 53 miles (85 km) of tunnels.  Drought hit in 1923, and the head of the water department frantically urged the city to stop the growth immediately, even if this required killing everyone in the Chamber of Commerce.  They ignored him, so he began pressing for an aqueduct from the Colorado River.

To make a long story short, America built a couple thousand major dams between 1915 and 1975.  Many were built during the Depression, to put the unemployed to work.  In congress, water projects became an extremely popular form of “pork.”  A great way for me to get your support for my bill would be to amend the bill to include a water project in your district.  This got out of control, to ridiculous proportions.

Many worthless projects were built at great expense to taxpayers and ecosystems.  Corporate America refused to invest in dams, because they were unlikely to pay for themselves, let alone generate reliable profits.  So, the west became a socialist utopia, dominated by militant free market conservatives who adored massive government spending in their region, and howled about it everywhere else.

By the time Jimmy Carter came into office in 1976, the national debt was close to a trillion dollars, and inflation was in double digits.  It was time to seriously cut spending, and Carter hated water projects, because they were so wasteful.  He attempted to terminate 19 water projects, and promptly became the most hated man on Earth.  He was a president with above average principles, a serious handicap.

Ronald Reagan took a different principled approach — no more free lunches.  He thought that those who benefitted from the welfare should fully repay the government for the generous help they received, both capital costs and operating expenses.  States should pay a third of the costs of reclamation projects, up front.  Pay?  Legions burst into tears.  The keg was empty, and the party ended.

I was amazed to learn that Carter was special because of his sense of history.  “He began to wonder what future generations would think of all the dams we had built.  What right did we have, in the span of his lifetime, to dam nearly all of the world’s rivers?  What would happen when the dams silted up?  What if the climate changed?” 

Well, of course, great questions!  As victims of dodgy educations, our graduates do not have a sense of history, a tragedy for which we pay dearly.  What right did we have to build 440 nuclear power plants that cannot be safely decommissioned?  What right did we have to destroy the climate?  What right did we have to leave a trashed planet for those coming after us?  A sense of history is powerful medicine, an essential component for an extended stay on this planet.

We know that any dam that doesn’t collapse will eventually fill with silt and turn into an extremely expensive waterfall — no more power generation, no more flood control, no more irrigation.  Every year millions of cubic yards of mud are accumulating in Lake Mead, the reservoir at Hoover Dam.  Many reservoirs will be filled in less than a century.  In China, the reservoir for the Sanmexia Dam was filled to the brim with silt in 1964, just four years after it was built. 

We know that irrigation commonly leads to salinization.  Salts build up in the soil, and eventually render it infertile, incapable of growing even weeds.  This often happens after a century of irrigation.  Salinization played a primary role in the demise of the ancient Fertile Crescent civilizations.  China’s Yellow River Basin is an exception, because of its low-salt soil.  It’s a serious problem in the Colorado River Basin, the San Joaquin Valley, and many other places.  It’s sure to increase in the coming decades, following a century-long explosion of irrigation around the world.

We know that the Ogallala aquifer will eventually become unprofitable for water mining.  This ocean of Ice Age water lies primarily beneath Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska.  Following World War II, diesel-powered centrifugal pumps enabled farmers to pump like there’s no tomorrow.  A 1982 study predicted problems after 2020.  When the irrigation ends, many will go bankrupt, many will depart, and some will return to less productive dryland farming, which could trigger another dust bowl.  Water mining has become a popular trend around the world, a short-term solution.

Stonehenge was built between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, and it was a durable design.  It had no moving parts, no electric-powered controls, and it was not required to prevent billions of gallons of water from normally flowing downstream to the sea.  How long will our dams last?  The Teton Dam did a spectacular blowout two days after it was filled.

Typhoon Nina blasted Asia in the summer of 1975.  Near China’s Banqiao Dam, a massive flood resulted from 64 inches (163 cm) of rain, half of which fell in just six hours.  The dam collapsed, and the outflow erased a number of smaller dams downstream.  Floods killed 171,000 people, and 11 million lost their homes.

In 1983, a sudden rush of melt water blasted into Glen Canyon Dam, damaging one of its spillways.  The dam did not fail that day.  It did not take out the Hoover Dam downstream with a huge wall of water.  It did not pull the plug on agriculture and civilization in southern California. 

As we move beyond Peak Oil, and energy production goes downhill, industrial civilization will wither.  It won’t be able to make replacement parts for dams, turbines, the power grid, and so on.  Will the nation of the United States go extinct some day?  The status quo in California is dependent on the operation of many pumping stations, which depend on the operation of hydro-power dams.  The Edmonston station pushes water uphill 1,926 feet (587 m), over the Tehachapi Mountains, using fourteen 80,000 horsepower pumps. 

As I write, the west coast is experiencing a serious drought.  Reservoirs in California are dangerously low.  Droughts can last for decades, or longer.  There is a good chance that climate change will increase the risks of living in extremely overpopulated western states.  So might earthquakes.

A wise man gave this advice to California governor Edmund Brown: “Don’t bring the water to the people, let the people go to the water.”

Reisner, Marc, Cadillac Desert — The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Penguin Books, New York, 1986.

Pillar of Sand

Pillar of Sand, by Sandra Postel, is spellbinding book about everyone’s favorite subject, irrigation.  It discusses the history of irrigation, the numerous serious problems, and the theoretical solutions — many of which seem to be economically or politically impossible.  The general health of irrigated agriculture is worrisome, and so is its future.  Feeding ten billion a few decades from now is not going to be a piece of cake.

The benefits of irrigation enabled the development of many civilizations, and the drawbacks of irrigation then destroyed many of them.  Today, 17 percent of the world’s cropland is irrigated, and it produces 40 percent of our food.  This amazing productivity has thrown gasoline on the flames of human reproduction, resulting in explosive population growth, which is never a good thing. 

From the very beginning, irrigation seemed to be a fountain of bad karma.  From the flooded fields sprouted a bumper crop of mighty emperors, vast palaces, powerful armies, multitudes of slaves, contagious diseases, the loss of freedom, and a pitiable way of life, isolated from wild nature.  It was a high-powered form of agriculture, but the magic was mixed with serious defects.  Sudden shifts in precipitation or temperature could make an entire civilization vulnerable to famine.  The levees, canals, and dams required continuous maintenance by large numbers of hard-working grunts.  The infrastructure also provided excellent targets for malevolent invaders, and vengeful enemies.

Over time, irrigation often led to the buildup of salt in the soil — salinization, which eventually transformed excellent cropland into infertile wasteland.  Irrigation was a primary reason why the once lush gardens and orchards of the Cradle of Civilization are now bleak deserts decorated with ancient ruins.

Today, salinization is increasing on 20 percent of irrigated land, causing productivity losses over vast areas.  Farmers can slow this destruction by installing a combination of drainage systems and high-efficiency drip irrigation.  Unfortunately, this is very expensive, few farmers do it, and the salt continues to accumulate.  Postel writes, “Salt remains one of the gravest threats to irrigated agriculture and food security in a world that will be striving to feed 8 to 9 billion people within 50 years.”

In the last 200 years, irrigated land has increased 30 times in area.  We went on a dam-building binge.  In the last 50 years, there has also been an explosion in the number of powerful electric and diesel pumps.  They allowed irrigation to expand into many new regions.  It is no coincidence that our population also skyrocketed — more food, more mouths, more problems.

It is no coincidence that we are discovering limits to the supply of fresh water.  In many places the water table is falling, because water is being pumped from underground aquifers faster than the ecosystem replaces it.  This groundwater mining is a widespread threat in primary food-producing regions of Pakistan, the Middle East, North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, India, northern China, and the western United States. 

The problem is well understood, but little effort is being made to address it, because over-pumping generates lots of food and money.  Eventually, the wells will go dry, and the golden goose will drop dead.  About a tenth of global grain production currently depends on aquifer mining.  Postel warns us: “Groundwater over-pumping may now be the single biggest threat to irrigated agriculture, exceeding even the buildup of salts in the soil.”

Irrigation is also draining major rivers.  In 1997, sections of the Yellow River in China had no flow for 226 days.  The dry stretches are often 600 kilometers long, and this takes a big toll on farm production.  Other threatened rivers include the Ganges, Indus, Nile, Amu Darya, Syr Darya, Chao Phraya, and Colorado.  In these basins, irrigation can no longer be expanded.  Growing cities and industries are consuming more and more water too, and they can produce more money with a gallon of water than a farmer can.  The proverbial wisdom says that water flows uphill toward money.

Meanwhile, the catastrophic population explosion continues, and another two or three billion are expected to come to dinner in 2050.  How will we feed them?  Oceanic fisheries are past peak and declining.  Ranching isn’t able to dramatically expand, neither is rain-fed agriculture.  The Green Revolution is over, and there are no new plant-breeding miracles on the horizon. 

This leaves irrigated agriculture holding the bag, and it looks like a wobbly bloody boxer after 18 rounds in the ring with a hard-punching opponent.  Conflicts over water are on the rise.  Numerous aquifers are being depleted.  Major rivers are being pumped dry.  Salinization continues to destroy more cropland.  Climate change could introduce serious additional problems, because our systems are designed to function in the current climate scenario.

The ideal sites for dams are already taken, and an anti-dam movement is growing.  Existing dam reservoirs are continuously accumulating silt.  On average, the capacity of the world’s reservoirs is diminishing by one percent annually.  For this reason, all dams have an expiration date, because removing the silt is very expensive.  “Like salinization and groundwater depletion, the silting up of reservoirs is a quiet, creeping threat that is building to massive proportions.”

Governments are running low on funds for the costly maintenance of water systems, and they are losing interest in building costly new water systems.  Many farmers do not feel obligated to obey the water use rules (if any), and enforcement of these rules is minimal.  Few farmers can afford to install state-of-the-art irrigation technology.  Cheap subsidized water discourages farmers from investing in efficiency improvements.  Few if any farmers could afford to pay the full cost for their water.  Few are interested in investing big money today to avert a problem that may not become serious until 20 or 30 years from now, especially if they don’t own the land, or have big money.

Despite all of these challenges, the strategic global goal is to double the productivity of irrigated lands.  In theory, Postel believes that this is possible.  In reality, important changes are being made far too slowly.  The subtitle of this book is “Can the Irrigation Miracle Last?”  From what Postel tells us, I wouldn’t bet on it.  Was the invention of irrigation really a “miracle?”  It unleashed major changes in history, and it’s not hard to argue that the costs far exceeded the benefits. 

On the last two pages, Postel mentions population.  Population growth tends to magnify all problems, while solving none.  Therefore, major efforts to further increase food production are not perfumed with the intoxicating aroma of wisdom.  As long as we’re dreaming for miracles, it would be far more intelligent to sharply reduce population, and thereby diminish many problems simultaneously.  But the current generation seems to be firmly against this — breed now, pay later.

Postel, Sandra, Pillar of Sand — Can the Irrigation Miracle Last?, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1999.