Excerpt from NYTimes.com, June 12, 2019
…when the inevitable multiyear droughts set in, farmers must rely on excessive groundwater pumping to irrigate those endlessly expanding acres of fruit and nut trees, endangering the vast underground aquifer that is arguably the state’s most valuable natural resource.
Given California’s reputation for legislative overkill, it’s astonishing that groundwater pumping has been absolutely unregulated in the state for its entire history. (A new law was recently passed, but farmers have up to 20 years to comply.) With no restrictions in place, landowners have been free to sink as many wells on their property as they like, drilling ever deeper as the water table falls and the shallower wells dry up. In the troubled Westlands Water District, for instance, aggressive pumping during the recent drought depleted the aquifer at a rate of 660,000 acre-feet per year — about as much water as a city of 6.6 million people would use annually.
Maybe the most alarming consequence of this kind of unrestrained pumping is the dramatic subsidence of the land that can occur as the aquifer recedes. In one large area of the Central Valley near a place called Red Top, the earth is sinking nearly a foot per year, buckling infrastructure and rearranging the local topography virtually overnight. And this is not a temporary phenomenon. Once the soil is compressed, even floods on a biblical scale won’t bring it back to its former state. No one knows what this kind of rapid alteration of the landscape will mean over the long term. “As far as impacts go,” one United States Geological Survey employee observes, “we’re in uncharted territory.”
Fortunately, not all of the news in “The Dreamt Land” is so bleak. The chronicle of California agriculture has always been mixed — half environmental nightmare, half remarkable success story — and Arax gives himself enough room to report on the positives as well, profiling a few small growers who have produced marvels (a grape that tastes like cotton candy!) while remaining sensitive to the land and water resources under their stewardship. Granted, there are times when “The Dreamt Land” feels overstuffed and chaotically organized, as if Arax decided to include every relevant newspaper feature he’s ever proposed to an editor. But I suspect that few other journalists could have written a book as personal and authoritative.
Having lived in the Central Valley for most of his life, Arax knows the people and their problems, and he’s spent decades writing about them for The Los Angeles Times and other publications. And as the son and grandson of local farmers (his grandfather Aram grew raisins near Fresno after emigrating from Armenia in 1920), he seems to have a fundamental sympathy for those who till the soil. Maybe that’s why he saves his harshest scorn for the titans of Big Agriculture who, without ever getting their own hands dirty, try to monopolize California’s water, maximizing their own yields while robbing from their less powerful neighbors. As Arax makes plain in this important book, it’s been the same story in California for almost two centuries now: When it comes to water, “the resource is finite. The greed isn’t.”
Gary Krist is the author, most recently, of “The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles.”
