Manifest California

this is a fascinating bit of history, relevant everywhere but especially to my friends in California. I'm not trying to point out California as a negative example, but share more on an issue that has transfixed me since moving out west. I think many of us have no idea just how much we've altered the natural environment, to squeeze out as much water as possible to support civilization in places where it probably shouldn't belong and might not be able to last.  

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"Everyone knows there is a desert somewhere in California, but many people believe it is off in some remote corner of the state - the Mojave Desert, Palm Springs, the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. But inhabited California, most of it, is, by strict definition, a semidesert. Los Angeles is drier than Beirut; Sacramento is as dry as the Sahel; San Francisco is just slightly rainier than Chihuahua. About 65 percent of the state receives under twenty inches of precipitation a year. California, which fools visitors into believing it is "lush," is a beautiful fraud.

Actually, San Francisco looks green all year long, if one ignores the rain-starved hills that lie disturbingly beyond its emerald-and-white summer splendor, but this is the second part of of the fraud, the part perpetrated by man. There was not a single tree growing in San Francisco when the first Spanish arrived; it was too dry and windy. Today, Golden Gate Park looks as if Virginia had mated with Borneo, thanks to water brought nearly two hundred miles by tunnel. 

The whole state thrives, even survives, by moving water from where it is, and presumably isn't needed, to where it isn't, and presumably is needed. No other state has done as much to fructify its deserts, make over its flora and fauna, and rearrange the hydrology God gave it. No other place has put as many people where they probably have no business being. There is no place like it anywhere on earth. Thirty-one million people (more than the population of Canada), an economy richer than all but seven nations' in the world, one third of the table food grown in the United States - and none of it remotely conceivable withing the preexisting natural order."

- Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 1993

Photo credit: http://ow.ly/mfbWY