The California Drought ---- What Should Be Done

A gentleman in my town has publicly proposed “the perfect solution to California’s drought.” It is the idea that all 37 million of us shall pray to god for drought relief. I would say this is an absurd idea, but the gentleman is a religious leader. So since he is invested in the enormous “god industry” that somehow manages to prevail into the 21^st Century, I can’t really blame him.

What we need to realize --- not even all 37 million of us --- is that the natural environment of California was never likely to support 37 million people anyway. Indeed, in pre-mission times, the landmass that we call California supported around 330,000 people quite nicely. But ever since statehood, landowners have sought to “develop” their land --- a sneaky way of talking about profiting from your land holdings --- by encouraging Easterners to emigrate and buy “developed property.” One sections off a parcel of land, builds a house on it, and promises access to water, sewage, and public education, as well as police and fire protection. It’s interesting how the community as a whole turns out to be responsible for providing the water, education, and protection, while the landowner rolls off with the profits. Anyway, that’s been the story of California for a long time now, and we are just about at the breaking point.

As Wallace Stegner and other authors of the West have eloquently announced, the West is inherently dry compared to the humid East so it takes very much more land to support an individual out here. (Read, for example, Wallace Stegner’s “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian” or the recent book by David Gessner, “All the Wild that Remains”). What can we do? Well, we should stop acting as though access to water is free for the taking. People who want to profit from land development should be required to develop appropriate water resources. That, I must say, would stop development in its tracks --- not something that the “city fathers/mothers” are likely to be enthusiastic about, since they make much of their money off of development too.

What Californians can hope for, right now, is that an El Nino condition will bring lots of rain and snowpack to California this fall and winter. We can hope that we refill our reservoirs over the next couple of years. But then, the biggest thing that 37 million Californians can do is conserve water even when the reservoirs are full. The history of our state is to worry about water when we don’t have it and then use it well beyond need when we do have it. Also, when we do have it, we tend to forget everything and stop building improvements to our conservation infrastructure. In the LA area, for instance, enormous amounts of rain water just runs out into the ocean. In drought times, we wonder why we don’t trap this water, but when the good times come again, we forget about the whole matter.

In my observation, people tend to thank god whenever something good and unexpected happens to them. Baseball players thank god when they make a hit and get to base successfully. Tornado victims thank god for saving their homes and their lives. What I don’t tend to see people doing in wondering why god let them strike out or let the outfielder catch a fly ball. Nor do I see tornado victims asking why god killed the other people and destroyed their homes and businesses. It seems we take this “omnibenevolence” idea very seriously. But when it comes to droughts and disasters, we either say “god acts in mysterious ways” or just ignore the question. Face it, the big guy just isn’t responsible for everything that goes on. We need to do our part --- and that doesn’t mean just begging him (or her).