California's water woes threaten food supply

[Guest guest]

California's Water Woes Threaten the Entire Country's Food Supply

By Scott Thill, AlterNet

Posted on June 6, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/story/140487/

 

" I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen.

We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California. I

don't actually see how they can keep their cities going, " Steven Chu told the

Los Angeles Times in February, shortly after taking office in January. " I'm

hoping that the American people will wake up, " he added, just in case there was

any confusion about the gravity of the situation.

That kind of apocalyptic foresight has made Chu a breath of fresh, dystopian

air. For eight nearly insufferable years, the American public has had no

shortage of political tools telling it everything is going to be all right, that

the United States is the greatest country in the world, that reports of our

impending environmental devastation have been greatly exaggerated, and so on. By

contrast, Steven Chu is a Cassandra on a mission from reality. But few,

especially in the state he singled out, feel like buying what he is selling.

" Dr. Chu is not a climate scientist, " argued Jim Metropulos, senior advocate at

Sierra Club's California chapter, echoing the same conditional given in the Los

Angeles Times article in which Chu was quoted. " Obviously, he's versed on it,

but he's taking an apocalyptic view. I think it's not sustainable in its current

form. We rely on imported water to grow high-value crops, but maybe the

agriculture we have today may not be the agriculture we have decades from now. "

That's a big maybe.

Here are some not-so-fun facts: California's agricultural sector grows

approximately one-third of the nation's food supply and is nourished by diverted

rivers and streams filled yearly by runoff from its prodigious Sierra Nevada

snowpack, as well as groundwater pumping and other less-reliable methods. That

snowpack -- which once sparked the first, but not the last, water war that

helped transform a semi-arid Los Angeles into an unsustainable oasis less

populous than only New York City -- is disappearing fast. Hence Chu's worrisome

prediction.

To make matters worse, a crushing drought, now well into its third year, has

made simply everything problematic. In California's central valley, home to a

majority of the state's agricultural output, farmers are leaving hundreds of

thousands of acres fallow, and the resultant economic depression is having a

domino effect that could cost California $1 billion to start and is causing

residents of a one-time food powerhouse to go hungry.

In April, a series of spring showers and storms upped the snowpack to 80 percent

of normal. At the beginning of May, it stumbled to 66 percent, compared to 72

percent the year before. Complicating that are recent federal directives

mandating reductions of water deliveries to California farmers and urban users

by 5 to 7 percent in hopes of preserving the Pacific Coast's salmon fishery,

which is hovering, like the state's snowpack, on the brink of extinction.

" This federal biological opinion puts fish above the needs of millions of

Californians, " Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger self-righteously fumed after the

federal directive came down in June. His sound and fury is unjustified, but

instructive.

" Sooner or later California is going to change how it uses water, " explained

Environmental Defense Fund officials Cynthia Koehler and Laura Harnish in the

Huffington Post. " We can do it before we lose our fish, or after. "

But these are short-term issues clouding, pardon the pun, an inevitably larger

one. According to recent climate science, California is never going to get its

regularly scheduled snowpack back. Which means that even well-intentioned

conservation outreach programs and bad-faith battles over agricultural

irrigation are missing the point.

Like other geographies once sustained by an uninterrupted supply of water,

California is going dry. And when it dries up, so does its cities, its people

and its future. Simply put, global warming, human-induced and otherwise, has

significantly broadened the range of the tropical belt by a rate of 70

kilometers per decade. Southern California, like the Sahara Desert and Sahel

savanna, is already subtropical in the summer. But with climate crisis expanding

its reach, that subtropical heat could claim not just Northern California's

snowpack, but even part of Washington's and Utah's bounties. . . .

 

The way California is currently wasting water -- on elaborate lawns in Beverly

Hills, on cow death-camps in the San Joaquin Valley, on whatever -- it either

doesn't know where its water comes from or simply doesn't care.

So any significant conservation initiative is going to be a challenge to the

status quo, to say nothing of lifestyle. And when the water vapor truly hits the

fan in 2100 or 2050, or even sooner, given the cross-your-fingers modeling of

not just the DWR but also the IPCC, what alternatives will there be other than

to pack up and leave?

Metropolous and Andrew and other well-intentioned enviros might balk, but I'll

stick with the apocalyptic rants of a truth-telling Ph.D. nominated by Barack

Obama to become the nation's chief brainiac on all things energy, thanks. And

you should, too.

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm. His writing has appeared on Salon,

XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140487/