Climate change reality is roaring in like a lion. A storm surge, a hurricane, a flood and a heatwave come and go… sometimes with unfathomable severity. But it’s the permanent changes, coastal land lost forever, wildfires decimating homes and forests, glacier and ice flows that melt into oceans and seas and massive tracts of once productive agricultural lands drying up and blowing away. We’ve watch sustained drought push desperate Sunni farmers from their traditional family farms in Syria and Iraq, and after their pleas to Shiite governments for life-sustaining aid fell on deaf ears, how a brutal ISIS regime used that rejection to ply their hateful Sunni fundamentalism into out-and-out war.
But lest we believe that such dire and permanent ecological disasters are just simply choking distant farmers from their livelihoods, look again at the United States itself. Particularly at what is/was once of the richest producer of food stuffs in the country, California’s San Joaquin/Central Valleys. As such a monolithically huge metric of our impending loss of vital farmland, it cannot be simply a mere canary in a coal mine warning. It is at least a giant ostrich! With its head buried in the sand!
Louis Sahagún, writing for the April 26th Los Angeles Times, tells us that what used to be a litany of temporary and cyclical patterns of drought just might become water impaired permanence: “Renowned for its bounty of dairies, row crops, grapes, almonds, pistachios and fruit trees, this agricultural heartland is still reeling from the effects of the last punishing drought, which left the region geologically depressed and mentally traumatized.
“Now, as the valley braces for another dry spell of undetermined duration, some are openly questioning the future of farming here, even as legislative representatives call on Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a drought emergency. Many small, predominantly Latino communities also face the risk of having their wells run dry.
“Drought is nothing new to California or the West, and generations of San Joaquin Valley farmers have endured many dry years over the last century. Often, they have done so by drilling more wells… However, some growers say they are now facing a convergence of forces that is all but insurmountable — a seemingly endless loop of hot, dry weather, new environmental protections and cutbacks in water allotments…
“Most recently, state and federal allocations of surface water were slashed to a trickle due to less snowpack in the Sierra Nevada — a move expected to force some growers to search underground for additional sources of water to keep their farms from ruin… Even more frustrating, growers say, is a complex law passed in 2014 — during the last drought — that requires all groundwater taken from wells to match the amount of water returned to aquifers by 2040. Experts say meeting its requirements will mean taking about 1 million acres of farmland out of production statewide…
“In recent weeks, Central Valley Republicans in particular have urged Newsom to declare a statewide drought emergency, which would allow state regulators to relax water quality and environmental standards that limit deliveries from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, California’s water hub. They were enraged recently when Newsom declared drought emergencies in Sonoma and Mendocino counties only.
“Much of Tulare County sits atop groundwater basins that have helped farmers compensate when there was little or no available surface water. But unlimited pumping during the historic drought of 2012-16, and the 2007-09 drought before that, has set off a cascade of events that has proved disastrous.
“Large farms drilled to depths of more than 1,000 feet to sustain thirsty citrus orchards and almond and pistachio groves that had drawn hedge funds and big corporations into the business… As farmers punched more wells into the earth, the groundwater table plummeted, drying up old wells and causing the land to sink up to 2 feet a year in some places, damaging infrastructure. Also, as groundwater levels fell, pesticides and nitrates from fertilizer and animal waste leached into the private groundwater supplies of impoverished farmworker communities in such locations as Tooleville, East Orosi and East Porterville in Tulare County and Tombstone Territory in Fresno County.
“These and other rural burgs got international attention after wells that had served them for more than half a century went dry or became polluted. Unincorporated areas of Tulare County were hit particularly hard… As a result, families were forced to forgo showers and dump a bucket of water into toilets to flush.” Extreme hardships.
Agricultural viability is at stake. Notwithstanding the power of the Silicon Valley, San Francisco/the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Diego, most of California remains vast and seemingly endless tracts of farmland. And mirroring a toxic game of whack-a-mole, catering to any one water-craving constituency of necessity slams the water needs of another. Do cities with masses of people win at the expense of food-producing farmers? Or do the farmers win? Given the extremes of water impairment, resources exhausted and unlikely to be replenished as natural cycles are ending, is a workable balance even possible? Welcome to “in your backyard” climate change. Will America become a net food importer?
I’m Peter Dekom, and unless some radical changes in climate policy are effected immediately, it seem that we will all be losers… in a very way.
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