The New York Times
FRESNO,
Calif. — EVERY Saturday in late December and January, as reports of
brutal temperatures and historic snowfalls streamed in from family in
Vermont, New York and even southern Louisiana, we made weekly
pilgrimages to our local beer garden to enjoy craft brews and
unseasonably warm afternoons.
Normal
winters here in Fresno, in the heart of California’s Central Valley,
bring average highs in the 50s, steady periods of rain and drizzle, and
the dense, bone-chilling Tule fog that can blanket the valley for days
and even weeks on end.
But
not this year. Instead, early 2014 gave us cloudless skies and midday
temperatures in the 70s. By the end of January, it seemed like April,
with spring trees in full bloom.
We
fretted over the anomalous weather, to be sure. A high-pressure system
parked off the Alaskan coast had produced not just our high temperatures
but also soaring levels of fine particulate matter in the air and more
than 50 rainless days, worsening a
three-year drought,
the most severe in half a millennium. If it’s this bad in January, we
wondered, what’s it going to be like in July? But then we’d return to
the beer taps, or meander over to peruse food truck menus.
Life
in the Central Valley revolves around two intricately related concerns:
the quality of the air and the quantity of the water. Although Fresno
is the state’s fifth-largest city, it is really just a sprawling farm
town in the middle of the nation’s most productive agricultural region,
often called “America’s fruit basket.” Surrounded by mountains, which
trap the pollution created by a surging population, interstate
transportation and tens of thousands of farms, the valley has noxious
air, even on good days.
The
political atmosphere surrounding crop irrigation is equally toxic. Some
farms in the western Valley — crippled by cuts in water allocations,
salt buildup in the soil and depleted aquifers — now resemble the dust
bowl that drove so many Tom Joads here in the 1930s. Farmers line
highways with signs insisting that “food grows where water flows,” while
environmentalists counter that the agriculture industry consumes 75
percent of the water transported by California’s byzantine water system.
Locals
assess the situation in numbers and colors. Meteorologists compile and
trade rainfall statistics with all the regularity and precision of
batting averages, but without any of the fun. The air quality index —
ranging from a “healthy” green to a “hazardous” maroon — occupies an
ominous presence in the day, not unlike the color-coded terrorism alert
scale adopted after 9/11.
Experts
offer dire warnings. The current drought has already eclipsed previous
water crises, like the one in 1977, which a meteorologist friend,
translating into language we understand as historians, likened to the
“Great Depression” of droughts. Most Californians depend on the Sierra
Nevada for their water supply, but the
snowpack
there was just 15 percent of normal in early February. And the dry
conditions are likely to make the polluted air in the Central Valley —
which contributes to high rates of asthma and the spread of
Valley Fever, a potentially fatal airborne fungus — even worse.
The current crisis raises the obvious question: How long can we continue to grow a third of the nation’s fruit and vegetables?
Tom Willey — an
organic farmer
from nearby Madera with the genial manner and snowy beard of a Golden
State Santa Claus — certainly wonders. For six and a half years, he and
his wife, Denesse, have provided most of our family’s fresh produce
through their community-supported agriculture program. The Willeys
taught us to appreciate kohlrabi and even turned our 5-year-old into a
fan of brussels sprouts, which she likes to eat straight from the farm
box.
Twenty
years ago, the water table under the Willeys’ farm measured 120 feet.
But a well test in late January revealed that it is now 60 feet lower.
Half of that decline, Tom estimates, has occurred in the last two years.
The
Willeys have done what they can to cope. They’ve cut back on less
profitable crops, and they are already dedicated practitioners of
sustainable agriculture. But many farmers aren’t, and the future is
worrisome. Pumping from aquifers is so intense that the ground in parts
of the valley is sinking about a foot a year. Once aquifers compress,
they can never fill with water again. It’s no surprise Tom Willey wakes
every morning with a lump in his throat. When we ask which farmers will
survive the summer, he responds quite simply: those who dig the deepest
and pump the hardest.
Yet
for all the doom around us, here in Fresno itself it is hard to find
evidence that the drought is changing the behavior of city dwellers.
Locals have made a few concessions, though mainly to mitigate the
effects of the bad air. The two of us, for instance, have skipped
afternoon jogs to ease the strain on our lungs.
And
while religious communities around the valley organized a day of prayer
and fasting, entreating God to send rain, concrete efforts to solve the
water problem are less apparent. Gov. Jerry Brown has called on all
Californians to reduce their water use by 20 percent, but residential
lawns, seeded each year with winter ryegrass, continue to glow in
brilliant, bright-green hues, kept alive by sprinkler systems that are
activated in the dark of night.
Fresnans
have long resisted water-saving measures, clinging tenaciously to a
flat rate, all-you-can-use system. Nudged by state and federal
officials, Fresno began outfitting new homes with water meters in the
early 1990s, but voters passed a ballot initiative prohibiting the city
from actually reading them. It took two decades for all area homes to
acquire meters and for the city to start monitoring the units. To its
credit, Fresno has a watering schedule, limiting when residents can
water their lawns. But enforcement, to put it charitably, is lax.
Our
behavior here in the valley feels untenable and self-destructive, and
for much of it we are to blame. But we also find support among an
enthusiastic group of enablers: tens of millions of American shoppers
who devour the lettuce and raisins, carrots and tomatoes, almonds and
pistachios grown in our fields.
Rain
showers moved in Thursday morning, for the third time in a week. The
faithful will see signs of divine intervention, but it seems clear we
need to stage one of our own. These storms brought less than two inches
of rain — merely a drop in our tired, leaky bucket.
Blain Roberts, the author of the forthcoming book “Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South,” and
Ethan J. Kytle,
the author of the forthcoming book “Romantic Reformers and the
Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era,” are associate professors of
history at California State University, Fresno.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 10, 2014, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: The Dust Bowl Returns.
