The Verdugo Wash is a small flood control channel that takes rainwater from the foothills above Glendale to the L.A. River, and 30 miles out to the Pacific Ocean.

When you visit the wash, as I recently did, you can see the massive chasm between rhetoric and reality in California water.

Since 2017, the Crescenta Valley Water District has been pursuing the sort of project that anyone who is anyone in California water says they want.

Crescenta Valley, which serves 35,000 people in mostly unincorporated neighborhoods between Glendale and La Cañada-Flintridge, wants to capture ocean-bound rainwater from the Verdugo Wash and use it to recharge local groundwater supplies. Verdugo Wash doesn’t carry a lot of water, but capturing it would provide one-sixth of the total water supply for the small district.

Stormwater capture and groundwater recharge are two pillars of the new State Water Plan, released with great fanfare this spring by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The California Department of Water Resources has championed local projects like Crescenta Valley’s through its “Go Golden” initiative. And Los Angeles County, where you’ll find Verdugo Wash, has a new Water Plan that emphasizes local collaborations on “sustainable water resources.”

The state, county, and neighboring local governments have been supporters and collaborators in the Verdugo Wash project.

Unfortunately, there’s one holdout: the city of Los Angeles.

Yes, L.A. talks big about launching its own stormwater capture projects, and has set a goal of achieving “zero wasted water” by 2050, as part of its own “Green New Deal.”

But, in the Verdugo Wash case, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power—and our ancient system of water rights—stands in the way.

LADWP maintains, citing a mid-1970s court decision, that all rain that runs into the L.A. River belongs to L.A., including the stormwater that ends up in Verdugo Wash.

LADWP could let Crescenta Valley Water District capture some of that water and have its project. LADWP itself lets it run out to sea.

But instead of doing the right thing—and backing up rhetoric with action—LADWP is blocking the small project, because it fears the precedent of giving up any rainwater. In the process, LADWP repeats its notorious history of appropriating the water of other places and people.

Maintaining that it owns the Verdugo Wash water, LADWP insists that Crescenta Valley, a smaller agency with limited resources, must replace any stormwater it captures by purchasing water for LADWP from other sources. In email correspondence with the Crescenta Valley Weekly newspaper, DWP suggested that Crescenta Valley buy the water from the Metropolitan Water District, which supplements the supplies of water agencies around Southern California.

That means Crescenta Valley would effectively be taking water from the Colorado River, which is drying up under pressure from Western states, to replace water it merely seeks to recycle from its own Verdugo Wash.

This isn’t the only way that LADWP doesn’t live up to its words. LADWP’s promised “self-sufficiency” has it seeking to quadruple the amount of water it draws from the Owens Valley in the Eastern Sierras. That move has drawn protests from environmentalists across the state.

“It’s the there-it-is-take-it mentality,” says the Crescenta Valley Water District staffer Patrick Atwater. That’s a reference to the famously short speech given by William Mulholland, the civil engineer behind L.A.’s water infrastructure, at the 1913 opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

Atwater, whom I’ve known for years because of his work in improving California water data, met me at a section of Verdugo Wash where much of the infrastructure would be built, at Crescenta Valley Community Regional Park, to discuss the $3.3 million project.

Crescenta Valley wants to capture more stormwater and restore its groundwater supply, which had been reduced by droughts. The project is an efficient, environmental way to do both.

The project would set up two flexible barriers on the wash, one near the dog park and the other near a baseball field. The dams could be inflated when it’s raining to capture some of the flow (the rest would still go to the river and the ocean).

Much of the cost of the project would come from building new pipe to take the captured stormwater to the district’s groundwater production wells about a mile away. Every gallon of water collected would be a gallon of water that didn’t have to come from the Colorado River or another stressed water source. Capturing stormwater is cheaper than buying imported water, which is becoming more expensive. Crescenta Valley spends approximately $3 million on imported water a year; next year’s budget devotes $3.8 million to imports.

“It’s obvious that this is what the future of water should look like,” says James Lee, general manager of Crescenta Valley Water District. “It’s what everyone is telling us to do.”

Lee says the technology is not novel. If it wasn’t being blocked by L.A. water rights, permitting should happen quickly. But the project is unlikely to be built until water policy in Los Angeles, and in California, catches up with reality.

The post A Water Rights Storm Is Brewing in the Foothills Above Glendale appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The study of cannabis is a personal one for me. Outdoor cannabis production in the rural Western U.S. has its roots in back-to-the-land movements of the 1960s. That’s when counterculture groups began growing cannabis surreptitiously as a source of income, a political statement, and a spiritual practice. I grew up in rural Southern Oregon, the child of hippies from that era. The communities where we lived were, at least in part, founded on and funded by cannabis.

In 2015, the year Oregon legalized recreational cannabis, I was home applying to graduate school. I was surprised to see that legalization was already starting to transform the landscapes I had grown up in—both ecologically and socially. I had friends who were growers, and had seized legalization as an opportunity to legitimize their businesses. But I had other friends who were raising alarms about the emerging industry’s potential environmental harms—from the high carbon footprint of indoor warehouses, to the water use for outdoor farms, to the poisons used on illegal public land grows. I decided to focus my dissertation research on understanding these developing conflicts, using tools from wildlife biology, landscape ecology, social sciences, and other disciplines to try to answer a wide array of questions about the cannabis industry. I wanted to understand: Where is cannabis production located, and why? What are cannabis farming’s impacts on a landscape? And finally, how does wildlife respond to active cannabis farms?

Because cannabis is still federally illegal, there is very little research on the crop or its dynamics. I realized I would have to start from scratch. To my surprise, I found that though these issues feel unique to cannabis, in reality, they run parallel to rural land use issues that predate its legalization. This means that addressing the concerns regarding rural cannabis production will provide a roadmap for resolving many entrenched issues relevant across the Western U.S.

One thing this means, of course, is thinking about water. Estimates of cannabis farms’ water use have varied greatly, and researchers are working to generate better calculations. But the amount of water that cannabis farms use isn’t the only issue at stake: geography, storage, and timing are also important. My research showed that cannabis hotspots are often located near rivers. This proximity could be a concern if farmers are drawing water from the stream or a shallow well, which could deplete or reduce the river’s water. Other studies from the Cannabis Research Center at UC Berkeley, one of my primary collaborators, have indicated that many farmers lack enough water storage capacity to be able to draw up and store water during the winter, to avoid straining rivers during the summer.

These issues mirror general worries that existing Western water policies are not prepared to handle the worsening water shortages associated with climate change. Current regulations don’t encourage farmers—whatever their crops—or other landowners to practice conservation or balance their water needs with those of rivers and fish. But perhaps concerns over cannabis, coupled with recent historic droughts, will be enough to finally update water policies for all.

Another Western issue that cannabis policy can help address is land use planning. In my research, I found that cannabis farming on private lands in Southern Oregon had a small overall footprint but one that had expanded rapidly. In the years following legalization, cannabis plots were generally clustered on larger parcels in areas that were not typically zoned for agriculture. This brought up questions about planning and zoning: Where should cannabis be located? Are current zoning codes effective for cannabis production? How would restrictions affect existing farms and equitable access to land?

Like water rights concerns, these planning challenges are not unique to cannabis production. Across the West, outdated land use codes and opaque planning processes frequently generate conflict between land users, reflective of disagreements about how to allocate land for conservation, recreation, development, and production. The increase of large-scale, area-based conservation initiatives, like California’s “30 x 30 plan,” are likely to intensify these debates in the coming years. If counties develop transparent and equitable planning processes for cannabis that integrate feedback from growers, neighbors, researchers, and regulators, they might be able to decrease such conflicts, and facilitate better community dialogue across all types of land use.

Finally, the rural location of many cannabis hotspots means that cannabis farms are often near wildlife habitats and in proximity to certain sensitive species such as Coho salmon and Pacific fishers. My research also suggested that some species can coexist with cannabis farming, while it deters others from the area. This raises concerns that cannabis development could cut wildlife off from needed resources, or disrupt local animal interactions and food webs. Conflict is also a concern: Many of the species that can coexist with cannabis, such as ground squirrels, can be crop pests that farmers may feel the need to kill.

Yet again, these concerns are not unique to cannabis—across California, new housing developments are encroaching on wilderness areas, and the concern about killing “pest” animals appears with almost any crop. Cannabis provides an opportunity to try to build sustainable farming into policy incentives, and to experiment with supporting farmers in ways that enable them to practice low-impact agriculture.

The social and ecological dynamics of cannabis production are a microcosm of questions of rural livelihoods and sustainability in the Western U.S. Other industries, such as timber, ranching, and industrial crops, like alfalfa, also need reform. But because the legal cannabis industry is still new, it offers an opportunity to learn to structure things differently.

There is still potential and political will for researchers, policymakers, and communities to come together to plan land use priorities, update water policies, guide development goals, inform sustainable best management practices, plan for climate disasters, and balance rural livelihoods.

This is hard work. But if we can figure out a way to collaborate on cannabis regulations, we will have a blueprint for solving the largest land use conflicts currently facing the Western U.S.

The post Could Cannabis Help the American West Solve Its Thorniest Environmental Issues? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico on September 18, 2022, the U.S. colony had still not fully recovered from Hurricanes Irma and Maria, in 2017. Collapsed bridges had not been rebuilt, houses still lacked roofs, and most recovery funds had not been distributed.

Fiona’s rains only added to the woes, causing house collapses on the interior part of the island, devastating mudslides, and a widespread power outage that lasted for weeks. There was no drinking water: The Puerto Rico Aqueducts and Sewers Authority failed to acquire power generators before the storm hit, and drinking water or sewage systems run mainly on electricity. Simple tasks such as getting gas for the generator (for those who had one) or obtaining drinking water could take a whole day—and become life-and-death situations for people with chronic illnesses who needed ventilators or refrigerated insulin.

The three hurricanes severely impacted the island’s wellbeing. But their effects aren’t simply the result of intense storms. These “natural disasters” are political, stemming from a long colonial history culminating in years of austerity imposed by the U.S. With federal and local government support at a standstill, people in the colony are pulling together to make things better. Mutual aid groups and rural water systems have driven recovery pathways across the island, creating a new model for effective disaster recovery.

Puerto Rico’s history is one of exploitation. The island became a Spanish possession in the 1500s, with a colonial governance built on the genocide of Indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, and the mistreatment of land and animals to develop the coffee, tobacco, and sugar industries.

After the U.S. took control of the island in 1898, tax incentives for U.S. corporations have come and gone, driving increases in poverty, unemployment and emigration. Starting in the 1950s, Operation Bootstrap allowed companies to establish themselves on the island without paying Puerto Rican taxes; then, in 2006, the federal government swung in the other direction, repealing a corporate tax exemption on income originating from U.S. territories. Companies left the island, and the economy plummeted. Currently, 45% of Puerto Rico’s population lives below the poverty line, and its debt is estimated to be more than $70 billion—a debt that has never been audited and was pushed by Wall Street interests.

The U.S. government’s response—decreasing Puerto Rico’s debt through austerity measures—has made the island ever more vulnerable in the face of disaster. Under President Obama, the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico was created to develop a deal for debt repayment between Puerto Rico and its creditors. However, the Board knew that paying back the debt would be disastrous for the island. Drastic cuts to the island’s education and health systems, including emergency medical technicians, meant that when Hurricane María hit the island, local agencies had minimal capacity to respond. Another measure, a new public-private partnership for the electric grid, has raised energy costs for consumers and caused regular power outages that create daily disruptions in education, water delivery, and health services. In disaster situations, these become catastrophic.

The U.S. and Puerto Rican governments’ disaster recovery efforts have fallen short for Puerto Ricans. Instead, it is community strategies that have enabled life on the island to continue. Mutual aid efforts—defined as collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually growing from awareness that top-down systems aren’t working—have picked up the slack, establishing relief actions for the island such as providing water, food, shelter, and medicine in remote, mountainous regions.

One of the most important of these solidarity efforts are community aqueducts, which provide drinking water infrastructure to areas that the government’s water utility does not serve. The aqueducts usually consist of a water pump or gravity-driven channel that moves water from wells or small rivers to a central water reservoir. The water is then treated by a chlorine disinfection process, and distributed through pipes to houses, schools, churches, and public pick-up stations.

There are 241 of these aqueducts in Puerto Rico, and they are managed largely by the community residents who they serve. Most systems are operated by neighbors that take care of everything from initial installation to day-to-day oversight. (Aqueducts with greater financial resources tend to hire external operators.) Some members oversee physical components, including daily operations and pipe and plume repairs; others take charge of organizational duties, like organizing and running their assemblies and accounting. The aqueduct organizations can take many forms. Many have one person in charge, others have an informal board of trustees, and a few have 501(c)(3) status and a well-defined structure with positions such as president and chief operator.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, community aqueducts were often the only means communities had to access potable water. Having clean water allowed Puerto Ricans to recover some sort of normality, allowing them to clean, do laundry, and flush toilets. In addition, having drinking water saved residents hours that would otherwise be invested in buying or collecting it from public pickup stations.

The network created by the aqueducts also served a more expansive mutual aid role, becoming a conduit for collecting essential goods from foundations and NGOs and redistributing them to residents in need. Members drew on the aqueducts’ networks to facilitate resource-sharing. For example, a member of one community aqueduct in Añasco shared with me that because one person in the community had an excavator available to loan to the post-María cleanup effort, aqueduct managers were able to quickly remove debris and get their system back up and running.

While community aqueducts have had success, they are not immune to the political and economic factors that constrain life in Puerto Rico. They deal with high costs for water tests and privatized energy, and marginalization from local agencies. But they are paving the way for new directions in the recovery and collective organizing. They underscore how collaboration can put even limited resources in motion to tackle emergency needs, in ways that are often more effective than government-sponsored relief efforts.

Mutual aid’s success doesn’t mean that governments should walk away. On the contrary, the U.S. and Puerto Rico should learn from these community strategies how to better respond in times of need. They should support community aqueducts and mutual aid groups, heeding their needs and concerns, and removing bureaucratic hurdles to accessing funds. There is progress: Legislation introduced on the island this year includes community aqueducts on an advisory committee developing drinking water strategies for the island.

As more and more extreme weather events take place across the world, building and maintaining solidarity networks that recognize our mutual interdependence are crucial to a resilient future. Puerto Rico’s mutual aid strategies offer an example to follow as we rethink disaster preparedness.

The post Is Puerto Rico a Global Model for Disaster Recovery? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Sure, the river begins in the Colorado Rockies. But in law and practice, the waterway making headlines is clearly the California River. And the first provision of any deal to save the river should rename it accordingly.

This condition wouldn’t be about Golden State pride. Instead, a name change would more accurately reflect the imperial role California plays not only in the river controversy, but in the movement of water, people and power in the American West.

Right now, the Grand Canyon-sized divide over how to reduce the amount of water drawn from the rapidly diminishing river is being portrayed as a dispute between states, and as a contest between the power of politics and the power of law.

On one side, six states that rely on California-née-Colorado water—Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—have come together to demand cuts in water use that would fall heaviest on California, which receives the largest share of the river’s water.

In response, California water officials have produced a plan that emphasizes how our state’s rights to the water are more senior than those of our Southwest neighbors. Their newly released plan would cut less from California’s take, and more from Arizona and Nevada. In the Wild West of Water, this argument—We stole it first! We stole it fair and square!—is a strong legal position.

But such descriptions of the fight fail to capture the true dynamics of the West. In matters of economy and demography, the six states are California colonies. Which makes this dispute less a fight between Californians and Arizonans, Nevadans, or Coloradans and more a civil war within California, with Californians on both sides of the fight.

To understand this river rift properly, start by seeing California for what it really is: the seat of a regional empire. The state of California, anchored by its major metropolises, is by far the richest and most dynamic area in this half of North America. With nearly 40 million people, California has more residents and a bigger economy than all the other western states of the U.S. put together.

In recent generations, California, like other great empires through history, has grown so much that it has exported people, money, and culture to nearby territories. California’s investment has helped make the intermountain West the nation’s fastest-growing region.

Many of the greater West are native Californians, or immigrants who came through the Golden State. Nevada is the most Californian state, with nearly as many California natives (20 percent) as Nevada natives (25 percent), and more than 90 percent of its population living within 50 miles of the California border. But Californians have also provided sizable percentages of new residents to Utah, Colorado, and especially Arizona, where one out of every 10 residents was born here.

Moving to the colonies is so common that the Orange County Register business columnist Jonathan Lansner often builds spreadsheets for his readers examining which of these colonies are doing best. (His latest advice? “Move to Colorado.”)

Are these transplanted Californians, and other residents of the California colonies, grateful for our largesse? Of course not. Colonists don’t freely thank their emperors, which is why every so often, the LA Times or New York Times interviews some real estate agent in Phoenix or Las Vegas or Denver, who whines about how the California ex-pats are driving up housing prices.

Oh, you denizens of western deserts and mountains, please forgive us Californians for making you wealthier!

With water, our successful colonization policies create headaches for us. We seized the water of the Western wilderness to build the world’s fourth-largest economy. But that wilderness is now full of former Californians and their communities, which now mercilessly seek a bigger share of the water.

“Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive,” Edward Gibbon observed in his classic History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Alas, the patently clear observation that Californians should keep the water because we do more things with it is not politically palatable in our colonies. Nor should we expect the president, from the tiny corporate tax haven of Delaware, to choose the grand needs of our great empire over the demands of those desert swing states, Arizona and Nevada.

Instead, we have little choice but to behave like wise empires, and do for our colonies what they won’t do for themselves. “The price of greatness,” the imperialist Winston Churchill observed, “is responsibility.”

The Golden State needs a better, future-focused answer to the colonies’ claims, especially with climate change drying up the Colorado and other rivers.

California must develop and finance a water plan not just for itself but for the West. This will mean more water recycling, more capture of stormwater, more desalination, and more water for ourselves and our colonies—so that our empire is no longer so dependent on that workhorse of a river.

All we’d ask in return is that everyone start calling our river by its proper name.

The post The Colorado? Call It the California River appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Dullaghan imagines five phantasmagoric river towns—from a row of houses built along a river full of rowers to a lunar colony to a city comprising the shell of a World Turtle. Of her Sketchbook, Dullaghan tells Zócalo, “I’ve been watching too many nature documentaries lately that all present evidence that humans are overstepping their bounds with nature, so my illustrations nod to the encroachment of humans on the natural world.”

The post River Blues appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What’s harder to connect with is what this all means for people in temperate places. While these dispatches from the far-off polar extremes of the Earth may feel removed from our reality, understanding our relationship to these colossal frozen giants is crucial for our own climate awakening. Learning about glacier vulnerability can guide our fight to stop climate change and illuminate ways to change course before it’s too late.

The glaciers around today are leftovers from Earth’s last ice age, which came to an end 12,000 years ago. During that time, all of Canada and a good swath of the northern U.S. was completely covered in ice. New York, at the peak of the last ice age, had a vertical mile of ice towering above its surface. Today, only a small fraction of that ice remains, with glaciers covering about 10 percent of Earth’s land surface. Still, they remain critical players in stabilizing Earth’s climate and ecosystems. Glaciers are white, which helps reflect solar heat back into space, and they are cold—two attributes that help cool our planet. But their most important gift to us might be fresh water. 98 percent of Earth’s water is in the oceans, salty and unusable for our daily needs. A whopping three-fourths of the miniscule amount of fresh water we have on the planet—the water we really need—is stored in Earth’s 200,000-plus glaciers. What’s more, new fresh-water-containing snow that falls on a glacier, thanks to the glacier’s cool microclimate, can survive all year long, providing continual fresh water downstream, while snow that falls elsewhere melts off in the spring and is quickly consumed by the ecosystem. You can think of a glacier as a water faucet, left slightly open for us, enabling us to enjoy water all year long.

Glacier melt is nothing new. In fact, we go in and out of ice ages every 100,000 years or so, as fluctuations in the shape and tilt of Earth’s orbit around the sun position some portions of the Earth farther from the sun, making them colder, and shift other parts of the Earth closer to the sun, warming them up. Water that is sucked out of the oceans through evaporation is converted into snow, which falls on colder regions of the planet and remains frozen as long as cold conditions persist. If the cold climate remains long enough, you get large glaciers—and an ice age that can last 80,000 years. All of this ice-making takes a lot of water out of the ocean, and sea levels fall as a consequence. Then orbital conditions shift again, the ice melts, and glaciers send colossal amounts of water back into the oceans, flooding coastal lands anew. You can see evidence of this cycle in downtown Miami’s financial district, where exposed coral remnants 15 feet above current ground level provide proof that the area once lay at the bottom of the sea, at a prior historical moment of the Earth when glaciers melted much more than they have now—an ominous announcement to us of what is yet to come.

While this pattern happens naturally every 100,000 years, human activity is accelerating glacier melt so fast that glacier collapse—a process that should have had thousands of years left to play out—is occurring in mere decades, or even faster. Much of the damage we’ve already caused will be irreversible for millennia. Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier recently began to crumble, and pieces of it are now floating in the ocean and rapidly melting. Its demise could trigger further destabilization of surrounding glaciers, and raise ocean levels around the world by several meters.

Today, glaciers cover a surface area of roughly 5.8 million square miles. That’s larger than the United States, at 3.8 million square miles. If all that ice were a single country, “Glacierland,” it would be the Earth’s second largest, behind only Russia at 6.6 million square miles. While the biggest glaciers are mostly found in the polar regions or in Greenland, a significant number remain closer to home, in high-altitude environments like the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada in California, Nepal, the Central Andes, the Tian Shan mountains of Asia, and the European Alps. There are even glaciers in Africa, on the equator, and in the South Pacific. There is still plenty of water left to melt in climate-vulnerable glaciers. And the rapid sea level rise they’re causing could result in massive floods over millions of acres of coastal lands, displacing hundreds of millions of people in the coming century. If all remaining glacier ice melts the sea would rise by about 230 feet!

But sea level rise is not the only impact of melting glaciers. Rapid glacier melt creates a feedback loop. As glaciers warm, the climate impact on Earth is magnified, building on itself, accelerating warming and speeding deglaciation. That’s because when white glaciers melt, Earth’s darker surfaces (on land and in oceans) absorb solar heat instead of reflecting it back to space—think of the effect of wearing a dark shirt on a very hot day, but on a planetary scale. This, in turn, makes the glaciers melt even more, and the Earth warm even faster.

Paradoxically, the pace that glaciers are melting at is also reducing our global supply of fresh water. As glaciers shrink, the dependable fresh water they provide for ecosystems, for farming, for industry, and for home use dwindles, too. Smaller glaciers mean there is less ice to melt each year. Melting glaciers, especially those perched on mountains, also pose another kind of danger when they lose their physical integrity. Ice structures weaken when they warm, fracturing and collapsing and rushing down mountainsides, carrying with them rocks and debris that can take out everything in their path. I call these “glacier tsunamis,” and they are becoming more prevalent in places like the Himalayas and the Central Andes, where thousands of people have died in massive land and ice slides in recent years.

Melting glaciers create havoc with the weather, too. Have you ever noticed that most of Europe is at the same latitude as Canada, and yet is not nearly as cold in the winter? It’s because currents in the ocean and the atmosphere move warm water and air from Earth’s equatorial regions through the Arctic and Antarctic, where the air and water cool off before returning to the equator (like an oceanic and atmospheric conveyor belt/AC system). The ocean has a natural churning and circulation effect that is in perfect balance to keep global temperatures stable. If glaciers melt and drop too much fresh water into the salty seas, oceanic water circulation and air currents can stall, leaving cold water and cold air in the polar regions and warm water and warm air near the equator. This breakdown of the ocean’s “conveyer belt,” so to speak, could be tragic for local climate systems all over the planet, sending the tropics into extreme heat and regions like Europe into a deep freeze.

My work exploring the ways glaciers influence our ecosystem has shown me just how significantly these rapidly diminishing sheets of ice impact all of our lives. But it has also made me realize that we shouldn’t resign ourselves to this future. It isn’t too late to slow, stop, and even reverse climate change. We can save glaciers, and avoid a deepening of the climate emergency. I recently returned from the global climate summit in Glasgow, where 108 global leaders pledged to collaborate to reduce methane gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Given that methane is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, this is a big step to slow warming, save glaciers, and restore our climate.

The COVID lockdown also showed us that we are capable of limiting our use of carbon and other so-called “super pollutants” that are even worse for climate than CO₂, like methane, black carbon, dirty refrigerants, and smog. While before the pandemic, the idea that we’d stop everything to save our climate would have been unthinkable, we in fact did stop everything to tackle COVID. With driving, air travel, and industry at rest, for example, we removed black carbon emissions from the atmosphere. Black carbon, or soot as it is more commonly known, causes severe respiratory disease in humans and is also a scourge on the environment, darkening glaciers and accelerating ice melt. With skies suddenly cleared of this pollutant during COVID, some residents of Nepal and India, who had lived lifetimes under a cloud of smog, saw the snowcapped Himalayas for the first time.

The positive effects of COVID on our environment and on the climate emergency were temporary—and as COVID restrictions eased, we went back to business as usual and the benefits vanished as quickly as they had materialized. Nonetheless, the temporary spike in climate health proved that collective action to give nature a break and to repair our climate is possible. We are all vested players in our global climate and each of us has the individual power, and choice, to make good climate decisions which can have huge collective benefits.

We simply have to realize how urgent our climate emergency really is.

The post You Really Should Be Having a Glacier-Induced Meltdown appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For much of my life I have been in conversation with a man who died 86 years ago.  He was born in Dublin in 1855 and grew up poor, with a face bruised by the fists of his father. He ran away from home at 14, joined the British Merchant Navy, and came to America. His name was William Mulholland, though he went by Bill, and by some he is known as the father of Los Angeles, the second-largest city in the country and the 13th in the world.

I was born more than five decades after Mulholland’s death, five hours north of that city, in a place called the Eastern Sierra Nevada: the remote, dry edge of California, a desert running into desert running into the Great Basin and Nevada. I grew up beneath looming mountains, shoved by trash-can hurling winds. Here, in Owens Valley, a plane of sagebrush encircles the town of Bishop, where I live today. The First People of this valley, the Paiute/Nuumu, called it Payahuunadu, which means land of flowing waters, for snowmelt pours from our mountains every spring.

When Mulholland first saw the valley, he almost certainly didn’t pause to learn the word Payahuunadu. But he saw the water, and he figured out how to take it away.

In my lifelong argument with Mulholland, I have tried to understand the way the thefts and losses of the past ripple into the future. I wrote a book trying to do this. I found it to be a tricky job.

After all, literature is not an instruction manual. So says the author Charles Baxter. Literature, and the history on which it feeds, are also not public service announcements or ready-made moral compasses. Rather, literature and history together say to us again and again that the world is complicated. And yet we turn to these realms to understand the way the past plays on the present, like shadows over water.

Mulholland engineered the Los Angeles Aqueduct. That metal pipeline, double-barreled, each tube nine feet in diameter and pocked with rivets, spans more than 230 miles of desert, crossing peaks and canyons between the Eastern Sierra Nevada region and the city to the south. Since 1913, the Los Angeles Aqueduct has collected water from my home valley and carried it away.

Even the short version of this story is complicated. The short version is that, through a series of ethically dubious moves, the city of Los Angeles acquired enough rights to remove a substantial amount of water from Owens Valley and used it to supply a booming urban population, as developers boosted California all over the country.

In Payahuunadu, once a land of flowing water, meadows dried up. A lake once deep enough to carry steamboats desiccated, and its bed blew as toxic dust. Many creatures died. The agricultural industry tanked. Some ranchers were glad to sell; others wept when they were forced to leave their homes. The people hurt the worst by the poverty that came to the valley were the Paiute, who had already seen their lands taken, had watched cattle graze the fields they once irrigated and ranchers rewrite their canals with dynamite.

In dusty archives, I read the words of the people alive in those times. I read the words of Mulholland. And then I wrote down what I learned and fretted over it for years, rethinking and rewriting and re-contextualizing, inevitably stitching history into my own experience, into now.

Writing has the power to join the past and the present in a rare triangle. From the first point on this triangle, the writer reaches to the second—from her moment in time, the moment of the writing, to another—the very recent past, maybe, or farther back to an old time that waits, almost forgotten, like something dropped along a trail. The writer strings these points together and passes them to a reader.

Here is the wonderful, elastic, third point on the triangle: the reader synthesizes the writer’s concoction with her own mind, her own moment, and what ensues is a living conversation. Long-gone voices weigh in on what’s trending. Oceans, continents, borders, even war and death cannot interrupt such a seance. The wife of a 19^th-century sheep farmer slides her cold, calloused hand into mine, slides her mind and memory into this afternoon, presses onto me as I sit with my tea and my book in my small town, vaguely aware of the autumn leaves dripping from the trees outside and the wet towels sitting in the washer, waiting to go on the line.

I read about faraway mountains and freezing and near-starvation and landholders who look down from their horses at poverty. I read this and I look out the window in 2021, at my own mountains just snow-dusted. I think of the landed and the landless in my valley. I think of my own vantage point to the beauty and destructive power of nature. The shepherd’s wife lays her face on the bank of the river and goes to sleep and hopes not to wake to another day of hard work and moldy catfish. I sit with my book. I adjust the furniture of my mind just slightly.

If literature is no instruction manual, it is, instead, a reckoning. After enough subtle shifts, I cannot abide the furniture as it once was. It crowded the room; how did it take me so long to see? When I reckon with the past, I keep coming back to Mulholland.

“The test of a man is his knowledge of humanity,” Mulholland once said. “Of the politics of human life, his comprehension of the things that move men.” Here was a person who loved Shakespeare, who said, “Damn a man who doesn’t read books.” He loved the opera, and baseball, and the Los Angeles River, in his early days in the city when he lived in a shack and dug ditches. He rescued saplings from the blade of his shovel—eucalyptus, willow, oak—and raised them in salmon tins before planting them outside.

In 1913, Mulholland finished the Los Angeles Aqueduct under budget and ahead of schedule. In the city, he occupied the status of celebrity engineer. Headlines called him a modern caesar, a genius, and a superman. All his life he followed his culture’s utilitarian code, chasing “the greatest good for the greatest number.”

Later in Mulholland’s career, a dam he engineered north of the city he so loved broke apart just after midnight. On the morning before the disaster, Mulholland was called by the dam keeper to address a crack at the bottom of the western abutment. He considered the seeping brown water. It’s normal, he said. It’s fine. When the wall broke, an eighteen-foot mud monster barreled forth to drown over 600 people, washing their bodies to sea.

Knowledge of humanity, the politics of human life. Lofty words, Mulholland, to have spoken with such confidence—and then the citizens who once worshipped him installed signs in their front yards: KILL MULHOLLAND.

A century in the future, good can look so different.

When I read about the crimes of history, I rail against the wrongness of the thinking, the backwards, shortsighted cruelty. I despair over consequences, now writ large. From my own time, I can see it all: how Mulholland ignored the presence of the First Peoples in the place from which he took water, following the lead of the California governor who said, in 1851: “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected.” How Mulholland built upon the march conducted by the U.S. Army, whose soldiers led 1,000 Paiute out of Payahuunadu at gun point, 225 miles through desert and over mountains in the heat of July, because the ranchers wanted them out.

The removal of water from the valley was a link in a chain which Mulholland took into his hands. With it, he carried out an age-old task, according to an age-old pattern: he did the work that was expected of him by the society he served.

Time corroded Mulholland into a villainous character in Hollywood’s signature account of Los Angeles: Chinatown. History turned him inside out. It’s all so clear from where I sit now, cocooned in my living room.

What’s more difficult to remember? That history has the power to do the same to me.

We will someday be that third point on the triangle, a past with which the future reckons. I want to stay open to being wrong, but I do not want to be wrong in a way that paves a path to suffering. Thus, I must try to learn from the failings of Mulholland. With equal harshness, I must turn the lens I lend to the figures of history onto my culture and myself.

I remind myself that I, too, exist within the sticky sap of an era. The things I hold to be self-evident and undeniable may, in time, be proven false and denied. I walk through the desert in this particular autumn in this patch of the world, and I prepare to be undone.

If men like Mulholland cause me anger, and I burrow into that anger, I find a desire to understand how the Mulhollands of history came to be: where and how they failed to think themselves free of the boundaries of the dominant way of living during their moment in time.  How Mulholland missed the cracks in the dam that was the world in which he lived. How all we might fail to see out of the murk of our moment, and in this way commit what may, through the centuries of reckoning, come to be known as crimes.

There exist, perhaps, antidotes to the archetype of Mulholland.

Perhaps they are the Paiute who survived the march and came home, who returned to a changed world, but retained an old knowledge of living reciprocally with each other and the land, a perspective that goes beyond ownership and money and may just be essential to continued human survival.

Perhaps these antidotes exist in the author Mary Austin, a young schoolteacher from the Midwest who came to Payahuunadu in 1892. Austin got to know the indigenous folks of the valley, listening to ways of thinking and being that were not a part of the conversation for many of her peers. “It is the mistake of cities to assume that everything in the world is run upon what is called a ‘business basis,’” she wrote against the removal of the valley’s water, “which is to say that money is the end and aim of every operation.” She spoke of the dangers of unlimited development and the value of that which cannot, or should not, be exchanged for money. “Not the law, but the land sets the limit,” she wrote in 1903.

Now fire moves across our drained and parched California, and these old words ring true. It has taken the world a long time to listen. Austin walked with Paiute healers in the desert and she tried to understand. This willingness to look beyond was something Mulholland and men like him, for all their power and genius, failed to do.

It is useful to turn the Mulhollands of history inside out. And it is useful to search for the stories of the people who set themselves a little bit free, who thought their way, not flawlessly, to living differently, to doing less harm, to pushing toward that illusive future where the atrocities of the present are relegated to the past. I try to reach backward, to draw all of them into the room where I read, where the shepherd’s wife rests her cheek by the water, and Mary Austin tears her skirts on sage, and Mulholland regards us, sodden to his chin in the ruins of a dam. I reach for them, these figures. I overlay their lives with mine. We gather here, points on a triangle, as I search for the cracks to which I am blind.

The post What Can We Learn From the Failings of William Mulholland? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In her 1997 poem, “Colorado Water,” she wrote:

The palm said, “My clover is cool around my bole, over my hidden roots.
My fronds clatter, crash
like waves in the far off sea.”

I follow the tradition of thousands of years, of date palm growers diverting the waters of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates and Indus, to irrigate their gardens. Water that entered the Colorado River basin as melted snow in Wyoming and Utah, Colorado and Arizona, and even New Mexico, contributes to the flow onto my property.

But this is a historic moment, too. This summer, for the first time ever, water on the Colorado River was rationed. With the West drier and the current drought dire, the river’s flow, which supplies water across the American West, as well as to Mexico, cannot meet the needs of all the humans who depend upon it.

When date growers want to order water for their palms, we can call or email the Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD) and order water—“30 inches on Monday, off Wednesday,” and their computer alerts the computer at the Imperial Dam on the river, which regulates how much of the total flow is routed over to our canal and Valley. As we are below sea level in the Salton Sink, the need for pumping is minimal.

My usual 30 inches are not much compared to neighbors who order 90 inches or 120 inches, so the “Zanjero” (the CVWD employee who opens the water valve gate up on Ave. 60 that regulates our stem of the canal) may not adjust the flow exactly to 30 inches, and I may get a little more or less.

The insects cry in different voices, “When the water comes
we climb the clover to the pinnacles of safety.”

The ducks speak in an ensemble
of piccolo, oboe and kazoo, “Now
there is water around the tree for our feet, a banquet of bugs on the clover;
our beaks snap and gather the harvest, crisp and squishy, legs and wings,
tidbits of flyer and crawler,
the last buzz in our bills,
the last tickle in our swallowing.

But if I get a little less and come up short of water, the final end palms in my rows may not get water that month. As the crisis deepens, who decides which “end rows” get short changed, and how that shrinking total flow is allocated?

Congress passed the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 to fund irrigation projects throughout the West. The original intent was for U.S. taxpayers to provide the infrastructure (dams and canals) to help family farms, with the subsidized water going to farms of 160 acres or less.

In 1922, the Federal Government and the affected Western States negotiated a compact that divided the allocation of the Colorado River’s waters. Seniority of water rights goes back to that agreement. Since then, this law of the river has spawned an army of lawyers and lobbyists defending different interests, and treaties that involve Mexico, Native Nations, states, and various other entities.

The Coachella Valley Water District and the Imperial Irrigation District (IID), at the southern end of the Salton Sea, cover a 100 mile plus area stretching from Palm Springs to the Mexican border. Both were formed over 100 years ago. But over the years, large landowners and corporate farms joined with IID to challenge the 160-acre limitation, going back to the Boulder Canyon Act of 1928, arguing the notion of “perfected rights.” In 1980, in Bryant v. Yellen, the U.S. Supreme Court waived any limitations on water deliveries to these growers.

The allocation of the river’s limited and life-giving bounty has become a political as well as ecological crisis as urban and rural interests clash.

During my several days of irrigating every month, tens of thousands of cars will be washed and tens of millions of toilets will be flushed in Southern California with water from the river.

I pay under $50 an acre foot (325,851 gallons) for my water. San Diego has agreed to pay IID $679 per acre foot. An acre foot is estimated to serve 2.5 households (four persons each) for a year. Since they have more votes than the sparsely populated Imperial Valley, and more representatives in Sacramento and Washington, and their own lobbyists and lawyers, and are willing to pay, urban users in San Diego and Orange and Los Angeles are going to put tremendous pressure on agriculture to cut back.

There are delights for all on a desert morning
when the water is sidetracked from the Colorado.
Even the insects know
they have hidden their eggs well, and their tribes will increase,
though they perish in the duck’s morning meal.

A key principle in water allocation is “best use” or “beneficial use” which assumes “best use for humans.” The ducks and bugs and clover cover crops, the whole web of life that the river stimulates in the date gardens in this valley, are not part of the equation. If the IID can provide water at $50 an acre foot, and San Diego is willing to pay many times that, corporate farmers and the IID are eying selling more and more of their high seniority “rights” to the water. The Imperial Valley reverts to desert.

But wait—water itself isn’t what we pay for. The original intent of taxpayer-funded dams and canals was to provide water to farmers to feed the cities. Farmers and urban dwellers are paying for the water delivery systems, and the maintenance of same.

CVWD delivers my water through canals by gravity flow, with no water treatment and almost no expense of pumping. Urban dwellers are paying for the pipes and pumps and filter systems that enable them to flush their toilettes with purified water suitable for drinking. As the decreasing supply of the river’s waters are reallocated, and the original intent of the 1902 Reclamation Act is overridden, urban and rural populations must both promote conservation and Best Use/Beneficial Use of this life-giving asset.

The Coachella Valley, with its high seniority water rights and highly productive and beneficial use in agriculture, may have more protection for its water that other agricultural areas. But the river cannot do all that humans demand. And agriculture, and the whole web of life it supports, will surely suffer.

The post When the Colorado River Runs Dry appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On the phone, I was gruff, sarcastic, dismissive. Don’t you know, smart-rich guy, that California’s governmental dysfunction is built on top of ballot initiatives that don’t work? Passing more initiatives would make things worse; it’s like trying to fix the Winchester Mystery House by adding more rooms, dude. California needs a change in its thinking and its system, with a new constitution, I told him, before signing off.

Of course, I didn’t tell him how you convince enough people to change the system because, well, no one has figured that out yet. A few hours after the call, I found myself re-reading a book, How America’s Political Parties Change (and How They Don’t), by the incomparable Michael Barone, who edits the Almanac of American Politics. The book, on top of the call, inspired a flurry of thinking and reporting that led me to email the Silicon Valley guy: If you want to make a big systemic change in California, or in the U.S., you probably need to build a new political party.

According to the conventional wisdom, I had just given the tech dude terrible advice. As Barone points out, America’s political parties are history’s most enduring; the Democrats, who got started in 1832, are the oldest political party in the world. The Republicans, dating to 1854, are the third oldest. (The U.K.’s Conservatives rank second). These parties survive because they change and reshape themselves with the country, and because our constitutional system incentivizes having just two parties. Rare is the moment in this country when another party could take power and alter the American system.

Of course, we are now in a very rare moment in history. These might even be the craziest times ever in California. But are they crazy enough to birth a true unicorn—a political party—the sort of institution rarer than a $1 billion tech start-up?

I dare to say the answer is yes, in full knowledge of how loopy this will sound to our state’s governing and political professionals.

California history tells us that new parties can bring the greatest changes—be they the early Republicans who helped form our state’s institutions in the 1850s, or the short-lived Workingmen’s Party that established our constitutional structure in the late 1870s, or the Progressive Party, which split from the Republicans and established women’s suffrage, our state’s system of commissions, and direct democracy in the 1910s.

Our present circumstances cry out for new parties. The Republicans have cracked up, with reasonable members departing, and the remains reconstituting themselves as a social club for conspiracy-mongering. Meanwhile the dominant Democrats, obsessed with national politics and owned by labor unions, pursue narrow policies instead of providing the very basics Californians are lacking: education for all, reliable and affordable healthcare, sufficient housing, a stable economy, dependable emergency response, and energy that doesn’t constantly shut off.

Neither party seems capable of delivering the essentials of 21st-century life. Which is why we need a new political force to do that.

We need a Water Party.

Why Water? Because it’s something we all require, regardless of region or occupation or ideology. Because water puts out fires, which would be useful right now. And because, most profoundly, it defines our state, and its dysfunction.

Water—our rivers, our coast—connects us and divides us; water is all around us, and yet we manage it so poorly, and create such confusing laws around it, that we don’t have nearly enough of it. Water, like housing and jobs and energy and health care and education, is artificially scarce here. If we could fix the water, and make this a place of abundance, we could fix the state.

But mostly, water is the metaphor that shows us the way out of our nasty contradictions.

Californians cling to old infrastructure and systems, even ones that aren’t working. But water can wash away the past.

California is split up between regions and thousands of local governments. All those pieces don’t fit together. But water naturally fills in such cracks.

In California, we often prefer to let decisions be made by algorithms and formulas. Perhaps we should leave more of the decisions to humans, whose bodies are more than half water.

Indeed, our state, so full of constraints and limits, needs to re-dedicate itself to the value of flexibility. Because we will need to be fluid to deal with the difficulties and horrors of the future. In this, the Water Party would do well to adopt the practical philosophy of the San Francisco-born martial artist and film star Bruce Lee, who famously advised:

Be formless, shapeless—like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

The people now in charge of California will dismiss the idea of a Water Party, just as I dismissed that Silicon Valley caller, but their actual behavior betrays their desperate wish that they could be more like water. Look at Gov. Gavin Newsom, who, caught in the inflexible vise of state government, keeps forming task forces, strike teams, and special commissions that have more freedom and fluidity to dig into the big problems and respond to all of our current emergencies.

Forming the party itself wouldn’t be so hard. Under state regulations, you must first hold a party caucus or convention, and then qualify as a party either by collecting enough voter registrations, or sufficient signatures on a petition.

By starting from scratch, a Water Party wouldn’t have to follow the practices of the Democrats or Republicans; it could forge new ideas and new practices to fit our age of apocalypse. The Water Party could experiment with “liquid democracy,” a system in which voters can either vote on issues themselves, or turn their vote over to a personal proxy. Or, like Italy’s Five Star Movement, it could build an online environment to allow its members to determine candidates and policy positions directly.

In Barone’s book published last year, he predicted the continued dominance of the Democrats and Republicans, arguing that “the parties have been a force for stability.” But right now, the parties themselves feel unstable, with some of the most bitter fighting happening not between the parties, but within them.

Around the world, traditional parties of left and right have split apart in recent years. It’s no longer hard to imagine the Democrats dividing between Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats, and the Republicans splitting between White Nationalists and Never Trumpers.

At a time of such uncertainty, a flexible, California-centric party, devoted to water and the other basics, would have enormous value. The nation’s rigid divide might crack up, but California would have a force fluid enough to shape a better future.

Be water, my party.

The post Californians Need a New Political Party That Can Keep Us Afloat appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From this narrow neighborhood park atop the Panorama Bluffs on Bakersfield’s northern edge, you can’t actually see everything. It only seems like you can.

And when you take in this panoramic view of Kern County, you are not just looking out upon our nation’s greatest valley. You are witnessing how California’s past and present may be converging to create a very different future.

The view of oil fields and waterways isn’t exactly beautiful, but it is stunning—even overwhelming. And it provides undeniable evidence that in California, you really can defy the laws of chemistry: Here, oil and water really do mix, and all too well.

As you look out and down, the water appears first. The Kern River, fed from the slopes of Mt. Whitney, the state’s tallest peak, meanders below the park’s bluffs, winding through a small forest of willows, cottonwoods and sycamores. There are fish in the river, and birds flying above it.

This pastoral river can feel like an oasis amidst the larger, drier landscape. But it’s a time machine, a portal into the past—and perhaps into the future.

This land you see from Panorama Park used to be one of California’s wetter places. The river and other waterways often flooded, and the valley was a land of lakes. One of these was Tulare Lake, which could grow to as much as 60 miles long and 36 miles wide, making it the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. In heavy rains or heavy snowmelt in the Sierras, the water systems of the Kern and San Joaquin Rivers and Tulare Lake would merge, turning the middle of California into an inland sea.

But in the 19th century, farmers began taming those volatile river and lake waters, eventually creating today’s drier landscape, with its tumbleweeds. Dams and canals went in. From Panorama Park, you can see two of the first: Beardsley Canal and Carrier Canal. Water that supplies the Carrier Canal also feeds the Kern Island Canal—Bakersfield once had so much water around it that its name was Kern Island.

Bakersfield is still an island—perhaps California’s largest isle—at least in the ways its people live and think. The hometown of Kevin McCarthy, the highest-ranking GOPer in the U.S. House of Representatives, is a redoubt of reactionary Republicanism, surrounded by a state turning ever bluer. But what really makes Bakersfield an island in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley is its economic devotion to oil.

The vista from Panorama Park demonstrates this, to a shocking degree. To your left, an oil refinery is in view. Beyond the river vista near the bluffs, massive oil fields stretch north for many miles, further than your eye can see. Indeed, the oil fields here so dominate the landscape they remind me, perversely, of the giant trees not far away in Sequoia National Park. The oil patch, like the sequoia groves, is too grand in scale for a human field of vision, or even to be easily photographed.

Kern River Oilfield, discovered by prospectors in 1899, helped turn California into America’s leading oil producer in the early 20th century. It brought people from around the world to work and live here. From Panorama Park you can see the community of Oildale, where Merle Haggard grew up in a boxcar, and later wrote a song about it:

The oil tanker train from down on the river
In Southern Pacific and Santa Fe names
Would rumble and rattle the old boxcar we lived in
And I was a kid then and I loved that old train

Haggard would popularize the brand of country music known as the Bakersfield Sound. You can visit his family boxcar at the Kern County Museum, just two miles from Panorama Park. Poor people, successors to the Haggards, still live around Oildale, and still pay too much for sub-standard housing.

The Kern River Oil Field has produced 2 billion barrels and counting. But its output has fallen dramatically since 1985, propped up by pushing steam into the wells to draw out the sticky oil that remains. This is an extraordinarily costly practice, both economically and environmentally, and support for the oil business is not bottomless, even here. A court recently ordered Kern County to halt new oil permits. From Panorama Park, you’re looking at an industry in decline.

Bakersfield is changing in other ways, too. If you stand in the park and turn away from river and the oilfields, you’ll see Alta Vista-La Cresta, one of the city’s older neighborhoods. The Alta Vista tract was first laid out by Donald McClaren, son of famed superintendent of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, John McClaren. This neighborhood was once a distinguished address—its denizens enjoying those grand views—but the area has been fading ever since Bakersfield expanded west, to the other side of Highway 99, and richer people bought places in neighborhoods like Seven Oaks.

The Panorama Vista—specifically, the area between the bluffs and the oil fields to the north—has been the focus of successful restoration for more than a generation. It’s been called the Panorama Vista Preserve since 2004, and visitors there enjoy trails and a native plant nursery.

It’s not hard to imagine the preserve growing larger, and the vista changing. As California responds to climate change, the state will turn harder against oil. In the 50 years, the pumpjacks might well be gone, replaced by park space, solar energy farms, or some of the new homes California needs to build.

These days, water already feels like a far more precious commodity than oil. And this land, if restored to its original condition, might fill with it. Will some dams be removed? Will the vista become wetter again?

The view from Bakersfield really makes you think.

The post From Bakersfield, You Can See Forever appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.