It’s so cool that cities are like “pweeease only turn your AC on if you’re actively dying and don’t go below 79 🥺🤘🏻💗” while the AI nobody asked for is slurping up the power grid to make 1 image of a girl with 5 tits
for years I've made fun of "conserve water! take short showers!" as California's response to endless drought, citizens taking the heat for hotels and agriculture using the VAST majority of what's left of our aquifer
As someone who grew up through the late 80s-early 90s drought, some of that is drilled into my head.
Then I realize all those lovely flood irrigated orchards in the Central Valley were allowed to do so well after we'd been told conservation is our responsibility. To say nothing of W(o)nderful Co.
I haven't checked on it in a while but at some point a truly egregious % of California's water went to almond groves who's crops were mostly exported
'food grows where water flows' indeed lol
Oh it’s ongoing and getting worse. Every time I drive down into the Valley there’s more acreage of almond orchard going in. Meanwhile the aquifer is squeezed so hard that the Valley itself is dropping by feet in places.
It was either NASA or NOAA that did a ISAR study of the west side of the valley to measure subsidence half a decade or more ago.
Over a foot drop in some places.
No one in Sacramento wants the heat from reworking water rights or cutting big ag off.
I've read Cadillac Desert a couple times over. Reisner was prescient on that one.
He also talked about the Dos Rios Dam. Which Ted Simon covered in far more detail in The River Stops Here.
The Eel is already screwed, but if the dam had been built, the coastal rivers would've been abjectly fucked.
Follow @sarahtaber.bsky.social, she’s written brilliantly about ag/water usage in CA (& around the US). CA is far from uniquely situated to provide produce; the inverse is true.
And if anybody tries to claim that ag is the biggest contributor to the CA GDP, inform them that it’s tourism, actually.
Appreciate that, follow her on the bird space, but not here.
Her takes on both ag and water are something I like to hear, given that ag and water keep my county going.
In the service of tourism that is.
It's a little more positive than a lot of the western water policy reads, especially given the end result.
Visited the dam site inadvertently a few years ago, and the survey marker we found sent me down this rabbit hole.
Cadillac Desert, Desert Solitaire, Conversations with the Archdruid - great books to read if you want some excellent insights and also to become boiling mad about how long it's been known and obvious that this was bad
