California, a Tale of Water
A few weeks ago I visited storm-beaten Northern California, where the snow piles high and the expression ‘atmospheric river’ has become very common in conversations. Just a few months before, the predominant worry in California was a very different one –a pervasive drought that had continued for years. A few years before, people would have been sure that all this rain and snow-pack in the Sierras could remedy the drought that has affected California since 2000, on and off, but this year, many of them are aware that the solution for such long droughts is not as easy as refilling a glass with water.
Californians are right in thinking that even extreme rain will not remedy the whole extent of the mega-drought they have been experiencing for years. The aquifers of California’s Central Valley have been continuously overused despite the warnings from water experts, who have kept repeating that this practice is unsustainable. The response of agribusinesses and industry is to act as though nothing is happening and continue using as much water as they need –prioritizing profits over reason and reality.
The visions of profits have neglected the science behind the nature of aquifers –a very dangerous ignorance. In our current culture, it seems that most humans see things only from the point of view of profit without caring about the geological and climate reality. They want to force water from rocks that have been empty due to long droughts as though the promise of big profits on paper could do the miracle of making water spout.
The geological reality of aquifers is that they hold water in between bits of sand, gravel, or clay. These components arrange in a disorganized manner and the water is stored in the spaces between them. If you extract water from the aquifer without replenishing it –as it happens during prolonged droughts –the underground arrangement collapses and the space between the grains is reduced along with the aquifer’s capacity for storing water.
This means that even if there are plenty of atmospheric rivers and snow packs after long droughts, the aquifers won’t replenish as efficiently as before and as a result, the excess water will stay on the surface leading to severe flooding. We have entered a water vicious cycle, in which drought’s frequency and length will progressively increase, reducing each time further, the aquifer’s ability to store water. This, in turn, will greatly reduce the chances of successful agriculture and people’s access to water.
If the mix in the aquifer has a lot of clay, the areas can also experience subsidence, a geological term that expresses the high probability of the land sinking. This is happening all around the world, including the San Joaquin Valley, Arizona, and Mexico –the most dramatic is the case of Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, which is sinking at a rate of 10 inches a year, forcing the government to move the capital to a new area.
Atmospheric rivers can certainly fill out empty reservoirs and alleviate low rivers, canals, and dry crop terrains –most likely saving some crops for the year. Governor Newsome and previous ones have also invested in more reservoirs and programs in which some farmers are paid not to grow food and instead allow their land to be flooded with rain. These measures can certainly help, but depending on the weather –especially very high temperatures –the rate of evaporation can rise and reduce their efficiency.
The best agricultural practice is to maintain the balance of aquifers. In normal years, the water taken out is replenished with rain and there is no problem. The imbalance starts with the general overuse of our planet which has led to an excessive use of resources -including land -that has overdrawn most aquifers on the planet.
The aquifer problem is certainly not good news for the agricultural valley of California. This valley provides one-fourth of the food that the US consumes and 40% of the fruit. One of its most profitable crops is almonds, which according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, is having a high peak in demand, so its acreage has increased from 640,000 acres in 2004 to 1,640,000 acres in 2021, about two and half the former acreage. The San Joaquin Valley saw the most spectacular increase, going from 1,757 acres in 2008 to 43,121 in 2021!
The increase in cultivation comes from the incredible popularity of almonds around the world. Almonds are considered very sustainable since they can provide plant-based milk that can easily substitute cow’s milk, thus helping to reduce their methane emissions. Almond milk also requires less land than the one used for cow pasturing and the crops for feeding them, but when it comes to water, cow’s milk ends up a winner.
It takes 8 cups of water to get 2 cups of milk, while it takes about 16 cups of water to cultivate just one almond. One almond isn’t enough to make milk, so we will need at least 1 cup of almonds to make some milk, the use of water depends on how concentrated we want it –usually between 3 to 5 cups for one cup of almonds. A cup of almonds has about 94 almonds so this means that their cultivation requires about 1,472 cups of water. Needless to say, the water involved in almond cultivation is very water intensive.
In a water-needy state like California, the increase in almond cultivation has displaced other crops that need less water and many state officials admit that almond cultivation at the moment is unsustainable. These experts consider that the huge demand has expanded almond cultivation to areas where they shouldn’t be since the aquifers are quite depleted. In a weird paradox, we are told that almond milk is more sustainable even if its cultivation has become completely unsustainable from the water point of view!
Almond milk drinkers or eaters in the US are not the problem since we use just 30% of the almonds grown in California while the rest is exported. Any rational government would prohibit the export of a crop whose over-cultivation diminishes not just the quality of life of Californians, but also the access to other crops that feed the whole US. Instead, the almond grower’s lobbyists manage to convince politicians to put profits ahead of people –a response that can only have validity in a culture that venerates money above all else.
The strange thing is that the people who suffer the most water shortages are the same that work in agriculture, an industry that uses about 41% of California’s water. The people in towns like Fresno, in the center of this agricultural valley, are the ones who often have to buy bottled water for every water necessity.
Bottled water brings us to another big guzzler of water in California: bottled water companies. The main culprit is Nestlé, which takes California’s municipal water, bottles it, and then sells it at a premium to the same Californians that are very often asked to save water by not watering their gardens or washing their cars. Once again, the ones who win are corporations like Nestlé, who despite their green rhetoric on websites and ad campaigns clearly show that their only interest is profits.
In an effort to stop Nestle from robbing California’s water, water officials have tried in several instances to make the company accountable for its evident malfeasance. For example, in 2021, California water officials were once again struggling to stop Nestlé from siphoning millions of gallons out of the San Bernardino Mountains and selling it under the brand Arrowhead. Unbelievably, Nestlé argued that it has rights to California’s water since 1865 –barely 15 years after California became a state and the company had not even been created!
Water officials’ recent investigations have shown that the company has been taking much more than the legal agreements –it has surpassed the agreed 2.3m gallons a year and upped it to about 58 million gallons –basically robbing California’s water! The problem is that this is not the only transgression committed by Nestlé –the abuses have been going on for decades without much accountability, thanks to the help of corporate lawyers who can always argue for the rights of Nestlé and deny any misconduct!
Before we are too outraged about the company’s abuse of the water of a drought-prone state like California, we have to reserve some space for outrage for another egregious corporate behavior that is also guzzling California’s water with just one thought in mind –profits. The culprit this time is the fracking industry, which according to Food and Water Watch has consumed about 3 billion gallons of municipal water in California, between 2018 and 2021.
In a cruel twist, most of the fracking sites are located in California’s central valley, the same place where immigrant agriculture workers live and have to spend a lot of money buying bottled water to survive.
For comparison, these 3 billion gallons used for oil and gas drilling in California during 4 years would fill 4,570 Olympic-sized swimming pools, or provide water for over 120 million showers for California households.
If Jesus turned water into wine in one of his miracles, the fracking industry does the opposite –it uses good municipal water and turns it into very toxic water that can’t be used again. Even with this toxicity, drought-anxious California farmers have been willing to buy this toxic water to irrigate their crops. Who knows what crops have been irrigated with such toxic water without having been labeled as unsafe?
The spread of fracking toxicity doesn’t stop there –the drilling sometimes reaches the water table, where the toxic water can mix with the perfectly clean water, spreading the toxicity to many more consumers around the state.
This tale of California’s water problems is like a multi-faceted environmental puzzle that becomes even more complicated with the addition of another variable –greedy corporate behavior. In this puzzle, fitting the series of pieces of our future survival is very confusing –it is difficult to tell what is the best option to improve the use of the dwindling freshwater of California.
We are told that a plant-based diet is more sustainable since it will help to drastically reduce emissions only to realize that the state that produces 40% of the US’s crops has overused its water sources and as a consequence, it will have less and less water in the future. The prospect is even direr when we see that most of the best grain-producing states in the US are having similar water problems –empty aquifers and unprecedented droughts.
Many people have also voiced the need to increase economic equality in the state so that even the recent immigrants, who work in the valley’s agricultural industry, have access to water and a better quality of life. Though a very commendable idea, this becomes quite difficult since by doing this, we are only looking at one side of the puzzle –the economical equality one. In reality, a diminishing commodity like water would become more precious each day, and given the corporate behavior precedents, the chances of equally distributing dwindling resources seem quite dismal.
The plant-based diet is supposed to help reduce emissions from methane-producing cows but this emission reduction is certainly nullified by the high quantity of methane emissions that escape into the atmosphere during fracking, not just in California, but in many other states. The very rare media reporting about fracking, usually says that this is not true, alleging that oil companies involved in that practice, deal with methane emissions with the utmost care.
Knowing the corporate greed that pervades everything, this is quite impossible since capturing the odorless and colorless methane gas would be incredibly difficult and prohibitively expensive. Despite the optimistic profit sheet, fracking has a terrible return on investment –after all, it involves literally squeezing the rocks –forcing water, sand, and toxic chemicals in drilled wells to crack the shale, hoping to get some oil and gas from the cracks. Needless to say, this method has a very low success rate.
California’s puzzle is being repeated all around the world. Our culture’s excess energy use, its emissions, and their warming effect on the planet have affected the atmospheric and oceanic currents, which in turn, have disturbed the normal patterns of precipitation and evaporation. This means that the increasing water problems we are experiencing are directly related to these changes in patterns.
The series of mega droughts the world is seeing, even include areas never touched before, like Europe. In Germany and Austria, people can’t believe that their once-wet climate has turned into a super-dried one that has dried rivers and damaged crops. Rivers like the Rhine and Loire are trickling down, ruining crops and destroying hopes of the benefits of plant-based diets.
These occurrences prove that the main current systems of the planet are unbalanced and this will increasingly enhance climate unpredictability and agricultural failure. The multi-faceted puzzle that we are facing is rarely presented to us by most climate experts and the media. Most of the time their reporting presents information in an isolated manner –a flood here, a wild fire there, a crop failure here, a lack of water somewhere else –but without relating it to enough data so that the audience can understand a bit more of the puzzle.
The computer models on which mainstream climate experts rely have tried to simulate pieces of the puzzle but their predictions have proven false since climate events are happening much earlier than the models predicted. Climate tipping points are also being checked one after one, showing how close we are getting to a very disastrous reality.
Even if we are far away from solving even a sizable part of the puzzle, what is clear, is that we are going to increasingly have a problem with water and food supply. This is enough to create havoc with the population of a planet that has arrived at about 8 billion. Each of us is aware of just a bit of the puzzle, and many of us, especially in the West, don’t see much trouble –except when we complain about some unusual weather that we ascribe to climate “craziness”.
Many parts of the Third World do increasingly experience complete parts of the puzzle –having to walk for miles each day under a blazing sun to get water for all their needs, or having to leave their plots after prolonged droughts have killed their domestic animals and plants. These people know what a lack of food and water really means.
It is clear that the increasing water problems the world will have to endure will also escalate the number of climate refugees seeking areas where they hope to find sustenance. The problem is that, with time, more and more areas will become unable to provide it, so where will everybody go? By that time, most of us would have been forced to experience the reality of the puzzle, the changes in precipitation and evaporation that will in turn interact with other Earth systems, leading to increasing water shortages; sea levels will rise; and temperatures will become more extreme.
We think everything is OK because we haven’t seen much yet, but we forget about the power of the exponential function. The chain of disturbances of the Earth’s systems will reach all the tipping points and we will enter the exponential phase of the climate crisis. Anybody who knows the graph for the exponential function understands how after a very moderate move, there is a sudden continuous rise that in the case of the climate crisis, will make it very difficult for humans to survive. The environmental puzzle will completely unfold, and water, a very essential commodity, will be at the center of it.
