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NY Times Op-Ed, Nov. 3, 2019
It’s the End of California as We Know It
By Farhad Manjoo
SAN FRANCISCO — I have lived nearly all my life in California, and my
love for this place and its people runs deep and true. There have been
many times in the past few years when I’ve called myself a California
nationalist: Sure, America seemed to be going crazy, but at least I
lived in the Golden State, where things were still pretty chill.
But lately my affinity for my home state has soured. Maybe it’s the
smoke and the blackouts, but a very un-Californian nihilism has been
creeping into my thinking. I’m starting to suspect we’re over. It’s the
end of California as we know it. I don’t feel fine.
It isn’t just the fires — although, my God, the fires. Is this what life
in America’s most populous, most prosperous state is going to be like
from now on? Every year, hundreds of thousands evacuating, millions
losing power, hundreds losing property and lives? Last year, the air
near where I live in Northern California — within driving distance of
some of the largest and most powerful and advanced corporations in the
history of the world — was more hazardous than the air in Beijing and
New Delhi. There’s a good chance that will happen again this month, and
that it will keep happening every year from now on. Is this really the
best America can do?
Probably, because it’s only going to get worse. The fires and the
blackouts aren’t like the earthquakes, a natural threat we’ve all chosen
to ignore. They are more like California’s other problems, like housing
affordability and homelessness and traffic — human-made catastrophes
we’ve all chosen to ignore, connected to the larger dysfunction at the
heart of our state’s rot: a failure to live sustainably.
Now choking under the smoke of a changing climate, California feels
stuck. We are BlackBerry after the iPhone, Blockbuster after Netflix:
We’ve got the wrong design, we bet on the wrong technologies, we’ve got
the wrong incentives, and we’re saddled with the wrong culture. The
founding idea of this place is infinitude — mile after endless mile of
cute houses connected by freeways and uninsulated power lines stretching
out far into the forested hills. Our whole way of life is built on a
series of myths — the myth of endless space, endless fuel, endless
water, endless optimism, endless outward reach and endless free parking.
One by one, those myths are bursting into flame. We are running out of
land, housing, water, road space and now electricity. Fixing all this
requires systemic change, but we aren’t up to the task. We are hemmed in
by a resentful national government and an uncaring national media, and
we have never been able to prize sustainability and equality over
quick-fix hacks and outsize prizes to the rich.
All of our instincts seem to make things worse. Our de facto solution to
housing affordability has been forcing people to move farther and
farther away from cities, so they commute longer, make traffic worse and
increase the population of fire-prone areas. We “solved” the problem of
poor urban transportation by inviting private companies like Uber and
Lyft to take over our roads. To keep the fires at bay, we are now
employing the oldest I.T. hack in the book: turning the power off and
then turning it back on again. Meanwhile, the rich are getting by: When
the fires come, they hire their own firefighters. (In the case of the
Getty fire in Los Angeles, their gardeners and housekeepers still had to
go to work, though.)
Does all this sound overdramatic? You might point out that if it seems
like dystopian apocalypse in California, it’s because it has always felt
like dystopian apocalypse in California. The California of Joan Didion,
Charles Manson and Ronald Reagan was no picnic; nor was the California
of Pete Wilson, Rodney King or Arnold Schwarzenegger. California has
always been a place that seems to be on the edge and running on empty,
and maybe the best you can ever say about it is, hey, at least we’re not
Florida.
But this time it’s different. The apocalypse now feels more elemental —
as if the place is not working in a fundamental way, at the level of
geography and climate. And everything we need to do to avoid the end
goes against everything we’ve ever done.
The long-term solutions to many of our problems are obvious: To stave
off fire and housing costs and so much else, the people of California
should live together more densely. We should rely less on cars. And we
should be more inclusive in the way we design infrastructure —
transportation, the power grid, housing stock — aiming to design for the
many rather than for the wealthy few.
If we redesigned our cities for the modern world, they’d be taller and
less stretched out into the fire-prone far reaches — what scientists
call the wildland-urban interface. Housing would be affordable because
there’d be more of it. You’d be able to get around more cheaply because
we’d ditch cars and turn to buses and trains and other ways we know how
to move around a lot of people at high speeds, for low prices. It
wouldn’t be the end of the California dream, but a reconceptualization —
not as many endless blocks of backyards and swimming pools, but perhaps
a new kind of more livable, more accessible life for all.
But who wants to do all this? Not the people of this state. Sure, we’ll
ban plastic bags and try to increase gas-mileage standards (until the
federal government tries to stops us, which of course it can, because
our 40 million people get the same voting power in the Senate as
Wyoming’s 600,000).
But the big things still seem impossible here. In a state where 40 years
ago, homeowners passed a constitutional amendment enshrining their
demands for low property taxes forever, where every initiative at
increasing density still seems to fail, where vital resources like
electricity are managed by unscrupulous corporations and where cars are
still far and away the most beloved way to get around, it’s hard to
imagine systemic change happening anytime soon.
And so we muddle on toward the end. All the leaves are burned and the
sky is gray. California, as it’s currently designed, will not survive
the coming climate. Either we alter how we live here, or many of us
won’t live here anymore.
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