IN THIS YEAR of heat records and fire tornadoes, California faces
another potential crisis: drought. In November 2020, more than 80
percent of the state’s land mass was classified as somewhere between
“abnormally dry” and “extreme drought” by theUnited States Drought
Monitor
<https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?CA>.
The chances of the winter offering relief look slim, given what’s called
a “La Niña climate pattern,” which is associated with arid conditions in
much of California. The months ahead are, in general, far more likely to
bring water worries than happy surprises.
To longtime California residents, such fears are familiar. The state’s
most recent drought began in 2012 and stretched into the early days of
the Trump administration. Minds not entirely fogged by 2020 may recall
the choreographed spectacle in April 2015 when then-Governor Jerry Brown
stood on a snowless mountaintop to announce the state’s first-ever
mandatory urban water conservation measures. That drought of droughts
produced no shortage of breathless media coverage, usually featuring
images of the cracked mud around receding reservoirs or signs above Los
Angeles freeways urging water conservation. It also led to Fresno
journalist Mark Arax’s/The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across
California/(2019), a compelling brick of a book that places that epic
dry spell within a much longer history of efforts to manage the state’s
characteristic and now intensifying climatic variability.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/unmaking-californias-central-valley/
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