California facing harsh reality of continuing drought

Los Angeles

FOR more than a century, California has been the state where people flocked for a better life - 425,000 square kilometres of mountains, farmland and coastline, shimmering with ambition and dreams, money and beauty. It was the cutting-edge symbol of possibility: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, aerospace, agriculture and vineyards.

But now a punishing drought - and the unprecedented measures the state announced to compel people to reduce water consumption - is forcing a reconsideration of whether the aspiration of untrammelled growth that has for so long been this state's driving engine has run against the limits of nature. The 25 per cent cut in water consumption ordered by governor Jerry Brown raises fundamental questions about what life in California will be like in the years ahead, and even whether this state faces the prospect of people leaving for wetter climates - assuming, as Mr Brown and other state leaders do, that this marks a permanent change in the climate, rather than a particularly severe cyclical drought.

This state has survived many a catastrophe before - and defied the doomsayers who have regularly proclaimed the death of the California dream - as it emerged, often stronger, from the challenges of earthquakes, an energy crisis and, most recently, a budgetary collapse that forced years of devastating cuts in spending. These days, the economy is thriving, the population is growing, the state budget is in surplus, and development is exploding from Silicon Valley to San Diego; the evidence of it can be seen in the construction cranes dotting the skylines of Los Angeles and San Francisco. But even California's biggest advocates are wondering whether the severity of this drought, now in its fourth year, is going to force a change in the way the state does business.

Can Los Angeles continue to dominate as the country's capital of entertainment and glamour, and Silicon Valley as the centre of high tech, if people are forbidden to take a shower for more than five minutes and water bills become prohibitively expensive? Will tourists worry about coming? Will businesses continue their expansion in places such as San Francisco and Venice?

"Mother Nature didn't intend for 40 million people to live here," said Kevin Starr, a historian at the University of Southern California who has written extensively about this state. "This is literally a culture that since the 1880s has progressively invented, reinvented and reinvested itself. At what point does this invention begin to hit limits?" California, he said, "is not going to go under, but we are going to have to go in a different way".

An estimated 38.8 million people live in California today, more than double the 15.7 million people who lived here in 1960, and the state's labour force exploded to 18.9 million in 2013 from 6.4 million people in 1960.

California's US$2.2 trillion economy today is the seventh largest in the world, more than quadruple the US$520 billion economy of 1963, adjusted for inflation. The median household income jumped to an estimated US$61,094 in 2013 from US$44,772 in 1960, also adjusted for inflation.

"You just can't live the way you always have," said Mr Brown, a Democrat who is in his fourth term as governor. "For over 10,000 years, people lived in California, but the number of those people were never more than 300,000 or 400,000. Now we are embarked upon an experiment that no one has ever tried: 38 million people, with 32 million vehicles, living at the level of comfort that we all strive to attain. This will require adjustment. This will require learning."

This disconnect, as it were, can be seen in places such as Palm Springs, in the middle of the desert, where daily per capita water use is 761 litres - more than double the state average. But the drought is now forcing change in a place that long identified itself as "America's desert oasis". Palm Springs has ordered 50 per cent cuts in water use by city agencies, and plans to replace the lawns and annual flowers around city buildings with native landscapes. It is digging up the grassy median into town that unfurled before visitors like a carpet at a Hollywood premiere. It is paying residents to replace their lawns with rocks and desert plants, and offering rebates to people who instal low-flow toilets.

At the airport that once welcomed winter-chilled tourists with eight acres of turf and flowers, city officials are in the early stages of replacing the grass with cactus, desert bushes and paloverde trees. The city had hoped to replace the entire lawn, but the project's US$2 million price tag forced it to begin instead with three acres, said David Ready, the city manager.

Other places face different threats to their way of life. Mayor Robert Silva of Mendota, in the heart of the agricultural Central Valley, said unemployment among farmworkers had soared as the soil turned to crust and farmers left half or more of their fields fallow. Many people are travelling 95 to 110 kilometres to look for work, he said, and families are increasingly relying on food donations.

Richard White, a history professor at Stanford University, said the scarcity of water could result in a decline in housing construction, at a time when there has been a burst of desperately needed residential development in cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. "It's going to be harder and harder to build new housing without an adequate water supply. How many developments can you afford if you don't have water?" NYT