California Fish and Wildlife, Flickr
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California is an impossibly big and diverse place. Over its 900 miles of length there are a multitude of landscapes and habitat zones. Some of these are human dominated, and some are naturally pristine. Most of the state, though, is somewhere in between. California has almost 40 million human inhabitants making it the most populous state in the nation, and its three trillion dollar/year economy would make it, if it were an independent country, the fifth largest economic system in the world (only the U.S. (even without California), China, Japan and Germany are larger). It is a place of cultural and social innovation and experimentation, and it has a trend-setting entertainment industry, great natural beauty and a stupendously productive agricultural economy.
California because of its natural seasonal cycles is normally a place of drought and wildfires alternating with torrential rains, floods and mudslides. Its eastern mountains are buried (usually) in tens of feet of snow each winter and great efforts are made to retain, disperse and use the melt water from these great snow fields to sustain the agricultural systems and human inhabitants of the state.
California is on the forefront of places in the United States being altered by our changing climate and rising global temperatures. Changes in the seasonal timing of moisture delivery might drive the state out of its normal weather cycles into exaggerated extremes of drought or flood. The impacts of these fluctuations on the state’s natural and agricultural ecosystems could affect the food supply for the entire world.
California because of its young, still forming geological base is also a place of earthquakes. Minor tremors and major upheavals have been recorded in both recent, human history and also in the ancient, geological history of the state. The potential for a nearly unimaginably large scale human disaster if (or some would say “when”) a major earthquake hits a densely populated region of the state is an acknowledged, although still insufficiently planned for, reality.
El Capitan in Yosemite. Photo by D. Sillman
I recently went out to California to spend a week with family and friends in two of the great national parks in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Over the next few weeks I want to talk about my observations and impressions from this visit. Please recognize that I am leaving many more things out than I am including. Also note that I am a casual visitor to California and have no claim on even a low level of expertise about the state. I am focusing on just a few things of interest.
We flew into Fresno from Salt Lake City. The section of the flight up and over the Sierra Nevada Mountains was as rough and as turbulent a flight as I have ever experienced. You could picture the great masses of air coming from the distant Pacific Ocean, roiling chaotically up over the Sierras, releasing their moisture as clouds and rain and snow as they cooled high up in the atmosphere. The mountains were shrouded in clouds and the few peaks that emerged were jagged and snow covered. And this was late May!!
The air turbulence stopped almost immediately after we crossed the mountains, and the cloud cover dispersed. The land below us was flat and brown: the San Joaquin Valley. This is southern section of the great Central Valley of California. The Central Valley produces 8% of the United State’s total agricultural output (by value) and grows over 250 different crops! Almonds, grapes, pistachios, walnuts, oranges, peaches, tangerines, tomatoes and so many more fruits, nuts and vegetables are grown in the small, neatly cultivated, massively irrigated fields of the valley. We flew over a vast brown expanse that suddenly turned into some circular fields of green and then a continuous set of perfect rectangles that were crossed by lines and lines of dark green trees and vines.
Almond grove (Merced, California). Photo by Nehrams2020, Wikimedia Commons
Almonds are possibly the most important crop grown in California (it is an $11 billion industry), and I have talked about them before with regard to the need to import massive numbers of pollinators each year (see Signs of Fall 11, November 15, 2018). Almonds are also the most water demanding crop grown in California! The production of a single almond requires (according to a 2019 paper by Julian Fulton published in the journal Ecological Indicators) 12 liters (or 3.2 gallons) of water! And, almost all of this water is provided by irrigation! Growing almonds uses 10% of all of the water consumed in California!
Grapevines near Fresno. Photo by D. Prasad. Flickr
On the ground: we collected our rental car from the Fresno Airport and headed east toward Kings Canyon and Sequoia. Farms, vineyards and orchards dominated the countryside all the way to the mountains. The fields were incredibly well tended, lush and free of weeds. Vines of grapes and berries were carefully wrapped with protective netting. Trees were uniformly trimmed and pruned. To grow plants like this requires not only a large application of water but also significant fertilizer. The weed control (and primary pest control) were probably achieved by the extensive use of herbicides and pesticides. These careful, precise, idyllic looking farms were actually food factories being maintained by fossil fuels and fossil fuel synthesized chemicals along with tons of surface water pulled from the canal system that crisscrossed the acreage grids and also from ground water. Recent data shows that the ground level in this valley is sinking due to the extensive removal of ground water, and that many well casings are being crushed and rendered useless by the ongoing soil collapse.
The heavy use of agricultural chemicals (herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers) is also causing a drinking water crisis here in the valley. The New York Times reported in a May 21, 2019 article that more than 300 public water systems in California have unsafe drinking water primarily because of agricultural chemical contamination. Half of these failed systems are located right here in the San Joaquin Valley. There is a steep cost for the perfection of these fields! Over one million people are affected by this drinking water contamination.
We drove for about 40 minutes and then began the steady climb up the western face of the Sierras. The Sierras have been described as a great table of granite that tilted many millions of years ago lifting its western edge up high above the basin of Nevada. The relatively gentle slope of the western side of the Sierras contrasts with the steep escarpments on the west. These high western edges are where the great valleys like Yosemite were carved out by glaciers and rivers. These high western edges are where we were going to see the rocks, waterfalls and trees of Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon.
Photo by D. Sillman
Fresno was just over three hundred feet in elevation. Soon we drove passed the one thousand and then two thousand foot markers and then on up to the six thousand foot marker in our climb up to Kings Canyon and Sequoia. The farms and orchards disappeared, replaced by a dry shrub land (“chaparral”) and then a dense coniferous forest. The sides of the road were covered with scattered and then increasingly deeper and more continuous snow. Finally, just as we entered a cloud layer just over five thousand feet, a light rain turned to a gentle snow.
The agricultural “factories” were far behind us. Now we were looking for giant trees!
(Next week: the giant sequoias of Kings Canyon!)
Yellow Monarch Butterflies have been visiting my flower beds since last week. Bumble bees can be seen on the rhododendron blooms from sunrise to sunset. Even the purple chive blossoms are attracting honey bees and bumble bees alike. It is so good to see our wild pollinators return! I’m ready for some warm weather, how about you?