Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Friday, Oct. 21. I’m Corinne Purtill, a science and medicine reporter at The Times.
Earlier this year, my husband and I decided to take our two children to Yellowstone National Park, a place none of us had seen.
It was snowing in Yellowstone during the week we booked our tickets, more than typical for the season. By the time we got the kids new hiking shoes a few months later, it was warm at the park, unusually so, and the streams and rivers swelled with clean, cold melted snow.
Then months’ worth of rain fell in just a few days. The river rose, the ground gave way, and catastrophic floods washed away bridges, houses and roads a few days before we were meant to arrive. When we saw that the park was airdropping food to the tourists it couldn’t evacuate, we canceled. If we wanted to see the park before a modern climate disaster hit, we were too late.
The last few years have made it harder for me to think of any plans as certain, and undone the fantasy that anything is permanent. With a suddenly empty week of vacation time, we piled the kids in the car and headed north on Interstate 5 for a different kind of adventure.
I grew up in California, and I’m still delighted by the sheer amount of discovery within this state’s 163,000 square miles. We have hundreds of ecosystems and all six of the world’s major biomes. Nothing is static; any given mountain or desert or valley is a different creature depending on the season or the climate. Even so, the sight of Shasta Lake this summer stunned me.
The water level was half of what it should have been. The shrunken lake was ringed by a wide swath of exposed ocher bank, contrasting against the blue water like opposing lines on a color wheel. “Lakefront” homes looked out onto expanses of dirt.
In July, with the hottest part of the year still to come, Shasta Lake, the state’s largest reservoir, was at 38% capacity. Today it’s at 33%, according to an in-depth report the Wall Street Journal published this week. The reservoir serves many functions, and every single one of them has been affected by the ongoing and seemingly relentless drought.
Federal water managers have cut water to farms, imperiling the state’s $50-billion agricultural industry. They’ve cut water to cities, imperiling people’s ability to wash, cook and live their lives. Hydropower from the Shasta Dam power plant was halved this year. A shallow lake warms faster than a deep one, and so the federal Bureau of Reclamation spent $1.6 million on three 500-ton diesel-powered chillers to cool the water enough for Chinook salmon to spawn.
“There’s always the hope for a better year,” Fresno County grower Mark Borba told the Journal, “but it already looks bleak going forward.”
Nothing is certain, nothing is guaranteed; the landscapes our ancestors thought of as timeless are withering at the speed of a human lifetime. I wanted to take my kids to the first national park so they would remember it, in the hopes that the memory would be precious enough to them to inspire a sense of devotion and care for this world. But we never had to go that far. The lesson is always closer to home than you think.
No comments:
Post a Comment