Readers as springs of ideas amid drought
Stop eating meat. Build interstate pipelines. Turn seawater into drinking water. When our letter writers start making these suggestions in earnest, that’s how I know we’re beginning to feel the effects of another drought in California.
I’ve written about our readers’ ambitious ideas to combat drought and wildfires before, and how they betray an abiding optimism in California’s ability to engineer our way out of discomfort. And we have tried: Over the last century, watersheds and mountains in Northern California and the Sierra Nevada have been extensively engineered to prevent as much water as possible from escaping to the ocean; those in Southern California have been altered to do mostly the opposite and flush water into the sea. Aqueducts bring Los Angeles potable water from the Colorado River, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and, most notoriously, the eastern Sierra.
But here we are, in a drought so soon after the previous one, with an attendant catastrophic wildfire season looming just after the last one finished setting records. Cycles of drought and deluge have always tested the limits of our water infrastructure’s ability to keep agricultural and metropolitan areas habitable and productive (even as the sources of that water face ecological devastation), but climate change threatens more fires, more dry spells and higher temperatures. California was built for a lot, but not this.
So, many of our readers are suggesting that we build in ways we haven’t before, and others say it’s time to scale back California’s growth and, yes, our meat-eating.
— Paul Thornton, letters editor