Nice weather defines our state. What happens when it’s gone?
Hollywood should have been in New Jersey. It was, after all, in that unglitzy state that Thomas Edison invented the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, his cost-effective motion-picture camera and its companion viewer. And it was there that moviemaking took off; until the 1910s, many of the biggest hits of the day were produced in New Jersey and New York, many by Edison’s own company.
Yet by the end of that decade, the budding film industry had moved to California. Why? The earliest movie cameras required lots of light, so films were often shot outdoors or on open-air sets. Southern California offered filmmakers yearround sun and a diversity of striking landscapes.
In other words, Hollywood is in Hollywood rather than in West Orange, New Jersey, for many of the same reasons that California’s Central Valley produces about a quarter of the nation’s food. It’s why John Muir, looking from the summit of the Pacheco Pass, described a landscape that appeared “wholly composed” of light, “the most beautiful I have ever beheld.”
And it is the same reason that a lot of Californians first came here, and the reason so many of us, despite everything, still can’t help but stay.
A state that lives by nature, though, risks dying by it, too. In the past few years, as California battled heat waves and drought and fire, intensifying as the planet warms, I have found myself wondering about my home state’s future and, in a deeper sense, its purpose.
Is California still California when our weather becomes an adversary rather than an ally?
Seven of the 10 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in the past three years. This fire season has already put an entry in the books: The Dixie Fire, which has raged for nearly a month near Lassen National Forest, is already the secondlargest fire in the state’s history.
In the Bay Area, where I live, the air has so far remained short of noxious, but nobody I know is expecting it to remain that way. As they did last year, face masks will soon likely serve a dual purpose for Californians.
The weather is turning vengeful across the planet, not just in California. In an essay about the dry and dangerous Santa Ana winds that periodically blow through Southern California, Joan Didion described its climate as characterized by “infrequent but violent extremes.”
Growing up in Orange County, I often saw headlines about drought and mudslides, fires here and there, El Niño, the Santa Anas. It was a place where the earth could never quite be trusted — you were to never forget that at any moment the ground beneath your feet could erupt in violent tremor.
What’s different about nature in California now is not the kind of disasters we face, but rather the regularity. The violent extremes are no longer infrequent. The weather of catastrophe is not freak; it is just the weather.
People who study California sometimes talk about the “weather tax.” Life in this state can be frustrating — it’s expensive, it’s clogged with traffic, taxes are high, inequality levels are among the worst in the nation. But maybe that’s just the price you’ve got to pay for amazing weather.
In 2015, pollsters at USC and the Los Angeles Times asked people whether they’re likely to remain in California, and if so, why. Although respondents cited a litany of problems, more than 70% said they’d rather live here than anywhere else. The top reason, by far, was the weather. Life here may be tough, but people seemed willing to endure a lot to live in a place where it was so nice outside.
But the importance we place on pleasant weather is exactly why an altered climate could be so devastating to this state’s identity. The Mamas & the Papas sang of California as an escapist dreamland untouched by gloom. You’d be safe and warm if you were in L.A.
Not long from now, Los Angeles and elsewhere here might be more nightmare than dream — way too warm and none too safe, all the leaves burned, the sky ash gray.