With the Cavs set to face off against the Warriors in Game 1 of the NBA Finals tonight it’s especially important to point out that California should hardly even be a state, let alone a “Golden” one populous enough to support four NBA franchises.
It’s one thing to note that the state is experiencing an historic water crisis with consequences rippling across the country. It’s another to understand how predictable this problem was.
It’s only been about 150 years that non-natives have lived in what’s now California, with the non-indigenous population estimated to be no more than 8,000 as of 1846. This was for good reason, as explained by Marc Reisner in his book, published in 1986, titled Cadillac Desert, the American West and its Disappearing Water:
One does not really conquer a place like this. One inhabits it like an occupying army and makes, at best, an uneasy truce with it. New England was completely forested in 1620 and nearly deforested 150 years later; Arkansas saw nine million acres of marsh and swamp forest converted to farms. Through such Promethean effort, the eastern half of the continent was radically made over, for better or worse. The West never can be. The only way to make the region over is to irrigate it. But there is too little water to begin with, and water in rivers is phenomenally expensive to move. And even if you succeeded in moving every drop, it wouldn’t make much of a difference.
John Wesley Powell, the first person who clearly understood this [also probably the leading U.S. scientist of his day], figured that if you evenly distributed all the surface water flowing between the Columbia River and the Gulf of Mexico, you would still have a desert almost indistinguishable from the one that is there today. Powell failed to appreciate the vast amount of water sitting in underground aquifers, a legacy of the Ice Ages and their glacial melt, but even this water, which has turned the western plains and large portions of California and Arizona green, will be mostly gone within a hundred years – a resource squandered as quickly as oil.
At first, no one listened to Powell when he said the overwhelming portion of the West could never be transformed. People figured that when the region was settled, rainfall would magically increase, that it would “follow the plow.” In the late 1800s, such theories amounted to Biblical dogma. … [T]he most gigantic dams were being built on the most minuscule foundations of economic rationality and need. Greening the desert became a kind of Christian ideal. In May of 1957, a very distinguished Texas historian, Walter Prescott Webb, wrote an article for Harper’s entitled “The American West, Perpetual Mirage,” in which he called the West “a semidesert with a desert heart” and said it had too dark a soul to be truly converted. The greatest national folly we could commit, Webb argued, would be to exhaust the Treasury trying to make over the West in the image of Illinois [then the nation’s most agriculturally productive state] – a folly which, by then, had taken on the appearance of national policy. The editors of Harper’s were soon up to their knees in a flood of vitriolic mail from westerners condemning Webb as an infidel, a heretic, a doomsayer.
Desert, semidesert, call it what you will. The point is that despite heroic efforts and many billions of dollars, all we have managed to do in the arid West is turn a Missouri-size section green – and that conversion has been wrought mainly with nonrenewable groundwater. But a goal of many westerners and of their federal archangels, the Bureau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers, has long been to double, triple, quadruple the amount of desert that has been civilized and farmed, and now these same people say that the future of a hungry world depends on it, even if it means importing water from as far away as Alaska.
What they seem not to understand is how difficult it will be just to hang on to the beachhead they have made. Such a surfeit of ambition stems, of course, from the remarkable record of success [they] have had in reclaiming the American desert. But the same could have been said about any number of desert civilizations throughout history – Assyria, Carthage, Mesopotamia; the Inca, the Aztec, the Hohokam – before they collapsed.
Of course, if we’re going to keep the Golden Staters from driving civilization off the cliff, it’s going to require some major changes one way or another. But the point here is just that Cleveland > Golden State no matter what happens in any basketball games.
