As if in compensation for a historic drought, California is being deluged by expressions of grim satisfaction that it is finally getting its comeuppance for environmental sins. Judgement was especially swift after California Gov. Jerry Brown imposed a 25 percent reduction in water usage for urban areas. The media asked if this is “The End of California?”, as well as declaring “So Long, California,” and “Dust Bowl 2.0.” One historian of California told the New York Times, “Mother Nature didn’t intend for 40 million people to live here.”
The conceit is nature is punishing humanity in the form of climate-change induced disaster. Except climate change does not appear to be the primary culprit of what is California’s most severe drought in the last 1,200 years. Scientists say the rainfall is “anomalously low—yet not unprecedented.” What’s making the drought exceptionally harsh is the added effect of a warming planet, which is drying out the soil. However, climate change is not a one-way cause and effect. For example, the entire Southwest will be afflicted with more frequent, intense and longer-lasting droughts, but California’s Northern Sierra Nevada watershed “may become wetter and … somewhat less drought-prone” over time.
Like the weather, climate change does not respect borders. The crisis may be most visible in California as reservoirs evaporate and lawns brown, but, as some point out, “this drought is America’s.” As such, the tendency to condemn California tells us more about U.S. society than the natural world. Believing the mega-drought signals the end of California is a form of secular end times.
The mainstream media, while sensationalistic, are more measured than the outlandish predictions found in the conspiratorial corners of the Internet: “California’s food supply to collapse,” “California economy at risk of collapse,” “housing collapse, municipal bankruptcies and a mass exodus of climate refugees.”
Much of the reaction is a mishmash of Christianity and pop culture that’s distinctly American. There is the puritanical disapproval of California’s hedonism. The idea of a cataclysmic rupture draws as much from Hollywood as it does from religious and political thought. Some also believe there will be tribulations, a staple of Sunday sermons and science fiction alike: Everyone who enjoyed the Edenic fruits of California will be thrown into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and our salvation lies in returning to our eco-communal roots.