The dreamt land Chasing water and dust across California

Review by Choice Review

By the 20th century, the California Central Valley had become the breadbasket of the West as white farmers and ranchers began raising wheat and cattle and later fruit, vegetables, and nuts. The main obstacles to success and profit were inadequate surface and groundwater, drought/flood cycles, and soil unfit for cultivation. These obstacles were overcome or pushed onto other stakeholders by state and federal politicians cooperating with landowners who violated laws. Arax looks at the history of water management in the Central Valley from the 19th century onward, detailing projects that moved northern water south and discussing environmental damage. He ends his story as the latest drought gives way to floods. The issue this book raises is whether a story about an important part of the US should come from a dispassionate observer or an insider who knows the history, the land, and the people involved. Arax is a native of the Central Valley, and his family lived and worked in agriculture for several generations. That makes him not only the storyteller but also part of the story itself. It explains his biting disdain for politicians and big landowners and his sympathy for farm workers and migrants. Those who pick up this book need to be aware of the author's point of view. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. All readers. --Louise S. Zipp, independent scholar

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

WHEN DELEGATES TO the second International Irrigation Congress convened in Los Angeles in October 1893, pessimism about their mission was not supposed to be on the agenda. The gathering, after all, was meant to encourage reclamation of arid lands throughout the American West, using irrigation to transform an immense wasteland into an agriculturally productive cornucopia. Thus the reaction when John Wesley Powell rose and delivered his now-famous caveat about the limits of development in the region. "Gentlemen," he told the delegates in the Grand Opera House, "there is not sufficient water to supply these lands." The gentlemen responded by booing the esteemed explorer off the stage. Powell's warning was clearly not what champions of Western agriculture wanted to hear. For them, the problem in the region wasn't a lack of water, but the fact that too much of it was concentrated in places where it couldn't be fully used. And so - Powell be damned - they went ahead with their boldest and most ambitious plans to redistribute the precious resource, embarking on a century-long binge of dambuilding, aqueduct-laying, canal-digging and well-sinking. The effort, particularly in California, amounted to a wholesale re-engineering of the existing hydrology to suit the needs of ranchers and farmers. It was "California's irrigated miracle," as Mark Arax calls it in his new book, "the greatest human alteration of a physical environment in history." "The Dreamt Land" is Arax's exhaustive, deeply reported account of this problematic achievement. Though focused mainly on the present state of affairs in California's Great Central Valley, the book ranges widely over the course of its 500plus pages, managing to encompass a capsule history of California before the American conquest, a description of the state's first attempts at hydraulic engineering during the gold rush ("A miner couldn't prospect without water," Arax points out) and an impassioned jeremiad on the intentional decimation of the region's native populations in the mid-19th century. More to his main theme, Arax also profiles the principal players in what he calls California's "second rush," the rise of agriculture that followed in the decades after the gold petered out. The real names of these larger-than-life figures may not be familiar, but their popular monikers - the Wheat King, the Cattle King, the Grand Khan of the Kern - tell us what we need to know about them. These were men whose huge ambitions and absence of scruples enabled them to build agrarian empires of a magnitude unimaginable anywhere else in the country. (Cattle King Henry Miller, for instance, "governed more land and riparian water rights than any other man in the United States.") And although they focused on different agricultural commodities, all of these early land barons had at least one thing in common - a voracious desire to increase the size and productivity of their holdings to the absolute limit of the land's capacity, and then some. Little about the agricultural situation in today's California seems wildly out of tune with this long history of rapacity and environmental abuse. True, the current kings and khans of the Central Valley may not have the colorful nicknames of the giants who preceded them, but their appetite for growth seems just as keen. The difference is that now they can inflict far more extensive damage on the landscape. Thanks to the implementation of major 20th-century engineering efforts like the Central Valley Project and the California Aqueduct, farmers have been able to bring tremendous amounts of marginal and often barely arable land into cultivation. In wet years this is not a problem, and many of us enjoy the bounty of almonds, pistachios and citrus in our supermarkets. But California is subject to extreme annual variations in precipitation. ("There's no average here," Arax writes, noting that the state's rivers and streams can produce anywhere from 30 million to 200 million acre-feet of water from one year to the next.) So when the inevitable multiyear droughts set in, farmers must rely on excessive groundwater pumping to irrigate those endlessly expanding acres of fruit and nut trees, endangering the vast underground aquifer that is arguably the state's most valuable natural resource. Given California's reputation for legislative overkill, it's astonishing that groundwater pumping has been absolutely unregulated in the state for its entire history. (A new law was recently passed, but farmers have up to 20 years to comply.) With no restrictions in place, landowners have been free to sink as many wells on their property as they like, drilling ever deeper as the water table falls and the shallower wells dry up. In the troubled Westlands Water District, for instance, aggressive pumping during the recent drought depleted the aquifer at a rate of 660,000 acre-feet per year - about as much water as a city of 6.6 million people would use annually. Maybe the most alarming consequence of this kind of unrestrained pumping is the dramatic subsidence of the land that can occur as the aquifer recedes. In one large area of the Central Valley near a place called Red Top, the earth is sinking nearly a foot per year, buckling infrastructure and rearranging the local topography virtually overnight. And this is not a temporary phenomenon. Once the soil is compressed, even floods on a biblical scale won't bring it back to its former state. No one knows what this kind of rapid alteration of the landscape will mean over the long term. "As far as impacts go," one United States Geological Survey employee observes, "we're in uncharted territory." Fortunately, not all of the news in "The Dreamt Land" is so bleak. The chronicle of California agriculture has always been mixed - half environmental nightmare, half remarkable success story - and Arax gives himself enough room to report on the positives as well, profiling a few small growers who have produced marvels (a grape that tastes like cotton candy!) while remaining sensitive to the land and water resources under their stewardship. Granted, there are times when "The Dreamt Land" feels overstuffed and chaotically organized, as if Arax decided to include every relevant newspaper feature he's ever proposed to an editor. But I suspect that few other journalists could have written a book as personal and authoritative. Having lived in the Central Valley for most of his life, Arax knows the people and their problems, and he's spent decades writing about them for The Los Angeles Times and other publications. And as the son and grandson of local farmers (his grandfather Aram grew raisins near Fresno after emigrating from Armenia in 1920), he seems to have a fundamental sympathy for those who till the soil. Maybe that's why he saves his harshest scorn for the titans of Big Agriculture who, without ever getting their own hands dirty, try to monopolize California's water, maximizing their own yields while robbing from their less powerful neighbors. As Arax makes plain in this important book, it's been the same story in California for almost two centuries now: When it comes to water, "the resource is finite. The greed isn't." In one large area of the Centred Valley, the earth is sinking nearly a foot per year. GARY KRIST is the author, most recently, of "The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

Award-winning Los Angeles Times journalist Arax has written expansively and passionately about his home state, penning articles about life and death in California prisons and coauthoring with Rick Wartzman The King of California (2005) on the J. G. Boswell empire, which owns the world's largest farm in the Central Valley. His latest work explores the enigma of cyclical droughts and floods in the Golden State and the endless struggle farmers face in securing enough water to nourish their crops. For his research, Arax crisscrossed the state, interviewing workers and landowners alike, and navigating the dizzying array of water regulations and sources of moisture, from snowmelt to ever-deeper wells. Arax's narrative flows best when describing colorful figures like Charles the Rainmaker Hatfield who inexplicably but reliably ended nineteenth-century droughts and Hatfield's contemporary, cattle baron Henry Miller, who introduced modern supersize agribusinesses. Arax's highly readable guide to understanding an essential slice of California history also tracks the sometimes-precarious fate of the fruits and vegetables that feed our nation.--Carl Hays Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Journalist Arax (The King of California) goes both deep and wide in this massive exploration of the relationships between California's natural patterns of drought and flood, its elaborate and aging water distribution systems, and those who work in its agriculture industry, from migrant laborers to billionaires. Though the stories Arax tells are generally of conflict-between farmers and conservationists, urban and rural dwellers, and family farms and agribusiness-he brings an understanding eye to most perspectives. He even gives a voice to one of his most antithetical subjects, Stewart Resnick, a domineering fruit and nut grower and America's richest farmer, while also disclosing his discovery of Resnick's "private, off-the books pipeline" diverting much-needed water from "unsuspecting farmers" into his own orchards. The lion's share of Arax's sympathy goes to the people he sees as most deeply invested in the land, especially the small farmers whom he interviews while walking fields of candy grapes, citrus, and raisins, and who remind him of his own family, an Armenian-American farming clan in Fresno. Arax brings a reporter's precision of language, a researcher's depth of perception, and a born storyteller's voice to this empathetic but unsentimental look at the history, present, and uncertain future of a once-arid region restructured into one of the country's most productive. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Review by Library Journal Review

Water and dust, city and farmland, drilling and drought and flood. California's relationship to water is defined by such contradictions and complexities, as evidenced by this brilliant work from Arax (The King of California). Beginning with Arax's own family roots in the rich soil of the Central Valley, the book takes readers on a grandiose and troubling journey through the long history of growth, farming, politics, and capitalism that has imperiled the state's natural water supply, and threatens to devastate the land on which so many lives depend. The resulting tale is noticeably dense at times, but Arax's combination of research with memoir gives it the necessary lift and motion to make it compelling, brutal, and consistently hard to put down. "We have run out of tricks, or at least the easy ones," writes Arax at one point of the problem. It is a painful honesty for us to confront, which makes the issue all the more important for readers everywhere to consider. VERDICT A stunning and uncompromising look at California's man-made water crisis in the context of its complex history of agricultural growth. Highly recommended for those interested in environmental issues and journalistic nonfiction.--Robin Chin Roemer, Univ. of Washington Lib., Seattle

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Journalist, biographer, and memoirist Arax (West of the West, 2009, etc.) offers a sweeping, engrossing history of his native California focused on the state's use, overuse, and shocking mismanagement of water."Our water wars," writes the author, "began 150 years ago, at least. What's changed is our old nemesis drought has been joined by the new nemesis of climate changeand thirty million more people." Traveling "from one end of California to the other, from drought to flood to wildfire to mudslide," he chronicles in absorbing detail the transformation of the state's Central Valley from modest seasonal farms to huge agribusinesses exporting pistachios, almonds, mandarins, and pomegranates. His story begins in 1769, when Father Junpero Serra, reporting to the Spanish king, combined religious fervor with sophisticated agriculture, building dams and wells and diverting streams to grow wheat, apples, citrus fruits, dates, olives, and grapes. Yet while the land yielded a bounty, the Native American laborers and converts fell victim to European diseases. "In the matter of a single decade," Arax reports, "tens of thousands of natives from San Francisco to Santa Barbara died from foreign germs." After the demise of the Spanish missions, Mexico stepped in with "the first great California land grab," doling out thousands of acres to gentry. That land grab was hardly the last: The author offers sharply etched portraits of some of the most imperious landowners, including Johann August Sutter, who in the 1850s became the state's "biggest farmer, storekeeper, innkeeper, distiller, miller, tanner, manufacturer, enslaver and liberator"; "cattle king" Henry Miller, who from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s controlled more than 10 million acres, including a few rivers; and Stewart Resnick, the wealthiest farmer in America, perpetrator of clandestine deals and secret pipelines. Drawing on historical sources and nearly 300 interviews, Arax reveals the consequences to land and wildlife of generations of landowners who have defiantly dug, dammed, and diverted California's waters.A stunning history of power, arrogance, and greed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Prologue  (Summer 2016) On a summer day in the San Joaquin Valley, 101 in the shade, I merge onto Highway 99 past downtown Fresno and steer through the vibra­tions of heat. I'm headed to the valley's deep south, to a little farm­worker town in a far corner of Kern County called Lost Hills. This is where the biggest farmer in America--the one whose mad plantings of almonds and pistachios have triggered California's nut rush--keeps on growing, no matter drought or flood. He doesn't live in Lost Hills. He lives in Beverly Hills. How has he managed to outwit nature for so long? The GPS tells me to take Interstate 5, the fastest route through the belly of the state, but I'm partial to Highway 99, the old road that brought the Okies and Mexicans to the fields and deposited a twang on my Armenian tongue. Ninety-nine runs two lanes here, three lanes there, through miles of agriculture broken every twenty minutes by fast food, gas station and cheap motel. Tracts of houses, California's last affordable dream, civilize three or four exits, and then it's back to the open road splattered with the guts and feathers of chickens that jumped ship on the slaughterhouse drive. Pink and white oleanders divide the highway, and every third vehicle that whooshes by is a big rig. More often than not, it is hauling away some piece of the valley's unbroken bounty. The harvest begins in January with one type of mandarin and ends in December with another type of mandarin, and in between comes everything in your supermarket produce and dairy aisles except for bananas and mangoes, though the farmers here are working on the tropical, too. I stick to the left lane and stay ahead of the pack. The big-rig drivers are cranky two ways, and the farmworkers in their last-leg vans are half asleep. Ninety-nine is the deadliest highway in America. Deadly in the rush of harvest, deadly in the quiet of fog, deadly in the blur of Satur­day nights when the fieldwork is done and the beer drinking becomes a second humiliation. Twenty miles outside Fresno, I cross the Kings, the river that irrigates more farmland than any other river here. The Kings is bone-dry as usual. To find its flow, I'd have to go looking in a thousand irrigation ditches in the fields beyond. There's a mountain range to my left and a mountain range to my right and in between a plain flatter than Kansas where crop and sky meet. One of the most dramatic alterations of the earth's surface in human history took place here. The hillocks that existed back in Yokut Indian days were flattened by a hunk of metal called the Fresno Scraper. Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals and dams. The farmer corralled the snowmelt and erased the valley, its desert and marsh. He leveled its hog wallows, denuded its salt brush and killed the last of its mustang, antelope and tule elk. He emptied the sky of tens of millions of geese and drained the eight hundred square miles of Tulare Lake dry. He did this first in the name of wheat, then beef, milk, raisins, cotton and nuts. Once he finished grabbing the flow of the five rivers that ran across the plain, he used his turbine pumps to seize the water beneath the ground. As he bled the aquifer dry, he called on the government to bring him an even mightier river from afar. Down the great aqueduct, by freight of politics and gravity, came the excess waters of the Sacra­mento River. The farmer commanded the distant flow. The more water he took, the more crops he planted, and the more crops he planted, the more water he needed to plant more crops, and on and on. One million acres of the valley floor, greater than the size of Rhode Island, are now covered in almond trees. I pity the outsider trying to make sense of it. My grandfather, a survi­vor of the Armenian Genocide, traveled seven thousand miles by ship and train in 1920 to find out if his uncle's exhortation--"The grapes here are the size of jade eggs"--was true. My father, born in a vineyard outside Fresno, was a raisin grower before he became a bar owner. I grew up in the suburbs where our playgrounds were named after the pioneers of fruit and irrigation canals shot through our neighborhoods to farms we did not know. For half my life, I never stopped to wonder: How much was magic? How much was plunder? I'm going to Kern County, just shy of the Tehachapi Mountains, to figure out how the big farmers, led by the biggest one of them all, are not only keeping alive their orchards and vineyards during the worst drought in California's recorded history but planting more almonds (79,000 acres), more pistachios (73,000 acres), more grapes (35,000 acres) and more mandarin oranges (13,000 acres). It's a July day in 2016, five years into the dry spell, and the delirium that has gripped the grow­ers, by far the biggest users of water in the state, shows no sign of letting go. Even as the supplies of federal and state water have dropped to zero one year and near zero the next year, agriculture in Kern County keeps chugging along, growing more intensive. The new plantings aren't cot­ton, alfalfa or carrots, the crops a farmer can decide not to seed when water becomes scarce. These are trees and vines cultivated in nurseries and put into the ground at a cost of ten thousand dollars an acre to sat­isfy the world's growing appetite for nuts and fruits. Agriculture in the south valley has extended so far beyond the provi­sions of its one river, the Kern, that local farmers are raising nearly one million acres of crops. Fewer than half these acres are irrigated with flows from the Kern. The river is nothing if not fickle. One year, it delivers 900,000 acre-feet of snowmelt; the next year, it delivers 300,000 acre-feet. To grow, Big Ag needed a larger and more dependable supply. So beginning in the 1940s, Kern farmers went out and grabbed a share of not one distant river but two: the San Joaquin to the north and the Sacramento to the north of that. The imported flow arrives by way of the Central Valley Project and State Water Project, the one-of-a-kind hydraulic system built by the feds and the state to remedy God's uneven design of California. The water sent to Kern County--1.4 million acre-feet a year--has doubled the acres of cropland. But not even the two projects working in perfect tandem can defy drought. When nature bites down hard, and the outside flow gets reduced to a trickle, growers in Kern turn on their pumps and reach deeper into the earth. The aquifer, a sea of water beneath the clay, isn't bottomless. It can be squeezed only so much. As the growers punch more holes into the ground chasing a vanishing resource, the earth is sinking. The choices for the Kern farmer now come down to two: He can reach into his pocket and purchase high-priced water from an irrigation district with surplus supplies. Or he can devise a scheme to steal water from a neigh­bor up the road. I now hear whispers of water belonging to farmers two counties away being pumped out of the ground and hijacked in the dead of night to irrigate the nuts of Lost Hills. I roll past Tulare, where every February they stage the biggest trac­tor show in the world, even bigger than the one in Paris, France. Past Delano and the first vineyards that Cesar Chavez marched against. Past McFarland and the Mexican boy runners who won five state championships in a row in the 1990s. Past Oildale and the boxcar where Merle Haggard grew up. Past Bakersfield and the high school football stadium where Frank Gifford and Les Richter, two future NFL Hall of Famers, squared off in the Valley Championship in 1947 in the driving rain. And then it hits me when I reach the road to Weedpatch, where my grandfather's story in America--a poet on his hands and knees picking potatoes--began. I've gone too far. The wide-open middle of California did its lullaby on me again. I turn back around and find Route 46, the road that killed James Dean. I steer past Wasco to the dust-blowing orchards and vineyards that rise out of the desert in Kern County, the densest planting of almonds, pistachios, pomegranates and grapes on earth. Down this road are the baronies of Marko Zaninovich, who once was and may still be the nation's largest table grape grower, and the Assemi broth­ers, Farid and Farshid and Darius, who plant cherries and nuts when they're not planting houses, and Freddy Franzia, who grows and bottles more wine grapes than anyone except the Gallos. His most popular brand, 450 million bottles and counting, is Charles Shaw, "Two-Buck Chuck," which sells for $1.99 at Trader Joe's. Up ahead is the kingdom of Stewart Resnick, the richest farmer in the country and maybe the most peculiar one, too, whose 120,000-acre empire of fruits and nuts is called Wonderful. His story is the one I've been carting around in my notebook for the past few decades, sure I was ready to write it after five years or ten years, only to learn of another twist that would lead me down another road. I park the car and start walking. The sun's brutal beat reminds me of my grandfather pouring salt on his watermelon, an old farmworker trick to ward off sunstroke. I keep walking until I find myself straddling one of those divides that happen in the West, and maybe only in the West. Behind me, the hard line of agriculture ends. In front of me, the hard line of desert begins. In between wends the concrete vein that fun­nels the snowmelt from one end of California to the other. I have found Lost Hills, it would seem, but like so many other optical illusions I've followed along the thousand-mile path of bent water and reborn dust, the hills are not hills. Excerpted from The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California by Mark Arax All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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