The History of the Future

        We'll share a few moments here on the idea of drought, a drought of spirit and intellect as well as the obvious, depicted here in California's Lake Isabella in Kern County.

        I've been watching Lake Isabella disappear since we became Californians in 2007. These photos were taken recently.

        The stonework in the left of the frame above is the dam.

        There is no recreation in a lake where water levels have dropped to expose the ghost trees that once filled the valley before they were covered. This is an agricultural area too. Similar scenes are visible all over the west.

        We know this, right? It's a global issue. Even if droughts break, it will take years to return to "normal," an idea that is itself probably non-existent. Climate change, for whatever reason, is just that, change!

       From the view of someone who was there to cover the first Earth Day and who has chronicled the ensuing decades, we are not ready for what is coming at us.

        To the northeast of Lake Isabella is a perfect example.

        The great Owens Valley, the deepest in the US, sits at 4-thousand feet rimmed to the east by the Sierra Nevada, west of the White and Inyo Mountains at the western edge of the great basin.

        This vast wilderness is a poster of the moral and ethical drought that can destroy humankind.

        The California Water Wars are legendary, told well in the book and documentary series Cadillac Desert, fictionalized in the film Chinatown, and subject of litigation and battles that go on.

         That island, the remnant of a volcano, sits in the middle of a lake that remains at the middle of the public awareness of theft, deception, chicanery and shortsightedness perpetuated by Los Angeles officials. It began in the late 19th century and to this day LA exists becasue of the water theft.

        Mono Lake, subject of some of the most complex litigation in history, is the largest lake that remains in what once was an Owens Valley flowing with rivers, tributaries, small lakes until LA movers and shakers, destroyed them to feed a real estate boom that led to city of LA we know today. 

        It is a city still dependent on other people's water and those waters like those that feed Phoenix, and so much Southern California, and Arizona, are disappearing.

        Drought should change how we live, but golf courses remain green, builders continue to develop, swimming pools are filled, mindless irrigation continues. When the last drop is used, civilization in those places face a darkness where the drought of spirit, morality and ethics will rise up and create a force that will savage life and society.

        After years of wrangling, Mono Lake is beginning to rise and LA has learned to deal with it. While that may seem to be  good news, LA has instead begun to draw water from subsurface sources in the Owens Valley. 

        Owens Lake is a dry lake bed, as are others. Still the modernity of life in a big city is sucking water from aquifers in a parched area.

        In the early 1900's modern life began the theft. The Paiute tribe and other first citizens had relied on the water for centuries. Settlers had also begun a thriving agriculture that used the accessible water.

        There is no thriving agriculture today. The Paiute and other tribes have watched their paradise be stolen.

        LA is not the only place where this drought of conscience has blinded us to the consequence of our actions. It's a global problem.

        Documentary maker Gabriela Cowperthwaite who produced the expose Blackfish is out with a new investigation that is profoundly shaking up those who have seen it. 

        Based on the seven years of work by Nate Halverson of the Center for Investigative Reporting, it relates how commercial and national interests are buying land with water and food resources around the planet, essentially gaining control. As one analyst wrote "... it is a race against the clock to control food and water..." as climate continues to change humanity. 

       What permits, and what feeds such a sinister effort? A drought of morality and ethics.

       I've tried to avoid head on political analysis for a while. I'm sick of returning to the topic, depressed by the unnecessary division in the US, and anguished about the blatant ignorance and stupidity that is rampant. I've said most of what can be said.

       While we may be appalled and angered by the story of the Owens Valley, and the continued blindness of places like LA, the drought of conscience is apparent in too many places. One place is in the logic of a Republican party that will tolerate a candidate like Herschel Walker, or field candidates who deny the election and who continue to behave as cowards and ethical cripples. 

        We are a people at risk, all of us on this planet. Most of us have a capacity to act. We should.

       See you down the trail. 

       

    

 

SCENES OF A MERCY KILLING

 

        Up here on the ridge, Top of the World as it is called, we've suffered a loss. It was a mercy killing.

    There's a camaraderie up here, sharing the highest elevation between California Highway 1 and the expanding Pacific ocean. We've all kept an eye on this long time resident, worrying. Death has been stalking the slopes of the Santa Lucia Mountains.

    Drought, exacerbated by climate change, is killing our trees including our rare culture of Monterey Pine.

        Comparing the recent shot above to the 6 year old photo in the header of this post, you can see the deterioration in the regal crown of the hill, a participant in so many of the photos I've shared from up here.        

    She's been ailing, but we've all been trying to will her back to health. These trees have shallow roots, and when Pacific storms gale, they uproot, falling on houses and power lines.

    Life expectancy for the Monterey Pine is 80 to 100 years.

            I asked how old is this tree? The warden of death told me 80.

        The old double trunk Pine stands in the corner of a field, a couple of lots north our home. Someone told the property owner she was a risk, sick and dying and "trouble waiting to happen." So the warden and his crew came back to the ridge. 

        Crows have launched from and rested on these branches for decades. I've see young hawks give flight from them. California Quail have sped around its trunk. Wild turkeys have taken refuge or conducted their warfare in its underbrush. Woodpeckers have been frequent residents. Countless other species of bird have paused there. It is a tower on the ridge.

        She's been an icon of our western vista and one of the elders of the ridge. She and her aviary were here long before us, or the homes that dot the summit, a crown of rock and sandstone.

        Lana and our neighbor Lois, a birder extraordinaire, were talking about how sad it is, how that something that is supposed to be, is gone. I'm ahead of the story.

        What I can do now is show you the end of this long time Cambria dweller. 

        The wardens of it's final day were careful and professional. Their's was to remove a hazard. Ours was to pay respect, to watch to the end.

          Reader alert: what follows is a detailed look at the killing of a tree.

            

 

The manpower was augmented.

Excised limbs had no time to rest on mother earth.

They cut and trimmed higher into the old friend who must have sensed her time was running out as she created a prolific crop of cones.

The vivisection was done with precision.

The next three frames catch the fall.

The men match wits with nature, using calculations to undo what stands tall. 

The machine, the final resolution of this life, is beastfully disrespectful.

As we watched we learned more than the double tree was to die.

As limbs rained down the sky grows somber.

The wardens again play the angles like masters.

Branches that took decades to reach the sky, to offer up new generations of offspring in cones, are now merely brush to be moved.

The mercy kill is still incomplete.

There is no shortage skill on display.

Carefully the denuded co-joined trunks were topped, the lines were set and final cuts were made.

The earth shook and cast up rising clouds when at last she fell.

Even in death, the icon of the hill was formidable.

And then there was only this.

        I'm sorry for the birds and, bobcats, coyote, deer, skunk and raccoons who shared this proud old lady in seeking cover, shade or perhaps enjoying its prominent pose. Even in her decline she was lovely.

Look at what we  miss.

        There is a whole in the sky and an emptiness in our hearts. 

        There is no shortage of life to lament these days, so perhaps our sadness at the end of this tree is silly, but I think not.

        She was part our daily life, a presence, since our arrival in California. I worry she is gone before her time. 

        

        See you down the trail.