Welcome to California: land of plunder and hypocrisy | Mark Arax

I was a fourth-grader in the public schools of California when I first learned about the Gold Rush. I remember our teacher, Mrs Dyer, passing down the story in the manner of lore.

On the morning of 24 January 1848, James Marshall, a New Jersey boy come west, stumbled upon four shiny nuggets alongside the American River. He tried to keep his discovery a secret, but the shout of “eureka” from the dirt streets of San Francisco rang out across the shore. It unleashed a force that could not be contained.

No need for manifest destiny. Overnight, 80,000 dreamers of every color, creed and country poured in.

I didn’t know back then how story became myth and myth became story. The sordid details of history would be mine to fill in. The Gold Rush was California’s first extraction, a flash that cannonballed the whole mad state into being, and it ended the way all such plunders do. A handful of wealthy San Francisco industrialists made off with the riches. Marshall died so poor he could barely cover the price of his burial.

Hydraulic mining, the state’s first invention sold to the world, had blasted out an immense crater in the Sierra Nevada, a desecration that let loose a torrent of environmental ruin. In a landmark decision, a judge shut down the mining industry in 1884. The crater, a symbol of California creation and destruction, was declared a state historic park.

But the fever of gold mining did not pass.

All around me, from inland to coast, the fire of extraction still burns. I have spent more than half my life chronicling the exploitations of California, so I know delirium to be a condition of the land. It took up residence in the body of the infant state and went on to spawn further extractions – a piling-on of audacities – so that one unthinkable taking gave rise to an even more unthinkable taking, and on and on through the generations.

Now, the Golden state has spun itself into a new and more menacing age of plunder: the mining of water and the mining of our minds.

In the San Joaquin valley, farmers divert the great rivers and tap the ancient aquifer to grow nuts, fruits and vegetables. Their irrigated flatland is one of the most dramatic alterations of the Earth’s surface in human history. But the water can no longer keep up with the bounty. The drained earth, and all that has been built upon it, is sinking.

In Silicon Valley, lords of tech harness untold amounts of water and electricity to power more data-processing centers. The project of artificial intelligence feeds on human consciousness itself. Algorithms lay waste to our brains. Robots instruct our children how to expertly tie nooses to better hang themselves. Bombs guided by the pinpoint of AI erase Gaza and slaughter tens of thousands of innocents.

Each thing sprouts from the same fertile ground: the soil that is California. From my perch in the middle of the state, I swear I can feel an agitation disrupting the land and its people. Like a drone, it carries the sound of a hum.

California’s eternal grab for more has never seemed so desperate.

On a fall day, chasing the hum, I set out on the road to tell the story of two places, without heed, each pursuing one last extraction.

I am driving across the western flank of the San Joaquin valley, heading in the direction of Coalinga, a small town in Fresno county that owes its entire existence, right down to its name, to the digging for earth’s riches.

The leveled ground seems to be holding its breath. The nut harvest, nearly 5bn pounds of almonds and pistachios jolted off the trees in a filthy cloud, is already in swing. These are the factories in the fields conceived in the mid- to late 1800s by the same San Francisco barons who pocketed gold’s riches.

Year after year, Fresno county, where I was born and have lived most of my life, ranks No 1 in food production for the nation. Our crop counts on a sun that shines 300 days a year, a never-ending flow of water and a workforce that won’t tire. What are the men and women toiling in the fields if not a faithful extraction, whereby the beckoning arm of California, for a century and counting, reaches deep into the rural heart of Mexico for a new generation’s fresh bodies.

Our crop also counts on an ungodly amount of poison, which we regard as our dirty little secret never to be broached in a social setting. The year-round drift of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides floats from farms to schools to houses and into so many bodies now riddled with neurological disease. Parkinson’s Alley, as the epidemiologists at the University of California, Los Angeles have pinned it on the map, is the very road I’m driving on.

I had shut tight my car windows before leaving suburbia, but there’s no escaping the air, for this is California’s sacrifice zone. Miles and miles stink of dung and diesel. We dwellers of cornucopia breathe in more particulate matter than anywhere else in the country.

Our dairies aren’t mom and pop but factories of fine calibration that squeeze out milk from the teats of 1.3 million Holsteins. Out the other end shoots a river of shit that never stops flowing. The methane and ammonia toxify the already toxic air. Nitrates seep into the dwindling aquifer, fouling the wells people drink from.

Industrial agriculture was the first modern system of extraction that California exported to the world. It inspired the other systems – ballistic warfare, higher education, suburban sprawl, green energy – that we happily produced on a mass scale, pretending not to notice whether it was wonder or woe we were selling.

Our abuse of the state’s extraordinary gift of natural resources collides with our desire to clean the air and water, shrink carbon’s footprint and create solar, wind and battery power. This is California’s great paradox, we tell ourselves, a state big and complicated and enough of a work in progress that we can have it both ways.

In the halls of Sacramento governance, where our split personality is a grand exhibition, the recurring chant from Governor Gavin Newsom and his fellow Democrats is “abundance, abundance”, a magic wand that if waved wholeheartedly can summon the glories of California’s wide-open past.

The abundance agenda, in the fever of their dream, will bring AI prosperity, more housing and less homelessness, and a high-speed rail line that isn’t a boondoggle but will connect rural to urban, coastal to inland, red to blue, so we’ll finally become one. There’s no capitalism, they whisper, like California capitalism. Let it do what it can do once more.

On the outskirts of Coalinga, Chevron’s pump jacks are draining crude from the brown hills, and tens of thousands of cattle fatten up for slaughter in the largest feedlot in the west. There’s a gravel mine, a state prison and acre after acre of pistachio trees growing in dirt that still knows itself as desert. Turbine pumps hum, pulling up water that tastes like the sea. The pistachio, God blessed, is the one fruit-bearing tree that can stand such salt.

Jimmy Anderson pulls up to Coalinga city hall with a rumble. His big white Ford Raptor is gleaming. His leather boots are shiny, too.

He has come to the monthly meeting of the Pleasant Valley water district not from his own cattle feedlot on the dusty edge of town. He’s made the long drive from suburban Fresno, where his house sits along the river on the fifth hole of a country club. Anderson is partial to fifth holes. His multimillion-dollar house on the California coast, the one he flies to in his Swiss-made jet, is a chip shot from the fifth tee at Pebble Beach.

As to any insinuation that he’s a faux farmer, Anderson has a swift and practiced reply. His family on his mother’s side, the Mourens, herded sheep here as far back as the 1860s. This was before miners in Coalinga pulled out the coal that gave the town its name, before wildcatters struck a gusher named “blue goose” in 1898 and turned Coalinga into the No 1 oil field in the state. The Mourens survived hard times to amass tens of thousands of acres. A trust-fund kid now nearing 60, Anderson has been wily enough to add on to the family fortune.

This morning, a look of disquiet in his manner, he takes a seat in the meeting room with fellow farmers and district staff. Together, they listen as a young consultant with a water engineering firm explains just how dry they are. Whether they’re growing pistachios or row crops, overseeing thousands of acres of grazing land or feedlot ground, family farmers or big company men, their dominion as they knew it is no more.

For a century, California had allowed the full-throttle pumping of groundwater. The agriculturalists believed that the aquifer, straight down to thousands of feet, was theirs to do as they pleased with. Then the drought of 2012 to 2016, the worst dry times, struck. Politicians in Sacramento decided the state couldn’t very well regard itself as America’s great progressive hope if it kept signaling to agriculture to “get yours while you can”.

In 2014, California enacted the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act to limit the mining of our most imperiled resource. To keep the growers from complaining too much, the law came with a decade-long rollout. This led, quite expectedly, to a race to the bottom of the aquifer across five valley counties. Hedge funds, pension funds, the insurer John Hancock and the Mormon church joined a stampede of farmers, planting 600,000 more acres of nut trees and drilling thousands more wells. The land was sinking by the foot.

Only recently had the free-for-all exhausted itself, and the law showed its teeth. One million acres and more of valley farmland, one-fifth of agriculture’s footprint here, will now have to be fallowed to achieve something close to sustainability. The axe, as it should, will fall first on the farmland beyond the reach of a river.

Sustainable isn’t a word that rolls off the tongues of growers. When they figured out what sustainable meant – that California would be curtailing their draw of groundwater to no more than what the rain and snowmelt replenished each year – they did what entitled men do. They hired high-priced lawyers and reached for each other’s throats – a good ol’ western water war.

In Pleasant Valley, no river runs through the land. Instead, the groundwater is replenished by creeks that come alive only in hard rains. This has left the cattle ranchers and pistachio growers feuding over a small, briny aquifer that has plummeted 125ft since the first orchard was planted in 1991. The rancor over how they might share their dwindling resource has the sound of a reckoning long overdue.

Pleasant Valley measures 14,000 acres of permanent crops. To grow nuts and vegetables worth tens of millions of dollars each year, the farmers are pumping the aquifer to the tune of nearly three acre-feet of water for every acre. This is enough water to supply 90,000 households for a year. Such an extraction won’t outlast the next long drought.

Sustainability’s bottom line is brutal. To meet the state’s demands, farmers in Pleasant Valley are going to have to cut their pumping to a new level every five years. By 2042, their draw of the aquifer will be reduced by nearly two-thirds. At that point, having achieved a “safe yield” in the eyes of the state, their land will be radically altered. Six-thousand acres of pistachio orchards will need to be ripped out.

“That’s what sustainability is going to look like here,” says Brad Gleason, the district’s board president. “We’ll have to get smaller or smarter.”

I’ve known Gleason since the seventh grade, and when he says “smarter” I get what he means. There’s another option available to wealthy farmers like him: they can build a pipeline and haul in river water from northern California. This way, they’ll still comply with the state law and not drain the local aquifer dry. And they’ll be able to ship in enough water to keep every orchard bursting with nuts.

It won’t be cheap, Gleason says. The pipeline will cost $8m, and they’ll pay $3m a year for the imported water. But by simply extracting snowmelt from up north, the footprint of irrigated agriculture in Pleasant Valley can stay the same. Only the tired old delta, where the northern rivers converge, will feel the loss. This is how the growers plan to outwit the law.

Jimmy Anderson, the biggest landowner in Pleasant Valley, who not only ranches cattle but raises pistachios, has a different plan in mind. To maximize his draw of the local aquifer, he needs to change the district’s formula on sustainability. By late fall, he’s figured out the numbers. But before he can execute his move, he has to wait out Gleason’s tenure and then assemble a new board that will install him as president.

“Jimmy wants to undo everything we’ve worked on for the past year,” says Gleason, who lives near Anderson on 17-Mile Drive in Pebble Beach.

Gleason’s main duty as president is to meet the sustainability goals of the state and avoid costly sanctions for the district. His board, he believes, has adopted the fairest way forward. Standing in his orchard in the desert, he paints a future of environmentally friendly farming. “I was the first farmer to plant pistachios in this ground,” he tells me. “Agriculture still has a place here.”

Before Gleason is able to hand over his plan to the state, however, his tenure as board president ends. By the second meeting of the new year, Jimmy Anderson has executed his takeover. Not only does he make himself president, but with a majority of board members loyal to him, he sets in motion a scheme to monetize the water for his own gain.

As it plays out in stages, one rival board member marvels at Anderson’s execution. Like jiujitsu, he says, you must see his moves in slow motion to truly appreciate their craftiness.

Anderson starts by altering the math of sustainability. The new numbers make sense, at least from the cab of his Ford Raptor. He expands the district’s category for irrigated acres from 14,000 to 22,000 by changing the definition of “irrigated”.

Under Gleason’s plan, “irrigated acres” meant land in Pleasant Valley that was planted and watered year after year. This definition honored a certain code. The landowners who farmed the ground on a continual basis, putting the aquifer to “beneficial use”, would have first dibs on the water.

Anderson’s definition – call it a cattleman’s bent on things – regards the land as a shifting shape. The 8,000 acres he’s added to the ranks of irrigated grow no permanent crops. Many of the acres sit parched. At best, some tracts have been irrigated now and then for vegetables or grain. It’s all the same to Anderson. If a piece of ground has sipped water for a single season over the past decade, he considers it irrigated and thus forever eligible to draw from the aquifer.

Of these entitled acres, it’s no surprise that the lion’s share, 5,000 acres, belong to Anderson and his kin. How much of their ground is farmed