"Congress Created Dust Bowl"

Last week I was in a packing, buying, and organizing frenzy attempting to get everything in order for a month long WWOOFing trip.

The morning after senior prom I went on a bike ride with my mom for mother's day and threw my life into the trunk of my Subaru Forester.

Yesterday I drove with my dad from San Diego to Sacramento through hundreds of miles of massive agribusiness farms in the San Joaquin valley.  Between fields and fields of crops was the occasional "Congress Created Dust Bowl" road sign on barren fields which had once been farm land.

Back in 2007 restrictions were imposed on water diverted from the Sacramento rive delta to protect the dwindling habitat of the endangered Delta Smelt, a small native fish.  Agribusinesses were furious they they no longer could irrigate their fields of water-intensive crops and began a campaign of protest which included the signs.

For years agribusinesses and their respective lobbyists have secured the political leverage needed to divert all of the water from northern California they need to irrigate their crops in the dry southern valley.  Left to its own devices, the San Joaquin valley would be full of grasses, occasional oaks, and chaparral.  With modern water diversion techniques, however, the valley is filled with lush, green fields of crops and endless groves of nut and citrus trees thanks to water pumped down from Sacramento.  

It was jarring in a sense to see a grove of perfectly aligned nut trees standing dry and lifeless in a sea of weeds. It almost looked as if fall had come, stripping the trees of leaves and nuts - but oddly in May, when every other grove in the valley was just entering the growing season.  The remnants of orchards were a reminder that many of the crops grown in the southern valley aren't capable of growing in its near-desert climate without the help of human-imposed water diversions.  No matter how hard man can try to alter some ecosystems - like turning desert valleys into fertile farm land - some will flatly refuse to cooperate with corporate demand.

Read about the initial water restrictions which prompted the road signs here.