A deeply misguided story in this week’s Newsweek magazine about my state: Death of the Dream, written by Joel Kotkin.
For decades, California has epitomized America’s economic strengths: technological excellence, artistic creativity, agricultural fecundity and an intrepid entrepreneurial spirit. Yet lately California has projected a grimmer vision of a politically divided, economically stagnant state. Last week its legislature cut a deal to close its $42 billion budget deficit, but its larger problems remain.
California has returned from the dead before, most recently in the mid-1990s. But the odds that the Golden State can reinvent itself again seem long. The buffoonish current governor and a legislature divided between hysterical greens, public-employee lackeys and Neanderthal Republicans have turned the state into a fiscal laughingstock. Meanwhile, more of its middle class migrates out while a large and undereducated underclass (much of it Latino) faces dim prospects. It sometimes seems the people running the state have little feel for the very things that constitute its essence—and could allow California to reinvent itself, and the American future, once again.
It doesn’t get much better.
My maternal ancestors came to this state 160 years ago this year; William Whiteside Moore, my great-great-great grandfather, left his homestead in western Illinois and ventured out for the Gold Rush. Family lore has it that a partner stole what gold was found, and my ancestor returned to the Land of Lincoln penniless. He also returned inspired by what he had seen, and he brought his entire family with him. After moving about a bit, they settled in the Santa Clara Valley not long after statehood in 1851. In the mid-1880s, William Whiteside’s son, my great-great grandfather A.A. Moore, purchased a large piece of land in the rolling hills of southern Alameda County, just up above Mission San Jose. My mother’s side has called those hills our truest earthly home ever since.
My father had a different experience of coming to California. Born in Austria, raised as a war refugee in the rural English countryside, he came to the Golden State 110 years after William Whiteside Moore. My papa came for graduate school at Berkeley, and chose an unusual (if inexpensive and colorful) rout. He was the only fare-paying passenger on a merchant ship from Southampton to Miami in the spring of 1959; upon arrival he took a four-day-long Greyhound bus ride from South Florida to the San Francisco Bay Area. He eventually settled in Santa Barbara. He knew the geography of the state better than most natives (name a town, and he knew the county in which it was located, no matter how small and obscure.)
Love of California is in my blood and in my soul in a way that love of the union is not. And I suppose I’m one of those “hysterical greens” against whom Kotkin fulminates in his shrill Newsweek piece. I was raised to understand that California had a natural carrying capacity that it ought not exceed, and that capacity was dictated by one thing nearly completely missing from Kotkin’s article: water. We’ve built our canals and our desalination plants; we’ve drained the Owens River and nearly ruined the Colorado. And though rain keeps falling, we are in a state of near-perpetual drought, a drought exacerbated by the impossible agricultural and human demands placed upon a state that was never capable of hosting so many people.
Kotkin rails against the “green gentry”, and snarks about those who live in my hometown (Carmel by-the-Sea):
You can see the effects of the gentry’s green politics up close in places like the Salinas Valley, a lovely agricultural region south of San Jose. As community leaders there have tried to construct policies to create new higher-wage jobs in the area (a project on which I’ve worked as a consultant), local progressives—largely wealthy people living on the Monterey coast—have opposed, for example, the expansion of wineries that might bring new jobs to a predominantly Latino area with persistent double-digit unemployment. As one winegrower told me last year: “They don’t want a facility that interferes with their viewshed.” For such people, the crusade against global warming makes a convenient foil in arguing against anything that might bring industrial or any other kind of middle-wage growth to the state.
It has damn all to do with a viewshed, Kotkin. It’s w-a-t-e-r. Greens in my town have fought just as hard against new golf courses for the wealthy in Pebble Beach as we have fought against new housing developments inland. The land cannot support as many people and projects as it is being asked to support, and the crumbling of the Golden State is due far more to overbuilding and overpopulation than it is to over-regulation. The rivers and the snowpack are already depleted, and building new dams and canals (at tremendous cost to the environment) is both monumentally expensive and, in the long run, futile. The water simply isn’t there for 40,000,000 people and industry.
I know that the land my ancestors knew isn’t coming back. I’m not drugged on nostalgia. I am, however, interested in the long-term good of this land — and by long-term, I mean centuries rather than decades. And from that standpoint, a decline in growth is a good thing. Kotkin writes:
… the modern environmental movement often adopts a largely misanthropic view of humans as a “cancer” that needs to be contained. By their very nature, the greens tend to regard growth as an unalloyed evil, gobbling up resources and spewing planet-heating greenhouse gases.
He’s wrong that this is a new view; he hasn’t read his Edward Abbey or his Robinson Jeffers, two men who loved this land and wrote about this land and gave their lives to this land. The undiscerning might accuse them of misanthropy, but Jeffers and Abbey understood what it means to take the longest of long views. Long before anyone ever heard of a Prius, these two knew what it really meant to protect this land from humans whose very deathstyle is so frequently parasitical. Their views — hostile to growth and reverent for nature — are part and parcel of California environmentalism today, even in a bastardized and watered-down form.
Jeffers is my favorite poet. And one of my favorite poems is his great Carmel Point, a short offering about the land on which I was raised (my mother still lives 700 yards from Jeffers’ home). And for me, this piece — in its beautiful call to rethink our priorities — is at the root of my environmentalism. This is policy as well as poetry:
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.-As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
That stark, almost terrifying final sentence serves as a theological first principle for me as a Californian. All our works will indeed dissolve, but in the case of many of them, better that they not be built in the first place.