{"id":11589,"date":"2021-08-18T03:56:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-18T10:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=11589"},"modified":"2021-08-17T15:59:53","modified_gmt":"2021-08-17T22:59:53","slug":"over-drawn-in-the-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2021\/08\/18\/over-drawn-in-the-west\/","title":{"rendered":"Over-drawn In The West"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The Atlantic<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

THE WELL FIXER\u2019S WARNING<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

The lesson that California never learns<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Mark Arax<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Diptych
An almond grove in distress near Madera, California, and a sample of water from an overdrawn well (Jim McAuley for The Atlantic)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The well fixer\u00a0and I were standing at the edge of an almond orchard in the exhausted middle of California. It was late July, and so many wells on the farms of Madera County were coming up dry that he was running out of parts to fix them. In this latest round of western drought, desperate voices were calling him at six in the morning and again at midnight. They were puzzled why their pumps were coughing up sand, the water\u2019s flow to their orchards now a trickle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It occurred to him that these same farmers had endured at least five droughts since the mid-1970s and that drought, like the sun, was an eternal condition of California. But he also understood that their ability to shrug off nature\u2014no one forgot the last drought faster than the farmer, Steinbeck wrote\u2014was part of their genius. Their collective amnesia had allowed them to forge the most industrialized farm belt in the world. Whenever a new drought set down, they believed it was a force that could be conquered.\u00a0build more dams, their signs along Highway 99 read, even though the dams on the San Joaquin River already numbered half a dozen. The well fixer understood their hidebound ways. He understood their stubbornness, and maybe even their delusion. Here at continent\u2019s edge, nothing westward but the sea, we were all deluded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Besides, he couldn\u2019t turn them away. His company, Madera Pumps, was his livelihood; the city of Madera was his home. He farmed his own acres of almonds near the center of town. The voices on the line weren\u2019t simply customers. Many were lifelong friends who were true family farmers. So he was patching up their irrigation systems the best he could to get them through a last drink before the nut harvest began in mid-August. At the same time, he knew that something fundamental had changed. If he was going to keep on planting wells, pursuing a culture of extraction that had defined California since the Gold Rush, he could no longer remain silent about its peril.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at The Atlantic<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Atlantic THE WELL FIXER\u2019S WARNING The lesson that California never learns By\u00a0Mark Arax An almond grove in distress near Madera, California, and a sample of water from an overdrawn well (Jim McAuley for The Atlantic) The well fixer\u00a0and I were standing at the edge of an almond orchard in the exhausted middle of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}