California's Next Hundred Years

by MAX STERN

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IN PRIDE and pageantry the stale of California is celebrating its hundredth birthday and commemorating the great gold rush that started it on its way to fortune and fame in 1849. Torrents of printed and spoken words are flowing at the centennial fiestas along the Mother Lode and in the cities and hamlets throughout the state, in praise of California’s achievements in the brief years of its youth. California the blessed and beautiful, the nation’s third most populous and fastest-growing commonwealth: the state with the most autos, the longest bridges, the best schools, the fewest slums, the greatest variety of farm products, the biggest athletes; the abode of movie stars and of millionaires; Glamour Girl in the American sisterhood of stales! Most of the purple superlatives fit, for probably never before in history have men achieved such an opulent civilization in so short a time. But as California stands on the threshold of its second century and prepares to welcome its second 10 million, a few old sobersides are stopping long enough to ask, What about the future?

Two elements are basic to a prosperous, enduring society: healthy people and an ample storehouse of natural wealth. California has plenty of healthy people. World War II upped its population from around 7 million to 10½ million, and more are pouring across the borders at the rate of about 20,000 a month in what probably has been the biggest human migration in history. Governor Earl Warren says the state must spread its table for a family of 20 million before many years. But its once lavish store of natural resources — those Godmade endowments that feed and house and embellish a state — have been so depleted through a century of careless exploitation that thoughtful Californians are beginning to wonder whether their state can long maintain its high living standards, let alone absorb the millions of new families that are on their way.

In record time the rugged pioneers and empire builders turned California from a pastoral land peopled by a few Mexicans into the magnificent state it is. But what did they do to the great treasures they found the wide reaches of fertile land; the clear, free-flowing streams, the majestic stands of virgin pine and redwood forests; the oil and gas and minerals, and the vast reserves of ground water under the earth; the clean and lovely beaches that rimmed the ocean rich in marine resources?

Exact statistics covering the state’s earlier years are lacking, but estimates have been made to indicate that California has paid a staggering price for its century of progress. Billions of dollars in irreplaceable wealth have vanished through overgrazing, preventable brush and forest fires, ruinous get-rich-quick timber logging, hydraulic and dredge gold mining, wasteful use of oil, gas, and ground water, stream and beach pollution, and other prodigal practices.

Bernard DeVoto says that the big sins that have been committed against the West’s natural resources have been committed by Westerners themselves. Surely this is true of California.

First, what of California’s two basic resources, its soil and its water reserves? California’s land area covers roughly 100 million acres, of which about one third are agricultural. Of the 30 million acres of farmland about five sixths are in range and “sky farms,”and one sixth in irrigated farms. Damage due to overgrazing of sheep and cattle, fires, and poor farm practices has been greatest in the unirrigated hill country.

There is a comfortable illusion that California has escaped that world-wide sickness of the soil known as erosion. This is true, relatively speaking, but only because her lands have been farmed so short a time. The U.S. Soil Conservation Service’s last report reveals that 3 million California acres have lost over three fourths of their topsoil through erosion; that wind erosion has damaged more than 2 million and gully erosion some 7 million acres; that “moderate gully erosion” is gradually taking its toll on 15 million acres; that about two thirds of the state’s total land area “is in need of soil conservation practices.” Land without topsoil is dead land, its food-producing elements washed or blown away for at least four hundred years.

The land that chiefly sustains California and the rest, of the West is land irrigated through ditches, with life-giving water drawn from canals, streams, and wells. The 5 million man-watered acres in California’s many valleys produce 85 per cent of the state’s 2-billion-dollar farm income. What of them? Lying flat for the most part on the valley floors, these acres have suffered relatively little from the gully erosion that has ruined so many acres on the slopes. California also has been spared the invasion of corn and tobacco, the big soil-despoilers of the Midwest and the South.

Wind erosion, however, is a new and serious threat, particularly to the broad plains of the southern San Joaquin Valley, where King Cotton and his motley subjects have moved in to claim tens of thousands of acres. This area threatens to become a problem area, the first California Dust Howl. In the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, recent winds have blown away topsoil from an estimated 250,000 acres of rich farmland. Last year, Kern County was visited by eight “dusters, the latest of which ushered in the New Year with a storm so severe that it piled drifts two feet high on cotton fields, caused damage of at least a million dollars, and so blinded the countryside that traffic was shut off on Tejon Pass from the valley to Los Angeles. This is the land of the great holdings made famous by Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Mrs. Hobart’s Cleft Rock, where three corporate firms — a land company, an oil corporation, and a railroad — own 353,000 acres, a vast, almost treeless reach of mechanized “factories in the field" farmed by tractors and itinerant families.

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THE number one problem of the valleys, however, is not erosion of the land; it is shortage of water. This is a long, tragic story. One chapter tells of the hydraulic miners of the early days who hosed out great holes in the Mother Lode in their frantic gold hunt, literally moving mountains, silting the river bottoms, destroying navigation and salmon spawning grounds, and causing floods along the Sacramento River that have cost many millions in damage and many more in levees and other flood-control works.

Another chapter relates to their successors, the big corporate gold-diggers of yesterday and today who have sent and are sending their huge dragline dredgers and “doodlebugs" into the fertile river bottoms of the Feather, the Bear, the Yuba, the American, the Calaveras, the Stanislaus, the Mokelumne, the Merced, and the Tuolumne rivers to tear away productive farms and leave in their stead sterile, unsightly mountains of gravel. All attempts to halt this destruction of basic wealth have failed in the California legislature.

Another chapter is the story of the copper smelters of the Upper Sacramento, the Pit, and the Calaveras river districts where fumes once poisoned plant life and left the hills stripped of vegetation. Another tells of the gutting of forest and brush cover by axe and fire and of the overgrazing of the slate’s 45 million acres of watershed, thus subjecting these natural reservoirs to erosion and the silting of stream beds and reservoirs.

The acute shortage of irrigation water today is chiefly due to the fact that there are too many irrigators and not enough conservation storage and distribution works. High farm prices resulting from the two wars have been a great temptation to farmers — particularly to the big corporate planters.

Over the past four decades an average of about 60,000 acres a year has been added to the irrigated area of California’s Central Valley (the Sacramento and the San Joaquin valleys plus the connecting Delta). In 1947, in six sout hern San Joaquin Valley counties alone, 114,000 new acres were brought under irrigation, and 1948 saw the addition of 120,000 more. Since the building of irrigation works is from fifteen to twenty years behind normal schedule, practically all the water for this newly cultivated land came from wells.

Years ago California began worrying over the condition of the San Joaquin Valley’s underground storage. Artesian wells failed, Tulare Lake went dry, and the underground supply gave out in some areas of the southern end of the valley. The encroaching desert claimed some 80,000 acres and menaced about 800,000 more in irrigated farms. Finally, the situation got so bad that the people undertook, through their big State Water Plan, to import the floodwaters of the Sacramento River a distance of 500 miles into the southern San Joaquin.

This project proved too costly for California alone. The state appealed to Uncle Sam, and ten years ago the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation took over. Today it is finishing the first step of the multimillion-dollar Central Valley Project. CVP will rescue with new and supplemental water about a million acres of farms from the desert’s clutches, but the initial works will not begin to supply the increased need. Charles Kaupke, Kings River Water master, estimates that 5 million acre-feet of water are being pumped annually from under six counties, and only 1½ million annually replenish it. The initial CVP is an emergency rescue job that will bring these counties about 800,000 acrefeet of imported water a year. They need at least 2 million.

What will California do about its other new water customers? Sinking water tables, some now as low as 450 feet, wells costing as much as $30,000 each, the pumping of sally water highly damaging to the soil in many places, dust storms, and other danger signals warn of the need for early, drastic, and costly action.

“Bring tis more water and quick!” is the cry every Congressman hears as he travels down the Great Valley. The same cry is heard in the Salinas, the Santa Clara, and other coastal valleys where the population has outgrown the water supply, in Santa Barbara, Ventura, Solano counties, in the Sierra foothill fruit belt, and, of course, in watershort southern California, which has a story of its own. Foreseeing the time in the not too distant future when they will have to refuse to admit migrant families for lack of enough water, Los Angeles engineers today discuss ways of treating sewage to use its water for irrigation, of distilling salt water into fresh, of importing water from the West’s only big surplus — the Columbia River Basin, far to the north.

The state’s water and power shortage was dramatized into headline proportions in the drought of the winter of 1947-1948 when Santa Barbara citizens watered their lawns with secondhand bath water and bought drinking water from tank trucks; when Coalinga hauled water a distance of 40 miles in tank cars; when Sierra foothill communities lost heavily in ruined orchards and stockmen moved their herds to neighbor states. Only an unusual series of late spring rains saved the state from a major disaster.

The Federal Bureau of Reclamation claims to have the answer to California’s chief water needs, particularly in its Great Valley, where the bulk of her food and fruit is grown. When the CVP’s initial works are finished and the “moving of the waters” begins in 1952, the water conservation program for the state’s “two-billion-dollar empire” will have just begun. The Bureau has prepared over the years a massive report with plans for harnessing all of the valley’s undeveloped water and power. This master plan would double the valley’s irrigated area to some 6½ million acres, develop some 8 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, and provide enough water for homes and farms for 250,000 people. These works, costing more than 2 billion dollars, would utilize the Central Valley’s greatest remaining unused resource, 8 million acrefeet of water which now annually waste from Central Valley into the ocean. The cost would be largely repaid to the government from the sale of water and power.

Indispensable as such a self-liquidaling, comprehensive development is to California’s future, conservationists point out that with the dam and canal building there must also be carried out a program of upstream conservation to restore and preserve the forests and brushlands above the dams — the source of the water that fills the reservoirs and restores the underground supplies. And this brings us to consideration of the state of California’s third most precious resource, her timberlands.

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WHEN James Marshall saw the first glitter of California gold at Column on January 24, 1848, he happened to be working at John Sutter’s little sawmill on the American River. California then had more than 20 million acres in heavy stands of virgin timber. Within a short time, bigger and more efficient mills moved into the mountains. Armies of woodsmen raced in with axes and donkey engines and flumes and railroads, and the cry of “Gold!” gave way to the cry of “Timber!”

Whether through ignorance or greed or both, these woodsmen gave little heed to selective logging or other means of saving young stock for tomorrow’s harvest, or to preserving the precious undergrowth from burning. Today you’ll find their accusers in miles of stumps, in blackened and denuded hillsides, in abandoned milltowns and impoverished homes. In winter you’ll see other accusers in swollen, yellow, silt-laden rivers, and in summer in dry arroyos filled with sand instead of water.

When gold was discovered California had about 472 billion board feet of virgin timber. Today there remain 240 billion board feet —about 50 per cent of the original stand! California is the nation’s biggest timber consumer and uses twice as much per capita as the United States as a whole. About a billion board feet annually go into box shook in which to ship its huge output of fruit and vegetables. Last year, the state consumed nearly 6 billion board feet. It produced only 8 billion, however, of which it exported a billion. The rest came chiefly from the Northwest. The war and the post-war building boom have stepped up cutting to a new tempo: over 1000 sawmills are now operating, compared with 300 just before the war. In 1945 a legislative committee reported that the state’s virgin timber would “certainly not last more than fifty years, in many places a great deal less.” At the present rate of exploitation this would seem to be an optimistic forecast.

Although California’s century of progress has taken half of her virgin timber, the cutover lands are not all ruined. It is estimated that one third of the cutover forests still contain good stands of Second growth and another third are slowly recovering. At least 3½ million acres, however, must be reforested by long and costly artificial means or written off’as worse than wasteland.

About a decade ago the state awakened to what was happening to its forests. First, it set about encouraging private loggers to mend their ways. In 1945 the legislature passed the Forest Practices Act, a measure for self-regulation of the commercial forests that are privately owned. Codes of cutting practices were framed and adopted by the owners, policed by the state, with the view of farming the forests instead of mining them. Opinions difler as to the success of this move. The big companies have caught the long-range vision and are coöperating fairly well, but the wildcatters or gyppologgers,” activated by high prices, lease or buy a forest piece, cut everything that is marketable, and then move on to a new terrain.

About twenty years ago the state had tackled that big foe of the woods — forest and brush fire. This public enemy annually claims about 300,000 acres of timber, brush, and range in about 3800 fires each year, of which nine out of ten are mancaused. The state and Federal forest agencies are conducting a notable publicity campaign, for the purpose of educating campers, smokers, and others, and preventing the careless incendiarism that is causing so much damage. Recently, California has expanded its Slate Park System, which today embraces more than 500,000 acres. Included in this system are 60,000 acres of ancient Coast Range redwoods, famed as Earth’s oldest and largest living things and the pride and joy of every Californian. The invasion of the loggers into these priceless groves has been less destructive than in the pine forests; only 35 per cent of the original redwood stands have been cut over, in contrast with 70 per cent of private pine forests.

A beginning also has been made in buying state forests, although this program is fairly puny in relation to similar ones in other states. California’s state forests embrace 70,500 acres, compared with Washington’s 290,000, Oregon’s 519,000, and even little Maryland’s 119,500. The state has removed taxes for forty years on growing limber to encourage reforestation, but has done little toward supplying privale owners with nursery stock at low cost, as is done in Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and other Eastern states. Privale owners, organized under the California Forest Protective Association, coöperate with state and Federal agencies in a program whose slogan is “Keep California Green and Golden.”

The best work, undoubtedly, is being done in the National Forests, where logging is regulated, fireprotection systematized, and all the multiple purposes of the woods are more or less scientifically promoted. In California, Uncle Sam owns and operates eighteen National Forests, averaging about a million acres each. While these forests have one half of the state’s resources in saw timber, they produce, under selective cutting, only one fifth of the lumber output. Their big contribution is the protection they afford to the watersheds. These eighteen great natural reservoirs yield nearly half of the annual runoff of 70 million acre-feet of water. This is the water supply for most of the homes and farms in the valleys below. It is also the water that creates, on its way to the valleys, nearly 13 billion kilowatt-hours of hydroelectricity, or 92 percent of the annual output. The spacious reaches of these protected forests provide recreation for 4½ million people each year, sanctuary for a multitude of fish and wild game, grazing for cattle and sheep. Ever stricter rules of regulation prevail in the 2 million acres of the four big Federal playgrounds — the National Parks run by the Interior Department.

It is doubtful that the forest lands of California ever again will be able to produce all the timber the state needs. But if all the commercial lorests were scientifically logged and managed — each acre, say, producing 400 board feet a year — California could almost meet her own needs for all time to come. One University of California expert, Woodbridge Metcalf, claims that if all the state’s timber forests were pul under good forest management, it would be possible to grow the 6 billion board feet the state is annually consuming. Even if it did not, the effort and money required to put all the state’s forests under sustained yield management would be more than repaid in the protection such a program would give to the people’s land and water resources. Theodore Roosevelt once said: “A people without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as hopeless.”

Among the ghosts of California’s vanished forest trees wander the ghosts of the forest’s wild creatures. California once abounded in wild life of all kinds, but not today. The state’s official emblem is the grizzle bear, a magnificent creature that now appears only on its Bear Flag. Gone or almost gone are other fabled fauna from the woodlands — the golden beaver, that indefatigable first builder of flood-control dams; the famous Sierra bighorn sheep that used to roam the highest of the high Sierras; the elk and the prong-horned antelope; the sharp-tailed grouse, the majestic California condor, the trumpeter swan. From the offshore sea have practically vanished the Guadalupe fur seal, the sturgeon, the sea otter; and big inroads have been made into the once abundant stores of sardine, tuna, salmon, and other food fish. The state’s official fish is the golden trout of the High Sierras, now holding his own by reason of his inaccessibility to all but the hardiest sportsmen.

“We have good reason to believe,”said Dr. E. P. Meinecke, noted plant pathologist, “that the elk and deer, the bear, and many other mammals, fish and birds, abounded in almost incredible numbers. In wild animals, California must have been one of the richest regions in the world. Today, that picture is no longer true.”

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So MUCH for California’s diminishing organic wealth, much of which, through patient husbanding, could be restored. California’s mineral wealth also is going fast. The state truly has earned its title of the Golden State. In the past cent ury there has been blasted, dug, panned, washed, dredged, and otherwise removed from its soil more than 2 billion dollars in gold. California also tops the nation as a producer of quicksilver. It has yielded great wealth in copper, silver, zinc, lead, and some sixty-odd other kinds of commercial minerals. But surpassing all the others is California’s wealth of oil and gas. Second only to Texas in production and in known reserves of oil and gas, California has let from her veins nearly 8 billion barrels of petroleum, always lavishly and often wastefully.

Known oil reserves today are estimated at 3½ billion barrels. Coder present methods and at the present rate of production, here is a supply sufficient to last about ten years! Of course, this estimate does not account for possible new discoveries. Other developments, such as flushing old wells by water, may also prolong the life of the oil fields. So would importation of supplemental fuels, such as oil from shale or coal from Utah, now being discussed. So would full and early expansion of hydroelectric development, since by far the bigger portion of the private power companies’ expansion program is in gas and oil driven steam generation. The 8 billion kilowatt-hours of hydroeleclrieily which could be produced on Central Valley streams would conserve 15 million barrels of oil a year. But as of today, the most optimistic oilmen admit that the end, if not in sight, is certainly around the corner.

Reed D. Bush, State Oil and Gas Supervisor, is the last man one would call an alarmist, but here is his story briefly told: —

“On December 31, 1947, California’s known oil reserves were 3,294,963,000 barrels. The wells are producing at the rale of 340,000,000 barrels a year. The known reserves are only ten times the annual production. While new discoveries may add materially to the supply, the prospect is we’re not going to have enough to supply the State, and that we’re going to have to import. It is predicted that we’ll not have enough new discoveries to fill the anticipated increased demand along with the current demand. Up to now California has been a heavy exporter and has supplied the entire Pacific area, as far west as Japan. We’ll soon be importing — from Texas, Venezuela, or Saudi Arabia.”

The natural gas story is hardly more cheerful. On January 1, 1948, California’s natural gas reserves totaled 11.7 trillion cubic feet. These are being drawn upon at the rate of 606 billion cubic feet a year. At. that rate the supply will last twenty years. California already is importing 350 million cubic feet a day via pipeline from Texas and New Mexico, and an application has been made to the State Public Utilities Commission to build another line, carrying 300 million cubic feet. Incidentally, in September, 1929, California wells were blowing into the air a billion cubic feet of natural gas a day.

There are signs that California’s psychology is changing. Here and there voices are being raised against the theme of the boosters that here’s a land of eternal plenty, so come and get it. A gradual realization is spreading that there is a limit to the state’s abundance and that the purely “extractive economy" of the past must be rather speedily replaced by a modern, aggressive program of conservation, supported by all the people, in which the remaining natural wealth of the state is used wisely, capital is conserved, and nothing is wasted.

Farmers increasingly are carrying out soil and water conservation programs on their agricultural land through Soil Conservation Districts. Today there are 58 Soil Conservation Districts embracing 41,372 farms in California, and the movement is spreading. Another hopeful sign comes from the State Department of Natural Resources, which has just set up an office for a Chief of Conservation Education to coöperate with the State Department of Education in a program of basic information for the school curricula. This movement is a recognition that the state’s key resource is in the minds and wills of its people, and that to condition their minds and wills the educators must begin with young minds clean of the old concepts. One can only wish that this movement had started a generation or two ago.

“For the past hundred years we’ve been taking things out,” said State Director of Natural Resources Warren T. Hannum. “Recently we’ve been waking up to the fact that we must conserve and replenish our renewable natural wealth. We just can’t afford another hundred years like the first.”

California still is a land of plenty, a land flowing with milk and honey. But so, we are told, were Mesopotamia, North Africa, and the vanished Yucatán of the Mayans.