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The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California
Author Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even as California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In The Dreamt Land, he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution system, built in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, that is straining to keep up with California's relentless growth.
This is a heartfelt, beautifully written book about the land and the people who have worked it--from gold miners to wheat ranchers to small fruit farmers and today's Big Ag. Since the beginning, Californians have redirected rivers, drilled ever-deeper wells and built higher dams, pushing the water supply past its limit.
The Dreamt Land weaves reportage, history, and memoir to confront the "Golden State" myth in riveting fashion. No other chronicler of the West has so deeply delved into the empires of agriculture that drink so much of the water. The nation's biggest farmers--the nut king, grape king and citrus queen--tell their story here for the first time.
It is a tale of politics and hubris in the arid West, of imported workers left behind in the sun and the fatigued earth that is made to give more even while it keeps sinking. But when drought turns to flood once again, all is forgotten as the farmers plant more nuts and the developers build more houses.
Arax, the native son, is persistent and tough as he treks from desert to delta, mountain to valley. What he finds is hard earned, awe-inspiring, tragic and revelatory. In the end, his compassion for the land becomes an elegy to the dream that created California and now threatens to undo it.
This is a heartfelt, beautifully written book about the land and the people who have worked it--from gold miners to wheat ranchers to small fruit farmers and today's Big Ag. Since the beginning, Californians have redirected rivers, drilled ever-deeper wells and built higher dams, pushing the water supply past its limit.
The Dreamt Land weaves reportage, history, and memoir to confront the "Golden State" myth in riveting fashion. No other chronicler of the West has so deeply delved into the empires of agriculture that drink so much of the water. The nation's biggest farmers--the nut king, grape king and citrus queen--tell their story here for the first time.
It is a tale of politics and hubris in the arid West, of imported workers left behind in the sun and the fatigued earth that is made to give more even while it keeps sinking. But when drought turns to flood once again, all is forgotten as the farmers plant more nuts and the developers build more houses.
Arax, the native son, is persistent and tough as he treks from desert to delta, mountain to valley. What he finds is hard earned, awe-inspiring, tragic and revelatory. In the end, his compassion for the land becomes an elegy to the dream that created California and now threatens to undo it.
576 pages, Hardcover
First published May 21, 2019
About the author
Mark Arax
9 books97 followersIn the world of journalism, Mark Arax stands out as a rarity. On one hand, he is a skilled investigative reporter who unearths secrets from the depths of shadow governments. On the other hand, he is a gifted writer whose feature stories and books are distinguished by the “poetry of his prose.”
His Los Angeles Times stories revealing state sanctioned murder and cover-up in California prisons were praised by The Nation magazine as “one of great journalistic achievements of the decade.” Fellow writers at PEN and Sigma Delta Chi have singled out the lyrical quality of his writing in award-winning stories on life and death in California’s heartland. In a review of his most recent book, “West of the West,” the Washington Post called Mark a “great reporter…. tenacious and unrelenting.”
Like the legendary Carey McWilliams, Mark digs deep in the dirt of the Golden State, finding tragedies hidden from most Californians. With equal passion, he chronicles the plight of both farm workers and farmers. His stories on the land are told from the close up of a native whose own family narrative is found in the same soil. His grandfather Aram's first job in America was picking the fruits and vegetables of the San Joaquin Valley; his father, Ara, was born on a raisin farm outside Fresno.
Mark’s first book, “In My Father’s Name,” is a stirring memoir that weaves together the history of his Armenian family and hometown of Fresno with his decades-long search to find the men who murdered his father in 1972. A full-page review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review saw Mark’s journey to wrest the truth from his haunted past as a kind of "Moby Dick" struggle.
His second book, the bestselling “The King of California,” co-authored with Rick Wartzman, tells the epic story of the Boswell farming family and the building of a secret American empire in the middle of California. Named one of the top ten books of the year by the L.A. Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, "The King of California" won a 2004 California Book Award and the 2005 William Saroyan International Writing Prize.
His third book, a 2009 collection of stories called “West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders and Killers in the Golden State,” received critical acclaim in the Atlantic Monthly and Los Angeles Times and a starred review in Publishers Weekly, which compared Mark’s “sure and supple essays” to the great social portraits of Joan Didion and William Saroyan.
"It is Arax's personal connection to the land,” the review noted, “that pushes his collection past mere reportage to a high literary enterprise that beautifully integrates the private and idiosyncratic with the sweep of great historical forces."
A top graduate of Fresno State and Columbia University, Mark left the Los Angeles Times in 2007 after a public fight over censorship of his story on the Armenian Genocide. He has taught literary non fiction at Claremont McKenna College and Fresno State University and served as a senior policy director for the California Senate Majority Leader. The father of three children who lives on a suburban farm in Fresno, Mark still throws a mean batting practice to his Little League players.
His Los Angeles Times stories revealing state sanctioned murder and cover-up in California prisons were praised by The Nation magazine as “one of great journalistic achievements of the decade.” Fellow writers at PEN and Sigma Delta Chi have singled out the lyrical quality of his writing in award-winning stories on life and death in California’s heartland. In a review of his most recent book, “West of the West,” the Washington Post called Mark a “great reporter…. tenacious and unrelenting.”
Like the legendary Carey McWilliams, Mark digs deep in the dirt of the Golden State, finding tragedies hidden from most Californians. With equal passion, he chronicles the plight of both farm workers and farmers. His stories on the land are told from the close up of a native whose own family narrative is found in the same soil. His grandfather Aram's first job in America was picking the fruits and vegetables of the San Joaquin Valley; his father, Ara, was born on a raisin farm outside Fresno.
Mark’s first book, “In My Father’s Name,” is a stirring memoir that weaves together the history of his Armenian family and hometown of Fresno with his decades-long search to find the men who murdered his father in 1972. A full-page review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review saw Mark’s journey to wrest the truth from his haunted past as a kind of "Moby Dick" struggle.
His second book, the bestselling “The King of California,” co-authored with Rick Wartzman, tells the epic story of the Boswell farming family and the building of a secret American empire in the middle of California. Named one of the top ten books of the year by the L.A. Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, "The King of California" won a 2004 California Book Award and the 2005 William Saroyan International Writing Prize.
His third book, a 2009 collection of stories called “West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders and Killers in the Golden State,” received critical acclaim in the Atlantic Monthly and Los Angeles Times and a starred review in Publishers Weekly, which compared Mark’s “sure and supple essays” to the great social portraits of Joan Didion and William Saroyan.
"It is Arax's personal connection to the land,” the review noted, “that pushes his collection past mere reportage to a high literary enterprise that beautifully integrates the private and idiosyncratic with the sweep of great historical forces."
A top graduate of Fresno State and Columbia University, Mark left the Los Angeles Times in 2007 after a public fight over censorship of his story on the Armenian Genocide. He has taught literary non fiction at Claremont McKenna College and Fresno State University and served as a senior policy director for the California Senate Majority Leader. The father of three children who lives on a suburban farm in Fresno, Mark still throws a mean batting practice to his Little League players.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 217 reviews
July 19, 2019
Note: The second-to-last chapter of this book, titled "960-acre babies", is about my extended family. Jack Woolf, the family patriarch, is my grandfather; Stuart Woolf, his son and successor, is my father. The reception of the book within our family has been mixed: it does not present us in a positive light, and some feel it is factually inaccurate. (This latter group includes me, but the inaccuracies are minor: my brother Wiley, for example, was not named after Wylie Giffen, who led Sun Maid in the early 20th century.)
Family publicity aside, this is the best book about Fresno, if not the Central Valley, I have ever read. It is well-written, coherent, and relevant. I wish for nothing but its enduring success and hope it will be read across the state.
It is also the only book I have ever read whose content provides direct context to my life and the lives of many people I know. I wish it had been published earlier, perhaps when I was a teenager.
Family publicity aside, this is the best book about Fresno, if not the Central Valley, I have ever read. It is well-written, coherent, and relevant. I wish for nothing but its enduring success and hope it will be read across the state.
It is also the only book I have ever read whose content provides direct context to my life and the lives of many people I know. I wish it had been published earlier, perhaps when I was a teenager.
June 2, 2019
If you are a land owner in California this feels like a must read! An excellent history of California’s water woes punctuated with many stories of the local growers. I listened to the book and was rapt to his every word, it’s a long book, maybe 13 hours, my batteries don’t last that long so forced to make this a two day venture, I yearned to get back to it! I am an avid gardener with a deep interest in nuturing the land, was gardening the entire times I listened and enjoyed hearing all aspects. I really enjoyed the family dynamics of pomegranates and citrus. I live on an irrigation canal dug by the gold miners in the 1800s, a miners inch has greater meaning to me than most, but I still think it’s an excellent story about California’s history.
June 26, 2019
A fascinating and well-written history of the Central Valley in CA told mainly through the lens of farmers. Based on that description alone, I would agree that it doesn’t exactly scream ‘Read me!’, until you realize the skill of the author (a former LA Times reporter) to weave the foundational history (eg gold rush) with the current challenges of water, drought, law, immigration, environment, and capitalism - oh, and the ego of man to bend nature to its will. Ultimately, it’s a story of America. Highly recommend.
March 20, 2020
”I’ve gone through three of these (boom bust agricultural) cycles [connected to drought / flood cycle] , and none of them has been crazier than this one. In my grandfather’s day, if you didn’t have your land paid off, you couldn’t add a single acre. Today, you can be carrying a debt of eight grand an acre, and they’ll let you borrow twelve grand an acre to plant more almonds and pistachios. Equity and cheap interest rates means oversupply. And oversupply means a demand for water than cannot be met. The Federal Reserve can print all the phony money it wants. But it can’t print water. We can put off the national debt, but we can’t put off the day of reckoning out here.:
This is so brilliant. It deserves every nonfiction award there is this year. The Dreamt Land goes straight to my favorites shelf. While it discusses the specific case of California, it offers an object lesson to any situation where people are rushing headlong to make quick money that depends on natural resources, without anyone—themselves, the government, finance—being honest about how the natural world works.
It is also an eloquent paean to California’s rich central valley, and a tribute to those who farm it responsibly. It recognizes the wild nature and heroic ideas of the people who built the systems that transport water from one end of the state to the other. It’s brutal about the deception and selfishness that leaves sunken valley floors as the aquifers collapse (permanently), and produces salt and selenium-soaked soil and groundwater.
Arax’s Armenian grandparents came to the valley a century ago, but long ago lost their farm. He has spent his career, as an LA Times reporter and author, researching regional people and issues. The value of this book is that it doesn’t point at one villain or a simple explanation. Arax tracks dozens of actions and broken promises from a wide variety of players. He interviews farmers and lets them speak for themselves. He studies documents and court decisions from the gold rush onward. He travels thousands of miles, actually looking at the land and the canals.
Boiled down, however, the argument is this: every argument for a water project has said it’s necessary to support current acreage, and every time a project is built, it’s led to putting more acreage into production. Or more housing developments. And almost always the additional acreage is marginal. In addition, the promised mitigating measures seldom materialize, in particular the drainage system that was supposed to remove salt laden irrigation runoff from the west side of the central valley’s alkaline soil.
I love Arax’s writing about our state. Sometimes it expresses pain or frustration, other times it paints a picture of the land and its processes.
I drive past the packing house where I boxed peaches and plums as a kid and come to a stop in a vineyard outside Selma, where the raisin harvest is about to begin. The thermometer has shot beyond one hundred degrees for fourteen straight days. Three farmworkers have died in this heat. The vines haven’t drunk water for thirty days, but that is by design. The dry condition lets the farmer reconfigure the dirt rows between the vines, building a slight slope that angles toward the sun and allows water, in the event of a freak rain, to drain off the grapes baking on paper trays. Down the dirt road that runs through the vineyard, Honda Civics on their third owners line the path…Not a worker can be seen…a skinny young man…he parts the curtain of cane and leaf and steps completely inside the vine, hacking away at its purple bunches with one hand and letting the bunches plop into a plastic tub he holds with his other hand. It takes him forty-eight seconds to fill the tub. Then he bends over in the opposite direction and spills the fruit across a paper tray in the row’s middle, in the full sun. This is the oven where the grapes will bake.
Two of my great-great-grandfathers came to the valley in the 1850s and 1860s, and tried for decades to dry farm. Other ancestors came in the 1910s, as railroad worker, electrical engineer, would-be actress. Our city folk became teachers, rocket engineer, social worker, doctor, and so on. Then my sister married a soil and water researcher with the University of California’s Agricultural Field Station, and spent the last thirty years in the valley. Once again the cycle of water and harvest was part of the conversation at family gatherings. So this book feels very close to my land, and I am grateful to Mark Arax for teaching me so much about it.
In the wet years of 2005 and 2006, Resnick [of Pom-Wonderful infamy] had more water than even his trees could drink. So much water came down the aqueduct that he could afford to sell some of the surplus from the water bank. This was public water he was selling back to the state through a program called the Environmental Water Account….The program allowed Resnick to masquerade as an environmentalist while raiding California’s ecological kitty. He was paying the state anywhere from $28 to $86 an acre-foot for the water he deposited in the bank. He was then selling this water back to the state—and the fish—for $200 an acre-foot…
I listened to Arax narrate his book, and I highly recommend the audible version.
August 11, 2019
To get my one complaint out of the way: this book needed more maps! There's one basic one at the beginning, but the author references many different geographies than are labeled on it, and in different levels of detail. Especially as a non-Californian, I very much wanted a little more illustration of exactly what kinds of places I was dealing with in each chapter.
A fascinating read overall - natural and man-made history, California mythology and myth-busting in all its contradictions. I love these stories of the massive human ingenuity it took to colonize and engineer such a vast ecosystem and turn its natural flood/drought cycles to something amenable to industrial-scale agriculture, told with the understanding that ingenuity does not equal wisdom. And told with empathy for people - not just the farmers and laborers on the land, but a whole state and country that rely on these water systems and agricultural production - who have now worked ourselves into an impossible situation. Raises important questions of what makes something a public versus private resource and how to approach an increasingly complicated and existential challenge.
A fascinating read overall - natural and man-made history, California mythology and myth-busting in all its contradictions. I love these stories of the massive human ingenuity it took to colonize and engineer such a vast ecosystem and turn its natural flood/drought cycles to something amenable to industrial-scale agriculture, told with the understanding that ingenuity does not equal wisdom. And told with empathy for people - not just the farmers and laborers on the land, but a whole state and country that rely on these water systems and agricultural production - who have now worked ourselves into an impossible situation. Raises important questions of what makes something a public versus private resource and how to approach an increasingly complicated and existential challenge.
June 11, 2019
I’m a bit more than halfway through this book. At 530 pages it is not a light summer read. It is, however, a beautifully written book and one that lots of people ought to be required to read - particularly California politicians. It’s the story of water, the California land grab, politics, agriculture in the arid West, greed, and ingenuity.
August 28, 2020
As usual I've waited too long after finishing to write up any thoughts. My remaining impressions are equally typical: edifying but maddeningly lacking in citation, rendering what could have been a valuable history of water in California down to a hodge-podge of of errata and autobiography. An entertaining, educational hodge-podge full of great leads, but on the whole not something I would ever feel comfortable citing directly.
I will say that Arax has a nose for errata that are not trivial to look up on the Internet, and that my limited, library-less ability to vet facts on said Internet have not yielded any egregious falsehoods, though I have found a few minor problems I've described in the notes below.
The strongest part of the book was probably what first directed me to it: his chapter on the Resnicks, a couple who have made a fortune out of watering the southern San Joaquin Valley, and who Arax profiles with apparent detail and humanity (and which I first read in the California Sunday Magazine). This is where the book really is primary source material, because Arax is basically telling the story of his own reporting over many years, as well as his own family's story from the San Joaquin. The line between idealistic self-made dreamers and subhuman hubristic capitalists runs through so many Californians, and Arax is at his best when he traces its path through the Resnicks.
The writing is also surprisingly good, though there is a rather annoying and repeated tendency to "noun" adjectives, e.g. "each face wears its own weary" (p. 315). Once or twice is enough, thanks.
Of course, I was somewhat disappointed that Arax didn't seem to care much for nature in the specific, which, fine, not everyone has to indulge in my obsessions to the degree that I do, but the San Joaquin Valley is a place where an entire distinct ecosystem was practically obliterated by western culture and almost no one who blazes up and down I-5 has any conception of it. To Arax, this pre-Western condition merited a few passing references to Indians, wildflowers, and Tulare Lake. Today's Central Valley is an ecological cyborg, its vasculature totally rerouted into aqueducts and pipes, its skin mechanically flayed and arrayed with nut trees, its innards siphoned out to fuel the vehicles that distribute its products. Neglecting what it was like before that happened is like omitting who RoboCop was before he was Robo-anything.
I think I wanted this to be a more scholarly version of Cadillac Desert, but it's kind of more of the same in a different watershed. Maybe I should just be reading David Carle's books.
NOTES / SPOT CHECKING SOME CLAIMS
p. 26, James Henry Carson, "A frenzy seized my soul. Unbidden, my legs performed some entirely new movements of Polka steps." Arax cites the author and the work as "one of the first published accounts of early California" but it does not appear in the bibliography or endnotes. It is from Carson's Early Recollections of the Mines, published in 1852 (Stockton), p. 4. The quote is mostly correct. The original reads, "I looked on for a moment; a frenzy seized my soul; unbidden my legs performed some entirely new movements of Polka steps–I took several–houses were too small for me to stay in"
p. 51 Arax quotes former CA governor Pat Brown as saying, "I loved building things. I wanted to build that goddamned water project. I was absolutely determined I was going to pass this California Water Project. I wanted this to be a monument to me." As with the rest of the quotes in this book, there is no direct citation. A web search reveals a couple sources that cite Reisner's Cadillac Desert, a book that I also found to have some problems with citation, but even if it lacks actual citations it has much more extensive endnotes than The Dreamt Land. Reisner quotes Brown in chapter 10: "'I loved building things,' he blurted in an unguarded moment of candor. 'I wanted to build that goddamned water project. I was absolutely determined I was going to pass this California Water Project. I wanted this to be a monument to me.'" In the chapter endnotes, he says all quotes from Brown come from California Water Issues, 1950-1966, a publication of the Bancroft Library's Oral History Program, which is enough information to find the source, which lists the full quote as
The catchy line "I loved building things" is completely absent from that page, and from the prior page or two. I can't find it anywhere in the doc, which might be due to bad digitization, but even if it's there, it was combined out of context. The cursing seems completely fabricated. Maybe it was in an audio recording if one exists, but Reisner did not say he took the quote from an audio recording, but from this transcript, so he clearly fudged the quote, and I suspect Arax got it from Reisner.
p. 66 "The first pomegranate tree to grow in the valley were planted in the 1880s, not for their fruit so much but because they grew like bushes and nothing could kill them, especially not drought, and they were so thick with branches that no better windbreak could be found." So far I can't find a source for this, but maybe Butterfield's A History of Subtropical Fruits and Nuts in California (1963) has the answer.
pp. 70-71 "Los Angeles, by comparison, consumes only 587,000 acre-feet of water a year." Aside from the fact that this number naturally varies from year to year, if I average the LA water supply from 2008 to 2018 using the data at https://data.lacity.org/A-Livable-and..., I get ~552,060, which is pretty close.
p. 78 Subsidence due to groundwater pumping has altered the terrain over which the California aqueduct flows, causing it to sag in places where it was designed to flow south by gravity, and now must be assisted by pumps. Climate change leads to drought leads to groundwater pumping leads to subsidence leads to fossil fuel consumption for pumping leads to climate change leads to drought leads to groundwater pumping...
pp. 81 Arax made an off-hand reference to "shit on a shingle," which is apparently an American military delicacy of chipped beef milk gravy served on toast, also known by the sobriquet "S.O.S."
p. 87 So many great claims w/r/t Grover Dean Turnbow
* He wrote a textbook about ice cream called "Ice Cream." That checks out.
* He created a method for producing powdered milk that preserved the milkfat. Haven't been able to verify that.
* Ran Golden State Dairy in Oakland. Can't verify, but here's a cool milk bottle: http://collections.museumca.org/?q=co...
* Founded International Dairy Supply, a major supplier of milk products to the US military in Asia, which seems to be backed up by this merger into Foremost Dairies, Inc.
* Claims condensed milk supplied by Turnbow (I guess his company?) led to the development of Thai iced tea. This seems like total speculation and I've found nothing to support it
* Lived in Piedmont Hills above Oakland. Haven't managed to verify
* Owned Triangle T Ranch in Chowchilla, CA. Checks out: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/board_..., http://leonharrel.com/LeonsStories/Gr...
* Tried to preserve some of the un-farmed parts of his property as a preserve for San Joaquin flora and fauna. Not sure how you even verify this without knowing where the information comes from
This is where the lack of citation really kills you. This is such a great little vignette, but is any of it true? Who knows!
p. 102 "But with all its flow, furrow irrigation actually helps replenish the aquifer. The paradox of drip is that for all its precision, it does not save water in the aggregate. Because a drip line can reach anywhere, hundreds of thousands of acres in California–land on hillsides, land with rocks the size of baseballs, land with impenetrable clays and impervious salts–have come under cultivations." Any truth to this? rocky hillsides and salty clay flats are some of my favorite places...
p. 167 He uses Hutchings' Illustrated California Magazine as a lead-in to describing the floods of 1862, but damn, that publication makes for some fun reading and skimming. I only paged through that one scan but found numerous gems, from a spot-on report of a visit to the Farallons to multiple reports on the effects of poison oak and how to mitigate them to some painfully racist but fascinating portraits of "The World in California." Brilliant stuff.
p. 178 He quotes Thomas Starr King: "'The Earth is not yet finished. It was not made for nettles nor for the manzanita and chaparral,' the preacher told his audience of pioneer farmers. 'It was made for grain, for orchards, for the vine, for the comfort and luxuries of thrifty homes.'" Slightly chopped, but close enough, given that the source I found was a transcription of a speech, and thus probably also incorrect in the details.
p. 225 Makes another un-cited, un-dated quote from "the leading Japanese newspaper in San Francisco. I was skeptical that there were multiple Japanese newspapers in SF, ever. Turns out there were a bunch in the early 20th century.
p. 235 Arax claims peach pits from Fresno were used to create charcoal for gas masks in World War I. Peach puts and other stone fruit cores were, in fact, used for this purpose in WWI According to this 15 Sept 1918 New York Times article. There's also this Atlantic piece. No obvious hits about a Fresno connection, but if they were growing a lot of stone fruit in Fresno that seems reasonable.
p. 302 Apparently Resnick sued neighbors because their bees were fertilizing his seedless mandarin crop, causing them to have seeds. Not sure how one corroborates a suit like that, but here's one news story mentioning it that's not by Arax. The fact that there exists bee-proof netting to prevent this boggles the mind. Also on the subject of trespassing bees: https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=PRP19...
p. 379 Apparently there were a number of anti-Filipino pogroms in California and elsewhere in the Pacific states in the early 1920s. First I've heard of it. Most of the history of anti-Asian discrimination in California seems to focus on the Chinese in the 19th century and the Japanese during their imprisonment during WWII.
p. 436 Kesterson Reservoir, where selenium runoff from Westlands irrigation mutated a bunch of ducks, among other horrors: https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DS198...
p. 490 On Will S. Green founding the town of Colusa: "He and his fellow pioneers were then overtaken by a peculiar American impulse to name their place after the culture they were sending to the trash heap. Honor or insult, they christened it Colusa after the tribe of local Indians." This impulse needs a name.
p. 503 This really broke my mind. Central Valley ag lobbies the California Fish and Game Commission to loosen catch limits on Striped Bass so the bass will eat fewer smelt and salmon, whose dwindling numbers cause the state to turn off the pumps that will provide water to ag. Fishers resist loosening these limits b/c they don't want the *bass* to be over-fished: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/env...
I will say that Arax has a nose for errata that are not trivial to look up on the Internet, and that my limited, library-less ability to vet facts on said Internet have not yielded any egregious falsehoods, though I have found a few minor problems I've described in the notes below.
The strongest part of the book was probably what first directed me to it: his chapter on the Resnicks, a couple who have made a fortune out of watering the southern San Joaquin Valley, and who Arax profiles with apparent detail and humanity (and which I first read in the California Sunday Magazine). This is where the book really is primary source material, because Arax is basically telling the story of his own reporting over many years, as well as his own family's story from the San Joaquin. The line between idealistic self-made dreamers and subhuman hubristic capitalists runs through so many Californians, and Arax is at his best when he traces its path through the Resnicks.
The writing is also surprisingly good, though there is a rather annoying and repeated tendency to "noun" adjectives, e.g. "each face wears its own weary" (p. 315). Once or twice is enough, thanks.
Of course, I was somewhat disappointed that Arax didn't seem to care much for nature in the specific, which, fine, not everyone has to indulge in my obsessions to the degree that I do, but the San Joaquin Valley is a place where an entire distinct ecosystem was practically obliterated by western culture and almost no one who blazes up and down I-5 has any conception of it. To Arax, this pre-Western condition merited a few passing references to Indians, wildflowers, and Tulare Lake. Today's Central Valley is an ecological cyborg, its vasculature totally rerouted into aqueducts and pipes, its skin mechanically flayed and arrayed with nut trees, its innards siphoned out to fuel the vehicles that distribute its products. Neglecting what it was like before that happened is like omitting who RoboCop was before he was Robo-anything.
I think I wanted this to be a more scholarly version of Cadillac Desert, but it's kind of more of the same in a different watershed. Maybe I should just be reading David Carle's books.
NOTES / SPOT CHECKING SOME CLAIMS
p. 26, James Henry Carson, "A frenzy seized my soul. Unbidden, my legs performed some entirely new movements of Polka steps." Arax cites the author and the work as "one of the first published accounts of early California" but it does not appear in the bibliography or endnotes. It is from Carson's Early Recollections of the Mines, published in 1852 (Stockton), p. 4. The quote is mostly correct. The original reads, "I looked on for a moment; a frenzy seized my soul; unbidden my legs performed some entirely new movements of Polka steps–I took several–houses were too small for me to stay in"
p. 51 Arax quotes former CA governor Pat Brown as saying, "I loved building things. I wanted to build that goddamned water project. I was absolutely determined I was going to pass this California Water Project. I wanted this to be a monument to me." As with the rest of the quotes in this book, there is no direct citation. A web search reveals a couple sources that cite Reisner's Cadillac Desert, a book that I also found to have some problems with citation, but even if it lacks actual citations it has much more extensive endnotes than The Dreamt Land. Reisner quotes Brown in chapter 10: "'I loved building things,' he blurted in an unguarded moment of candor. 'I wanted to build that goddamned water project. I was absolutely determined I was going to pass this California Water Project. I wanted this to be a monument to me.'" In the chapter endnotes, he says all quotes from Brown come from California Water Issues, 1950-1966, a publication of the Bancroft Library's Oral History Program, which is enough information to find the source, which lists the full quote as
Well, I don t remember that but I had no compunction about even using my enemies in order to accomplish the result. You've got to remember that I was absolutely determined that I was going to pass this California Water Project. I wanted this to be a monument to me. So it was good for the state, but I felt that from a political standpoint, I mean from my own political standpoint, you want to accomplish things. Like if you're a lawyer you want to win lawsuits, and I wanted this project.
The catchy line "I loved building things" is completely absent from that page, and from the prior page or two. I can't find it anywhere in the doc, which might be due to bad digitization, but even if it's there, it was combined out of context. The cursing seems completely fabricated. Maybe it was in an audio recording if one exists, but Reisner did not say he took the quote from an audio recording, but from this transcript, so he clearly fudged the quote, and I suspect Arax got it from Reisner.
p. 66 "The first pomegranate tree to grow in the valley were planted in the 1880s, not for their fruit so much but because they grew like bushes and nothing could kill them, especially not drought, and they were so thick with branches that no better windbreak could be found." So far I can't find a source for this, but maybe Butterfield's A History of Subtropical Fruits and Nuts in California (1963) has the answer.
pp. 70-71 "Los Angeles, by comparison, consumes only 587,000 acre-feet of water a year." Aside from the fact that this number naturally varies from year to year, if I average the LA water supply from 2008 to 2018 using the data at https://data.lacity.org/A-Livable-and..., I get ~552,060, which is pretty close.
p. 78 Subsidence due to groundwater pumping has altered the terrain over which the California aqueduct flows, causing it to sag in places where it was designed to flow south by gravity, and now must be assisted by pumps. Climate change leads to drought leads to groundwater pumping leads to subsidence leads to fossil fuel consumption for pumping leads to climate change leads to drought leads to groundwater pumping...
pp. 81 Arax made an off-hand reference to "shit on a shingle," which is apparently an American military delicacy of chipped beef milk gravy served on toast, also known by the sobriquet "S.O.S."
p. 87 So many great claims w/r/t Grover Dean Turnbow
* He wrote a textbook about ice cream called "Ice Cream." That checks out.
* He created a method for producing powdered milk that preserved the milkfat. Haven't been able to verify that.
* Ran Golden State Dairy in Oakland. Can't verify, but here's a cool milk bottle: http://collections.museumca.org/?q=co...
* Founded International Dairy Supply, a major supplier of milk products to the US military in Asia, which seems to be backed up by this merger into Foremost Dairies, Inc.
* Claims condensed milk supplied by Turnbow (I guess his company?) led to the development of Thai iced tea. This seems like total speculation and I've found nothing to support it
* Lived in Piedmont Hills above Oakland. Haven't managed to verify
* Owned Triangle T Ranch in Chowchilla, CA. Checks out: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/board_..., http://leonharrel.com/LeonsStories/Gr...
* Tried to preserve some of the un-farmed parts of his property as a preserve for San Joaquin flora and fauna. Not sure how you even verify this without knowing where the information comes from
This is where the lack of citation really kills you. This is such a great little vignette, but is any of it true? Who knows!
p. 102 "But with all its flow, furrow irrigation actually helps replenish the aquifer. The paradox of drip is that for all its precision, it does not save water in the aggregate. Because a drip line can reach anywhere, hundreds of thousands of acres in California–land on hillsides, land with rocks the size of baseballs, land with impenetrable clays and impervious salts–have come under cultivations." Any truth to this? rocky hillsides and salty clay flats are some of my favorite places...
p. 167 He uses Hutchings' Illustrated California Magazine as a lead-in to describing the floods of 1862, but damn, that publication makes for some fun reading and skimming. I only paged through that one scan but found numerous gems, from a spot-on report of a visit to the Farallons to multiple reports on the effects of poison oak and how to mitigate them to some painfully racist but fascinating portraits of "The World in California." Brilliant stuff.
p. 178 He quotes Thomas Starr King: "'The Earth is not yet finished. It was not made for nettles nor for the manzanita and chaparral,' the preacher told his audience of pioneer farmers. 'It was made for grain, for orchards, for the vine, for the comfort and luxuries of thrifty homes.'" Slightly chopped, but close enough, given that the source I found was a transcription of a speech, and thus probably also incorrect in the details.
p. 225 Makes another un-cited, un-dated quote from "the leading Japanese newspaper in San Francisco. I was skeptical that there were multiple Japanese newspapers in SF, ever. Turns out there were a bunch in the early 20th century.
p. 235 Arax claims peach pits from Fresno were used to create charcoal for gas masks in World War I. Peach puts and other stone fruit cores were, in fact, used for this purpose in WWI According to this 15 Sept 1918 New York Times article. There's also this Atlantic piece. No obvious hits about a Fresno connection, but if they were growing a lot of stone fruit in Fresno that seems reasonable.
p. 302 Apparently Resnick sued neighbors because their bees were fertilizing his seedless mandarin crop, causing them to have seeds. Not sure how one corroborates a suit like that, but here's one news story mentioning it that's not by Arax. The fact that there exists bee-proof netting to prevent this boggles the mind. Also on the subject of trespassing bees: https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=PRP19...
p. 379 Apparently there were a number of anti-Filipino pogroms in California and elsewhere in the Pacific states in the early 1920s. First I've heard of it. Most of the history of anti-Asian discrimination in California seems to focus on the Chinese in the 19th century and the Japanese during their imprisonment during WWII.
p. 436 Kesterson Reservoir, where selenium runoff from Westlands irrigation mutated a bunch of ducks, among other horrors: https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DS198...
p. 490 On Will S. Green founding the town of Colusa: "He and his fellow pioneers were then overtaken by a peculiar American impulse to name their place after the culture they were sending to the trash heap. Honor or insult, they christened it Colusa after the tribe of local Indians." This impulse needs a name.
p. 503 This really broke my mind. Central Valley ag lobbies the California Fish and Game Commission to loosen catch limits on Striped Bass so the bass will eat fewer smelt and salmon, whose dwindling numbers cause the state to turn off the pumps that will provide water to ag. Fishers resist loosening these limits b/c they don't want the *bass* to be over-fished: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/env...
October 11, 2022
The soft stuff:
I found this useful for those who are not from CA or spent time in the valley to get healthy dose of materialism history. And I do look at my own meager garden differently and with deep gratitude for the waters of Hetch Hetchy and deeper understanding of the terrifying altered landscape of this state. My poor little tomatoes, accomplice to this grand water robbery… and yet they taste so sweet and save me $2 at the grocery store. I will defend them to the last.
The critical stuff:
The information in this book is critical and worth wading through the bad writing and glaring omissions…
-can you adequately tell the story of water in California for 500 pages without talking about oil and gas for more than a paragraph? Arax would say… yes!
-to name the genocide and violence against Native
people in CA in the name of resource extraction, to also name that these Native communities still exist in CA while ALSO not interviewing any of them and talking so disparagingly about them… a truly next level example of liberal vocabulary and its contradictions
-starting the book off with BAM a mention of your father’s murder and then slipping in at the last second that you knew someone who knew of the murder plot, condoned it, and that you met up with that person and found not only forgiveness but collaboration? That’s the REAL story and we didn’t get any of it!
I found this useful for those who are not from CA or spent time in the valley to get healthy dose of materialism history. And I do look at my own meager garden differently and with deep gratitude for the waters of Hetch Hetchy and deeper understanding of the terrifying altered landscape of this state. My poor little tomatoes, accomplice to this grand water robbery… and yet they taste so sweet and save me $2 at the grocery store. I will defend them to the last.
The critical stuff:
The information in this book is critical and worth wading through the bad writing and glaring omissions…
-can you adequately tell the story of water in California for 500 pages without talking about oil and gas for more than a paragraph? Arax would say… yes!
-to name the genocide and violence against Native
people in CA in the name of resource extraction, to also name that these Native communities still exist in CA while ALSO not interviewing any of them and talking so disparagingly about them… a truly next level example of liberal vocabulary and its contradictions
-starting the book off with BAM a mention of your father’s murder and then slipping in at the last second that you knew someone who knew of the murder plot, condoned it, and that you met up with that person and found not only forgiveness but collaboration? That’s the REAL story and we didn’t get any of it!
Want to read
May 6, 2023From the WSJ's "Five Best" weekly book column, 5/6/23:
"Ever since the Gold Rush of 1849, California has been the place where Americans go to seek their fortunes. But it is crops, not gold, that have made dreams come true, and men moved heaven and earth—and water—to achieve those dreams. Driving in the Central Valley outside Fresno, Mark Arax, a journalist from a family of farmers, traces byzantine irrigation lines and describes what he calls “one of the most dramatic alterations of the earth’s surface in human history.” “Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals and dams,” he writes. “The farmer corralled the snowmelt and erased the valley, its desert and marsh. He leveled its hog wallows, denuded its salt brush and killed the last of its mustang, antelope, and tule elk.” Today the region, where water-hungry almond trees occupy an area bigger than the state of Rhode Island, is in a long-term spiral of desertification while Big Ag drills ever deeper to irrigate and expand orchards and vineyards. Mr. Arax’s critical but compassionate exploration of this mesmerizing landscape and its reason-defying shapeshifting is both alarming and magnificent."
"Ever since the Gold Rush of 1849, California has been the place where Americans go to seek their fortunes. But it is crops, not gold, that have made dreams come true, and men moved heaven and earth—and water—to achieve those dreams. Driving in the Central Valley outside Fresno, Mark Arax, a journalist from a family of farmers, traces byzantine irrigation lines and describes what he calls “one of the most dramatic alterations of the earth’s surface in human history.” “Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals and dams,” he writes. “The farmer corralled the snowmelt and erased the valley, its desert and marsh. He leveled its hog wallows, denuded its salt brush and killed the last of its mustang, antelope, and tule elk.” Today the region, where water-hungry almond trees occupy an area bigger than the state of Rhode Island, is in a long-term spiral of desertification while Big Ag drills ever deeper to irrigate and expand orchards and vineyards. Mr. Arax’s critical but compassionate exploration of this mesmerizing landscape and its reason-defying shapeshifting is both alarming and magnificent."
June 28, 2023
I admit this isn’t a read that will interest everyone but as a resident of the Central Valley for more than 25 years, every place name & every farmer name was familiar to me. I learned a lot about where I live.
April 9, 2019
A brilliant blend of investigative research, history and storytelling. There’s even poetry in these lines. A massive accomplishment by Mr. Arax!
June 29, 2021
If you're thinking about writing a book about agriculture in California's Central Valley, don't. It's already been written.
The Dreamt Land tells the improbable story of how the Central Valley turned from a desert into an agricultural oasis through the taming of rivers, snowmelt, aquifers, marshes, farmworkers, government regulators and everything in between. Former LA Times journalist Mark Arax takes both a deep and wide look into the history of the area and all of its complexities, starting at the dawn of modern California as we know it with the Catholic missions all the way to modern day times. To understand how California became the way that it is, you have to go all the way back to the beginning.
And it's all here. The level of detail in these over 500 pages (with rather small print) can get overwhelming, especially to someone who has never visited the area, but it's quickly apparent that Arax has spent a whole lifetime learning this valley to write this book. And along with the history, he also tells some of his own Armenian farming family's story too and sprinkles in some first person details about his travels reporting. Parts of this book can get dry (pun realized), but once he gets too deep in the weeds he pulls you back with personal anecdotes.
One of the things that's so remarkable here is how he is able to look at so many issues from so many angles and get to the heart of the difficulties. Agriculture on this scale is man's manipulation of nature to its breaking point, and with it comes problems. He looks into what those fixes could be, and often there are unintended consequences with each. The deeper and deeper this goes, the more you realize the infinite number of ways our country has screwed over the planet and manipulated it past its expected capacity to produce. How does that end? It's a depressing question to ponder.
After a sweeping introduction of the various issues and the valley itself, he marches through the history of California through the lens of water. For people like me who have never lived in California and haven't studied the history in a number of years, it's a great brush up and adds a new level of depth to the latter half of the book, which is mostly focused on a series of families and specific issues. That section is less cohesive, and reads more like a series of Sunday newspaper features looking at some of the powerful players. But always, the theme of man's over production and the lengths people will go to grow more and make more money abound.
This is a heavy book, much more so than the typical nonfiction book that flies off the shelves these days. But it's worthwhile and tells us a lot about where we're going and how we got here.
The Dreamt Land tells the improbable story of how the Central Valley turned from a desert into an agricultural oasis through the taming of rivers, snowmelt, aquifers, marshes, farmworkers, government regulators and everything in between. Former LA Times journalist Mark Arax takes both a deep and wide look into the history of the area and all of its complexities, starting at the dawn of modern California as we know it with the Catholic missions all the way to modern day times. To understand how California became the way that it is, you have to go all the way back to the beginning.
And it's all here. The level of detail in these over 500 pages (with rather small print) can get overwhelming, especially to someone who has never visited the area, but it's quickly apparent that Arax has spent a whole lifetime learning this valley to write this book. And along with the history, he also tells some of his own Armenian farming family's story too and sprinkles in some first person details about his travels reporting. Parts of this book can get dry (pun realized), but once he gets too deep in the weeds he pulls you back with personal anecdotes.
One of the things that's so remarkable here is how he is able to look at so many issues from so many angles and get to the heart of the difficulties. Agriculture on this scale is man's manipulation of nature to its breaking point, and with it comes problems. He looks into what those fixes could be, and often there are unintended consequences with each. The deeper and deeper this goes, the more you realize the infinite number of ways our country has screwed over the planet and manipulated it past its expected capacity to produce. How does that end? It's a depressing question to ponder.
After a sweeping introduction of the various issues and the valley itself, he marches through the history of California through the lens of water. For people like me who have never lived in California and haven't studied the history in a number of years, it's a great brush up and adds a new level of depth to the latter half of the book, which is mostly focused on a series of families and specific issues. That section is less cohesive, and reads more like a series of Sunday newspaper features looking at some of the powerful players. But always, the theme of man's over production and the lengths people will go to grow more and make more money abound.
This is a heavy book, much more so than the typical nonfiction book that flies off the shelves these days. But it's worthwhile and tells us a lot about where we're going and how we got here.
September 9, 2020
“Of the fifty-four thousand, how many will make it back here, you think?” “If we’re lucky, maybe seven or eight,” she said. It was at that point that I fully understood what we as a people had done. A river is a highly dynamic force that possesses incredible powers to heal itself. Like the salmon, it had been coded to find its way back. But our destruction of the San Joaquin—six dams upstream, a seventh dam right here, a flow devoted to agriculture with only a trickle left over for fish—was an incredible force of its own. No degree of noble gesture, certainly not $1.5 billion, would bring the old run back to life. In the 1940s, even before the last dam went in, the spring run had dwindled to fifty thousand or so salmon. We would be quite blessed now to see seven or eight fingerlings make their way back home. “ P. 514.
Mark Arax is a fine writer. Dreamt Land is beautifully written and well researched. Arax whose parents and grandparents took a shot a being California farmers, expresses regret that his family didn’t pursue this way of life. This book documents and exposes much of the political manipulation, various forms of corruption, and out right theft of the most valuable commodity in California—Water.
Arax’s familiarity with much of the land and personalities he is writing about gives readers an opportunity to see effects that the cycles of drought and flood have on those seeking to make a living or a fortune from the land. He demonstrates how pumping underground aquifers has caused the ground to sink and how damming the rivers adversely effects wildlife.
I always thought of California as the land or oranges and grapes, but it seems that nut growers (pistachios and almonds) are making the big bucks. The growing population of California also calls for more water to be sent to cities. But by far most water is used in ever expanding agriculture.
California is always beautiful in my mind. The weather and the state’s magnificent scenery and culture have a lot to offer visitors or future residents. But how many people will be too many? How much agricultural growth can the state support?
A fascinating reading about the 5th largest economy in the world.
Mark Arax is a fine writer. Dreamt Land is beautifully written and well researched. Arax whose parents and grandparents took a shot a being California farmers, expresses regret that his family didn’t pursue this way of life. This book documents and exposes much of the political manipulation, various forms of corruption, and out right theft of the most valuable commodity in California—Water.
Arax’s familiarity with much of the land and personalities he is writing about gives readers an opportunity to see effects that the cycles of drought and flood have on those seeking to make a living or a fortune from the land. He demonstrates how pumping underground aquifers has caused the ground to sink and how damming the rivers adversely effects wildlife.
I always thought of California as the land or oranges and grapes, but it seems that nut growers (pistachios and almonds) are making the big bucks. The growing population of California also calls for more water to be sent to cities. But by far most water is used in ever expanding agriculture.
California is always beautiful in my mind. The weather and the state’s magnificent scenery and culture have a lot to offer visitors or future residents. But how many people will be too many? How much agricultural growth can the state support?
A fascinating reading about the 5th largest economy in the world.
November 16, 2020
This is the ultimate story about CA and water explaining more than you care. We read this for Book Club, otherwise I would have missed it. Very easy and interesting read. More than you would think.
July 15, 2019
This is my first DNF of the year, and I'm sorry it had to end this way. I really am interested in this topic and it is clearly a massive effort of research, but the writing doesn't work for me. It's just too long, too wordy, too pretentious. I didn't quite make it halfway through and I kept getting distracted while reading. After 10 days of wondering if I'm just too basic to get into this book, I remembered I'm not (that) basic and have read a lot of challenging books, plus this being an area of keen interest to me, I shouldn't be having this much trouble.
Maybe someday I'll pick up the audiobook if I have a million hours to kill, and finish it off. Because I would like to know the rest of the story but it was just too much of a slog. The author also seems to assume you've read his other books as prerequisites. E.g. "as I wrote about in my book ___", or "this reminded me of when I came here to investigate my father's murder" WHAT. Sorry dude, not everyone who picked up this book is your number one fan, stay within scope please.
It is a shame, but clearly a case of a book and a reader not being the right match. I imagine this book will be hard for a lot of people which is too bad because I think it is an important and interesting topic that could be more of an appealing read if it were actually accessible to basics like me.
Maybe someday I'll pick up the audiobook if I have a million hours to kill, and finish it off. Because I would like to know the rest of the story but it was just too much of a slog. The author also seems to assume you've read his other books as prerequisites. E.g. "as I wrote about in my book ___", or "this reminded me of when I came here to investigate my father's murder" WHAT. Sorry dude, not everyone who picked up this book is your number one fan, stay within scope please.
It is a shame, but clearly a case of a book and a reader not being the right match. I imagine this book will be hard for a lot of people which is too bad because I think it is an important and interesting topic that could be more of an appealing read if it were actually accessible to basics like me.
May 12, 2021
The Central Valley is the key to understanding California: A house of cards built on climactic extremes with fools for stewards.
March 28, 2024
What is it: five-hundred pages of journalism and history proving people are bad at thinking critically about the future.
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Why 5 stars: I grew up in southern California, on the farthest northern coastal edge of Los Angeles, where suburbs and fields could still be found in equal measure between the Angeles foothills and the Pacific. For all my life, my grandparents have lived in northern California, for a time settled into the Sierra Nevada mountains equidistant the beauty of Yosemite and the poverty of Fresno or more recently living in the suburbs surrounding the state capital of Sacramento. The span of our family meant long drives: eight hours in a minivan, most of it on the 5 freeway, running fast but never fast enough through mile after mile after long, flat mile of the Central Valley, flanked on both sides by farmland stretching to the hills near on the west and to the hills barely visible at the farther east edge of the valley, farmland broken only occasionally by small towns catering to travelers like us where locals made some sort of living working fast-food chains and gas stations or by the rarer small towns where the farming communities of the valley met the road that ran through it, though these were rarer because usually these communities were kept hidden away deeper in the acres and rows they worked.
I remember, over the years we drove through the valley, seeing sometimes those hills to the west in vibrant green when rain had been recent or plentiful and far more often those hills to the west a golden yellow--the warmth of dead grass dried and broken only by parched shrubland between hills. That difference, the 5 and the farmland bordered by green or by gold, seemed to me a simple truth of California: rain water could keep this land rich, and drought will threaten these miles upon miles, acre upon acre.
I remember, too, that when I was very young those acre upon acre were planted row upon row with low, leafy bushes. I wouldn't have recognized cotton at that age, but I could at least tell that cotton looked different than the vines that replaced it when I was a little older. Old enough to think that it was funny how these miles of fields looked, sometimes, like graveyards because the vines hadn't yielded thickly enough to hide the little white crosses planted in the ground to guide their growth. And by the time I was making that drive only once a year in the winter when I came home from college, the vines were gone too, replaced by orchards, tree upon tree of pistachios, a forest of them, brown branch bordered by gold hills in a period of long drought that surely seemed to threaten this sudden planting of a new landscape. This seemed to me an intuitive part of the changing of a land: new farmers chose new crops, and the Central Valley was an Eden capable of sustaining any crop they chose.
I remember hearing in the news, from family, from friends, in those years of drought what policies were put in place to guard California's water. Policies to limit watering of residential lawns--lots of public groups advocating for replanting yards with rocks and succulents. Policies to limit water-using appliances like dish washers and washing machines. Advocates urging people to keep showers short. And on the edge of the 5 freeway in those winters of drought, signs posted seemingly by local farmers advocating that their water needed to be protected. Another simple thing: water as a modern luxury, California residents by default wasteful and excessive in their consumption of a thing that should be treasured instead for its agricultural uses.
I'd like to think I'm a relatively smart guy. I'm well-educated. I kept up interest in and understanding of sciences and humanities. I try to stay informed. And yet.
And yet, it never occurred to me to ask why the Central Valley is cut through by a freeway but not by a river. Or, at least, no natural river. It never occurred to me to ask how anything could continue to grow on ground when rainwater was clearly not enough to keep even the thinnest grass alive. It never occurred to me to ask what would motivate the planting of vines instead of cotton, or pistachio trees despite drought.
Perhaps, to some degree, that's because I'm always driving through. Never intending to stay, to see. And perhaps, to another degree, it's because there are lots of things in the Central Valley that the general public isn't intended to see.
We aren't intended to see that the ground beneath the roads and acres of fields is, in large patches, ground ill-suited to any farming, soil too salty, soil without drainage, where the value of the land, to the first inhabitants of the valley or to the migrants who sought refuge from genocide or to the insurance companies that now own large spans of the valley's dirt, is the value of land as a concept rather than the value of what that land can provide and sustain.
We aren't intended to see that this same ground is sinking. Sinking because the ground is sustained by water beneath it, and the process of surfacing that water where it can be dripped across the flat, hardened acres so a little can be taken up by the plants and the rest burned up by the sun is a process whose primary consequence is the subsidence of the entire landscape--measurable in lost feet of ground in some places across the valley, deep enough to bury a body one year and and find yourself level with it some decades later.
We aren't intended to see that cycles of rain and drought are the normal pattern of California's climate--long cycles, certainly, but cycles nonetheless. We aren't intended to learn from these cycles or plan for them, when that learning and planning would require making sacrifices for the future based on the past rather than seizing whatever can be gained in the present.
And we don't intend to see that what might seem like land farmed by locals, crops rotating as different growers come and go, is in fact land farmed by owners who live on the farthest northern coastal edge of Los Angeles where houses have better views and luxuries are more ready-at-hand, and they've owned the land for generations, the valley itself a vast inheritance, the crops rotating as demand for snacks like pistachios cause the price of nuts to skyrocket so high that it is still, somehow, impossibly worth it to industrial farmers to plant forests of trees that require constant, a-seasonal water at massive volume.
And we don't intend to see that the irrigation to sustain these forests is an irrigation system that can best be described as one of the most monumental efforts to move water from where it would naturally be to where it has no business being. That the California State Water Project was one of several projects spanning over a century of California history whose goal was, by engineering and by money, divert water to where human activity demanded it rather than concede that maybe human activity should go to the water, because human activity demanded land more than water, and there was land aplenty where there wasn't water.
I find myself a little ashamed, and very frustrated, that as someone born and raised in California, I was never taught and never thought to ask about the remarkable, truly impressive, and deeply disturbing and faulty systems that sustain eight percent of America's agriculture, a quarter of its food. Reading The Dreamt Land isn't, in this regard, a pleasant experience. It's an unpacking of how unmanageably complex, how frequently misguided, how deeply short-sighted, how punishing for all involved, and how unassailably determined the human effort has been to make a garden of a desert in the heart of California.
Arax's work is astonishing. I mean this in two ways.
One is his sheer determination. This book is the product of a decade of focused and diligent pursuit, an effort that required him to seek out and understand input from hundreds of sources across dozens of disciplines all of whom bring their own biases and focal perspectives that he has navigate within to see not just what they see and how they see it but what they might not be seeing and how else it could be seen. It is a product, too, of extensive historical research, the main body of the text comprising a long account of the several stages of California's problematic relationship with water.
The other way is his effort to make all this accessible to any reader. Arax is a journalist, and this shows most clearly in the techniques he wields to turn a complex and challenging system into something that at least seems more understandable if not totally so. Techniques like foregrounding human narrative before explaining the data and evidence relevant to that narrative. You meet the people making the bad decisions before you see how bad the decision is. You meet the people paying the cost before the scope of that cost becomes clear. This humanizing makes of The Dreamt Land something personal and intimate despite its scope. And techniques like authorial presence. Arax situates himself and his family in the history he writes, never so much as to distract from or take control of the narrative but, rather, just enough to make it clear that he recognizes he is among all the rest of us struggling to understand how we and our families relate to California's land and its water. And techniques like good prose. There's a craftsmanship to the writing here that bespeaks a care for the subject (i.e., a care for the people he writes about) as well as a care for the reader (who he knows is enduring a lot to make it through five-hundred pages about water policy and agricultural engineering). Perhaps in a work of nonfiction at this scale it is more important than ever that the voice of the author is a generous voice.
Most impressive of all is Arax's ability to prize all perspectives. Sure, there's some inevitable judgment in a text of this scope where Arax has had to interact with perspectives so radically different from his own ethics. But he doesn't give them shorter page counts or hold his judgment as evidence against their arguments. This is a book where you will find in equal measure the laborer in the field and the rich man who owns that field, the scientist studying subsidence and the local bureaucrat who can't be bothered to monitor well depths, the advocates for fish with threatened habitats and the government employees working every day to move those fish by hand and truck to make sure industrial activity can proceed.
Even more nuanced than that, this is a book where you'll find that any one argument is shown for both its positive and negative consequences across multiple registers of value. A water pump might lure populations of fish, but that keeps them from predating species upriver, so if they can also be protected from the pump then perhaps there's a safe middle ground. A canal might be draining a river dry for the benefit of an essentially first-come-first-serve farm-next-to-the-water strategy, but there are people whose livelihoods and families have depended on exactly that system who would pay the cost if the system were to change. Crucially, there are no easy solutions. Arax's goal in this text is not to solve a problem. It may even be that this problem cannot be solved. In the final chapter a short list is thrown onto the page in a dialogue between Arax and a farmer, but they both know as they say it that this list is unrealistic, unlikely, and imperfect. The goal, instead, is contentedly just to show how large and how intricate and how intimate, how human the problem really is.
I cannot more highly recommend this book for anyone who lives in California; there's an, I hope, obvious responsibility to better understand the land you live on and the water provided you. But beyond that, this book matters to anyone who eats food--while there aren't easy solutions here, it does at least help to know the consequences of drinking Pom Wonderful and eating bags of pistachios every week. And beyond that, still, this book matters to anyone who's willing to approach a complex system and seek to understand it. Not to simplify it. Not to reduce it. Not to command or control it. But to understand that what it is is fundamentally large, intricate, and intimate. That what it is is human. And it might just take work like Arax's, determination like his, generosity like his, to see the people who make the decisions and pay the costs and pass from generation to generation the ways of thinking and acting that make our daily life as full and as problematic as it is.
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You might also like: 1974's Chinatown.
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Why 5 stars: I grew up in southern California, on the farthest northern coastal edge of Los Angeles, where suburbs and fields could still be found in equal measure between the Angeles foothills and the Pacific. For all my life, my grandparents have lived in northern California, for a time settled into the Sierra Nevada mountains equidistant the beauty of Yosemite and the poverty of Fresno or more recently living in the suburbs surrounding the state capital of Sacramento. The span of our family meant long drives: eight hours in a minivan, most of it on the 5 freeway, running fast but never fast enough through mile after mile after long, flat mile of the Central Valley, flanked on both sides by farmland stretching to the hills near on the west and to the hills barely visible at the farther east edge of the valley, farmland broken only occasionally by small towns catering to travelers like us where locals made some sort of living working fast-food chains and gas stations or by the rarer small towns where the farming communities of the valley met the road that ran through it, though these were rarer because usually these communities were kept hidden away deeper in the acres and rows they worked.
I remember, over the years we drove through the valley, seeing sometimes those hills to the west in vibrant green when rain had been recent or plentiful and far more often those hills to the west a golden yellow--the warmth of dead grass dried and broken only by parched shrubland between hills. That difference, the 5 and the farmland bordered by green or by gold, seemed to me a simple truth of California: rain water could keep this land rich, and drought will threaten these miles upon miles, acre upon acre.
I remember, too, that when I was very young those acre upon acre were planted row upon row with low, leafy bushes. I wouldn't have recognized cotton at that age, but I could at least tell that cotton looked different than the vines that replaced it when I was a little older. Old enough to think that it was funny how these miles of fields looked, sometimes, like graveyards because the vines hadn't yielded thickly enough to hide the little white crosses planted in the ground to guide their growth. And by the time I was making that drive only once a year in the winter when I came home from college, the vines were gone too, replaced by orchards, tree upon tree of pistachios, a forest of them, brown branch bordered by gold hills in a period of long drought that surely seemed to threaten this sudden planting of a new landscape. This seemed to me an intuitive part of the changing of a land: new farmers chose new crops, and the Central Valley was an Eden capable of sustaining any crop they chose.
I remember hearing in the news, from family, from friends, in those years of drought what policies were put in place to guard California's water. Policies to limit watering of residential lawns--lots of public groups advocating for replanting yards with rocks and succulents. Policies to limit water-using appliances like dish washers and washing machines. Advocates urging people to keep showers short. And on the edge of the 5 freeway in those winters of drought, signs posted seemingly by local farmers advocating that their water needed to be protected. Another simple thing: water as a modern luxury, California residents by default wasteful and excessive in their consumption of a thing that should be treasured instead for its agricultural uses.
I'd like to think I'm a relatively smart guy. I'm well-educated. I kept up interest in and understanding of sciences and humanities. I try to stay informed. And yet.
And yet, it never occurred to me to ask why the Central Valley is cut through by a freeway but not by a river. Or, at least, no natural river. It never occurred to me to ask how anything could continue to grow on ground when rainwater was clearly not enough to keep even the thinnest grass alive. It never occurred to me to ask what would motivate the planting of vines instead of cotton, or pistachio trees despite drought.
Perhaps, to some degree, that's because I'm always driving through. Never intending to stay, to see. And perhaps, to another degree, it's because there are lots of things in the Central Valley that the general public isn't intended to see.
We aren't intended to see that the ground beneath the roads and acres of fields is, in large patches, ground ill-suited to any farming, soil too salty, soil without drainage, where the value of the land, to the first inhabitants of the valley or to the migrants who sought refuge from genocide or to the insurance companies that now own large spans of the valley's dirt, is the value of land as a concept rather than the value of what that land can provide and sustain.
We aren't intended to see that this same ground is sinking. Sinking because the ground is sustained by water beneath it, and the process of surfacing that water where it can be dripped across the flat, hardened acres so a little can be taken up by the plants and the rest burned up by the sun is a process whose primary consequence is the subsidence of the entire landscape--measurable in lost feet of ground in some places across the valley, deep enough to bury a body one year and and find yourself level with it some decades later.
We aren't intended to see that cycles of rain and drought are the normal pattern of California's climate--long cycles, certainly, but cycles nonetheless. We aren't intended to learn from these cycles or plan for them, when that learning and planning would require making sacrifices for the future based on the past rather than seizing whatever can be gained in the present.
And we don't intend to see that what might seem like land farmed by locals, crops rotating as different growers come and go, is in fact land farmed by owners who live on the farthest northern coastal edge of Los Angeles where houses have better views and luxuries are more ready-at-hand, and they've owned the land for generations, the valley itself a vast inheritance, the crops rotating as demand for snacks like pistachios cause the price of nuts to skyrocket so high that it is still, somehow, impossibly worth it to industrial farmers to plant forests of trees that require constant, a-seasonal water at massive volume.
And we don't intend to see that the irrigation to sustain these forests is an irrigation system that can best be described as one of the most monumental efforts to move water from where it would naturally be to where it has no business being. That the California State Water Project was one of several projects spanning over a century of California history whose goal was, by engineering and by money, divert water to where human activity demanded it rather than concede that maybe human activity should go to the water, because human activity demanded land more than water, and there was land aplenty where there wasn't water.
I find myself a little ashamed, and very frustrated, that as someone born and raised in California, I was never taught and never thought to ask about the remarkable, truly impressive, and deeply disturbing and faulty systems that sustain eight percent of America's agriculture, a quarter of its food. Reading The Dreamt Land isn't, in this regard, a pleasant experience. It's an unpacking of how unmanageably complex, how frequently misguided, how deeply short-sighted, how punishing for all involved, and how unassailably determined the human effort has been to make a garden of a desert in the heart of California.
Arax's work is astonishing. I mean this in two ways.
One is his sheer determination. This book is the product of a decade of focused and diligent pursuit, an effort that required him to seek out and understand input from hundreds of sources across dozens of disciplines all of whom bring their own biases and focal perspectives that he has navigate within to see not just what they see and how they see it but what they might not be seeing and how else it could be seen. It is a product, too, of extensive historical research, the main body of the text comprising a long account of the several stages of California's problematic relationship with water.
The other way is his effort to make all this accessible to any reader. Arax is a journalist, and this shows most clearly in the techniques he wields to turn a complex and challenging system into something that at least seems more understandable if not totally so. Techniques like foregrounding human narrative before explaining the data and evidence relevant to that narrative. You meet the people making the bad decisions before you see how bad the decision is. You meet the people paying the cost before the scope of that cost becomes clear. This humanizing makes of The Dreamt Land something personal and intimate despite its scope. And techniques like authorial presence. Arax situates himself and his family in the history he writes, never so much as to distract from or take control of the narrative but, rather, just enough to make it clear that he recognizes he is among all the rest of us struggling to understand how we and our families relate to California's land and its water. And techniques like good prose. There's a craftsmanship to the writing here that bespeaks a care for the subject (i.e., a care for the people he writes about) as well as a care for the reader (who he knows is enduring a lot to make it through five-hundred pages about water policy and agricultural engineering). Perhaps in a work of nonfiction at this scale it is more important than ever that the voice of the author is a generous voice.
Most impressive of all is Arax's ability to prize all perspectives. Sure, there's some inevitable judgment in a text of this scope where Arax has had to interact with perspectives so radically different from his own ethics. But he doesn't give them shorter page counts or hold his judgment as evidence against their arguments. This is a book where you will find in equal measure the laborer in the field and the rich man who owns that field, the scientist studying subsidence and the local bureaucrat who can't be bothered to monitor well depths, the advocates for fish with threatened habitats and the government employees working every day to move those fish by hand and truck to make sure industrial activity can proceed.
Even more nuanced than that, this is a book where you'll find that any one argument is shown for both its positive and negative consequences across multiple registers of value. A water pump might lure populations of fish, but that keeps them from predating species upriver, so if they can also be protected from the pump then perhaps there's a safe middle ground. A canal might be draining a river dry for the benefit of an essentially first-come-first-serve farm-next-to-the-water strategy, but there are people whose livelihoods and families have depended on exactly that system who would pay the cost if the system were to change. Crucially, there are no easy solutions. Arax's goal in this text is not to solve a problem. It may even be that this problem cannot be solved. In the final chapter a short list is thrown onto the page in a dialogue between Arax and a farmer, but they both know as they say it that this list is unrealistic, unlikely, and imperfect. The goal, instead, is contentedly just to show how large and how intricate and how intimate, how human the problem really is.
I cannot more highly recommend this book for anyone who lives in California; there's an, I hope, obvious responsibility to better understand the land you live on and the water provided you. But beyond that, this book matters to anyone who eats food--while there aren't easy solutions here, it does at least help to know the consequences of drinking Pom Wonderful and eating bags of pistachios every week. And beyond that, still, this book matters to anyone who's willing to approach a complex system and seek to understand it. Not to simplify it. Not to reduce it. Not to command or control it. But to understand that what it is is fundamentally large, intricate, and intimate. That what it is is human. And it might just take work like Arax's, determination like his, generosity like his, to see the people who make the decisions and pay the costs and pass from generation to generation the ways of thinking and acting that make our daily life as full and as problematic as it is.
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You might also like: 1974's Chinatown.
January 2, 2024
This book is absolutely amazing. After having read the Destruction of California, written in 1965 or something, many of the facts in this story were not new. The two books detail the same stories of the state and federal water projects, of the gold rush, of the farmers, and of the massive alterations to the natural landscape. I recognized most of the big names mentioned, and some of the same themes appear in both books, such as those regarding the growth mindset.
However, this is definitely not to say that I did not need to read The Dreamt Land after having read the other. Mark Arax's style of narration is absolutely captivating, and he is capable of bringing to life the myriad of stories around California's quest to control water in a way that keeps you rapt for over 500 pages of information. It is also interesting to read the history of California as centered around a single theme of water, whereas the Destruction of California, for all its similarities, discusses the same history in a multitude of divisions (air, water, grassland, development, etc.).
However, this is definitely not to say that I did not need to read The Dreamt Land after having read the other. Mark Arax's style of narration is absolutely captivating, and he is capable of bringing to life the myriad of stories around California's quest to control water in a way that keeps you rapt for over 500 pages of information. It is also interesting to read the history of California as centered around a single theme of water, whereas the Destruction of California, for all its similarities, discusses the same history in a multitude of divisions (air, water, grassland, development, etc.).
July 17, 2019
Mark Arax is a great writer and story teller and here he tells an incredible tale of the monumental re-plumbing of the rivers of central California to serve the needs of (Big) agriculture and growing cities and subdivisions. The story is astounding. Arax provides great context for the California boom-bust, drought-flood culture and mentality that leads to this re-plumbing by going back to the Spanish settlement of California and the discovery of gold in the 1840's at Sutter's Mill. Throughout the book the reader is introduced to fascinating characters that range from the wealthiest growers of whatever crop is in economic vogue, to the Latino workers that move north to work the agriculture. Arax always provides just the right amount of back-story on each character and has a knack for finding the contradictions and humanity (read, flaws) that allow us to feel we know their essence. One thing that I really liked is that Arax refuses to turn any of these people into villains. This would be easy to do. Instead, we are presented with people who's actions are generally the product of good intentions and the belief that they are doing good for their communities and the world.
But doing good when your ag land is frequently in drought requires a lot of water and this book tells you how landowners go and get that water themselves, or induce politicians to get it for them. Whether pumping ground water or building canals to re-divert rivers, these actions are all heedless of the vast damage done to the natural and human environments and communities along the way. This becomes the take-away: that people will delude themselves; that it's ok to take it all, and at public expense and consequences be dammed. In the end, this is a reflection of all of us, regardless of your political leanings. An eye opening, well-written and important book. It makes me want to read more from Mark Arax.
But doing good when your ag land is frequently in drought requires a lot of water and this book tells you how landowners go and get that water themselves, or induce politicians to get it for them. Whether pumping ground water or building canals to re-divert rivers, these actions are all heedless of the vast damage done to the natural and human environments and communities along the way. This becomes the take-away: that people will delude themselves; that it's ok to take it all, and at public expense and consequences be dammed. In the end, this is a reflection of all of us, regardless of your political leanings. An eye opening, well-written and important book. It makes me want to read more from Mark Arax.
November 6, 2019
A disturbing and timely book about climate change and the history of American exploitation of California. The Spanish then the Mexicans enslaved the Native Americans but Sutter and American settlers brought money and technology to a whole new level when they arrived. One of Sutter’s men did discover a small nougat of gold and was overheard trying to verify it with a mining specialist in town. The rush of miners and people searching for gold brought about the dissemination of the natives who were virtually wiped out, but the mining tactics of miners for gold, ruined the land for many farmers and ranchers. The lack of water in CA grew worse and much was mixed with salt and pollution. Some good water was merely run into the sea. As farming and ranching became popular, more water needed to be brought from other places to be used and crops that ruined soil or too much water were used. In the current times, farmers and ranchers, who are huge corporations, take water from communities and retain water rights to 80% of CA’s water legally. Cities are given 20%. But small farmers and ranchers and small towns, often occupied by Mexican Americans or African Americans, have no rights at all. Most are run out of the area due to lack of water. A stunning and disturbing tale of greedy corporate men who will run off the poor and endanger species of animals and plants to get more money. They are everything as an impediment to get what they want. Denying climate change as it happens around them is a familiar tactic. I was surprised at how absorbed I was in the book.
August 13, 2021
a tough one to rate! i found the firsthand interviews with the brains behind big ag – such as the resnicks (pom, halos, formerly cuties) and david cain (cotton candy grapes) – utterly engrossing. i picked up the dreamt land to learn about the context of the californian water crisis and, unlike the pumps of the state and central valley projects, it delivered. history helped me see that californians (or, more broadly, settlers?) tend towards excess and extremism. it also taught me that there is no normal when it comes to weather and water out here: california's clime is pendular, a fact that people have been forgetting since forever.
i respect the author's fresnan (rather than ~ coastal elite ~) farmer-adjacent perspective and do believe he was made to write this book. my main gripes are that he (1) bloviates whenever he teeters into memoir and (2) burdens people of different racial/ethnic groups with the the central role that his armenianness plays in his own identity and, in doing so, swerves into questionable generalization territory. a condensed version of this book that cuts down on points (1) and (2) would be a worthy read for all golden state residents.
i respect the author's fresnan (rather than ~ coastal elite ~) farmer-adjacent perspective and do believe he was made to write this book. my main gripes are that he (1) bloviates whenever he teeters into memoir and (2) burdens people of different racial/ethnic groups with the the central role that his armenianness plays in his own identity and, in doing so, swerves into questionable generalization territory. a condensed version of this book that cuts down on points (1) and (2) would be a worthy read for all golden state residents.
March 13, 2020
This book is way, way, way too long. It was clearly well researched, but the author either can't keep on topic or couldn't decide what the topic is. The books for the most part is about the constant drought and flood cycles in California and the users of water. For the most part, it is about farmers and just a little about city users. The history of farming and water use, where all the water is coming, and the effects of using more water than is really available is interesting. The politics of it is also interesting and for the most part infuriating. However, the author kept talking in detail about some of the players in the water use. This would have been good, but so many people are introduced in such level of detail including all the various generations of water users, and they are introduced in such quick succession that I could not longer keep any of them straight. Also, the author kept going into memoir area that had nothing to do with the thesis of the book. This would have been a much better book with an editor who would have cut 10-20% of the text out.
June 29, 2019
For anybody thinking their opinion about water in California is well-informed, read this book and you'll learn how the history of how we arrived at today's (and tomorrow's) situation is far more nuanced than you could possibly imagine. As a grandchild of a small acreage farmer in the Central Valley, this book connects me to my ancestors in so many ways that I lost track of the stream. Really wish I could have read this book with my own grandfather and my great-great grandfather, Thomas Law Reed, whose sprawling ranch along the Kings River led to the founding of Reedley. And, thank you to Mark Arax for applying his amazing writing skills to this opus that clearly gripped him for years. This is the 3rd book of his that I've read, and I hope it isn't his last.
June 24, 2019
If there is one book to read on water AND the history of California (which are essentially synonymous), this would be it.
August 6, 2019
Brilliant telling of the history of California through the lens of water use. Arax's writing is superb.
March 28, 2023
Oh my god I haven't been able to stop thinking about this book since I started it. I've never felt more doomed.
April 15, 2022
Excellent book! But I did cringe every time “man” was used when “human” should’ve been used (eg man power, mankind, etc$.
October 10, 2020
I don't know which is the greater feat - that Mark Arax wrote a comprehensive book about the manipulation of water in California or that I actually finished this book. Picked by my book club, so not a book I would normally read, it was at first a chore to read but by the end it became a need to find out what conclusions the author would come to after his rumination on this subject. Starting with John Sutter the author begins the history of agriculture in California and covers everything that's happened since then and the harnessing of water and depletion of ancient aquifers to create the billion dollar industry it is today. Arax mainly focuses on the Central Valley, the fortunes made and lost, the politics, the corruption and the people both great and small. Through interviews it felt like the author had respect for the people who shaped and are shaping the region but he also makes it clear that their relentless drilling into the aquifer and their expansion into areas that should never have been farmed is not sustainable. Lest you think he is completely against farming, he points out how trying to save the smelt and salmon by diverting water back to the Delta probably won't work, there are just too many forces against these fish making a comeback. And if the farmers didn't use the water the state would find other ways to use the surplus, namely creating more suburbs. Like the author's grandfather, my grandfather was also a fruit tramp in the same place and time so I am glad to have learned of this piece of history but more importantly where our water comes from. Though I'd have to subtract a star for the book being a bit long winded, I'm adding it back for the simple fact that I actually finished the book.
July 8, 2019
This book is both informative and entertaining, especially to those of us in California. The history and personal stories hold your interest through a well written narrative. I listened to the book and I recommend it as the storyteller is the author. The book adresses the growth of "the Valley", Sacramento, San Joaquin, Kern, Kings and others and the growth that was brought about by politicians and large land holders. But the growth of the land use has come with much controversy with increased water use for crops and less for home owners. The book is an important read in this age of increased land use and water consumption. The book covers the changes in crops from wheat, cotton, raisins, almonds, pistachios and grapes. A book well worth the read.
July 10, 2020
This book is very informative, but could have been New Yorker magazine article length.
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