A deeply misguided story in this week’s Newsweek magazine about my state: Death of the Dream, written by Joel Kotkin.
For decades, California has epitomized America’s economic strengths: technological excellence, artistic creativity, agricultural fecundity and an intrepid entrepreneurial spirit. Yet lately California has projected a grimmer vision of a politically divided, economically stagnant state. Last week its legislature cut a deal to close its $42 billion budget deficit, but its larger problems remain.
California has returned from the dead before, most recently in the mid-1990s. But the odds that the Golden State can reinvent itself again seem long. The buffoonish current governor and a legislature divided between hysterical greens, public-employee lackeys and Neanderthal Republicans have turned the state into a fiscal laughingstock. Meanwhile, more of its middle class migrates out while a large and undereducated underclass (much of it Latino) faces dim prospects. It sometimes seems the people running the state have little feel for the very things that constitute its essence—and could allow California to reinvent itself, and the American future, once again.
It doesn’t get much better.
My maternal ancestors came to this state 160 years ago this year; William Whiteside Moore, my great-great-great grandfather, left his homestead in western Illinois and ventured out for the Gold Rush. Family lore has it that a partner stole what gold was found, and my ancestor returned to the Land of Lincoln penniless. He also returned inspired by what he had seen, and he brought his entire family with him. After moving about a bit, they settled in the Santa Clara Valley not long after statehood in 1851. In the mid-1880s, William Whiteside’s son, my great-great grandfather A.A. Moore, purchased a large piece of land in the rolling hills of southern Alameda County, just up above Mission San Jose. My mother’s side has called those hills our truest earthly home ever since.
My father had a different experience of coming to California. Born in Austria, raised as a war refugee in the rural English countryside, he came to the Golden State 110 years after William Whiteside Moore. My papa came for graduate school at Berkeley, and chose an unusual (if inexpensive and colorful) rout. He was the only fare-paying passenger on a merchant ship from Southampton to Miami in the spring of 1959; upon arrival he took a four-day-long Greyhound bus ride from South Florida to the San Francisco Bay Area. He eventually settled in Santa Barbara. He knew the geography of the state better than most natives (name a town, and he knew the county in which it was located, no matter how small and obscure.)
Love of California is in my blood and in my soul in a way that love of the union is not. And I suppose I’m one of those “hysterical greens” against whom Kotkin fulminates in his shrill Newsweek piece. I was raised to understand that California had a natural carrying capacity that it ought not exceed, and that capacity was dictated by one thing nearly completely missing from Kotkin’s article: water. We’ve built our canals and our desalination plants; we’ve drained the Owens River and nearly ruined the Colorado. And though rain keeps falling, we are in a state of near-perpetual drought, a drought exacerbated by the impossible agricultural and human demands placed upon a state that was never capable of hosting so many people.
Kotkin rails against the “green gentry”, and snarks about those who live in my hometown (Carmel by-the-Sea):
You can see the effects of the gentry’s green politics up close in places like the Salinas Valley, a lovely agricultural region south of San Jose. As community leaders there have tried to construct policies to create new higher-wage jobs in the area (a project on which I’ve worked as a consultant), local progressives—largely wealthy people living on the Monterey coast—have opposed, for example, the expansion of wineries that might bring new jobs to a predominantly Latino area with persistent double-digit unemployment. As one winegrower told me last year: “They don’t want a facility that interferes with their viewshed.” For such people, the crusade against global warming makes a convenient foil in arguing against anything that might bring industrial or any other kind of middle-wage growth to the state.
It has damn all to do with a viewshed, Kotkin. It’s w-a-t-e-r. Greens in my town have fought just as hard against new golf courses for the wealthy in Pebble Beach as we have fought against new housing developments inland. The land cannot support as many people and projects as it is being asked to support, and the crumbling of the Golden State is due far more to overbuilding and overpopulation than it is to over-regulation. The rivers and the snowpack are already depleted, and building new dams and canals (at tremendous cost to the environment) is both monumentally expensive and, in the long run, futile. The water simply isn’t there for 40,000,000 people and industry.
I know that the land my ancestors knew isn’t coming back. I’m not drugged on nostalgia. I am, however, interested in the long-term good of this land — and by long-term, I mean centuries rather than decades. And from that standpoint, a decline in growth is a good thing. Kotkin writes:
… the modern environmental movement often adopts a largely misanthropic view of humans as a “cancer” that needs to be contained. By their very nature, the greens tend to regard growth as an unalloyed evil, gobbling up resources and spewing planet-heating greenhouse gases.
He’s wrong that this is a new view; he hasn’t read his Edward Abbey or his Robinson Jeffers, two men who loved this land and wrote about this land and gave their lives to this land. The undiscerning might accuse them of misanthropy, but Jeffers and Abbey understood what it means to take the longest of long views. Long before anyone ever heard of a Prius, these two knew what it really meant to protect this land from humans whose very deathstyle is so frequently parasitical. Their views — hostile to growth and reverent for nature — are part and parcel of California environmentalism today, even in a bastardized and watered-down form.
Jeffers is my favorite poet. And one of my favorite poems is his great Carmel Point, a short offering about the land on which I was raised (my mother still lives 700 yards from Jeffers’ home). And for me, this piece — in its beautiful call to rethink our priorities — is at the root of my environmentalism. This is policy as well as poetry:
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.-As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
That stark, almost terrifying final sentence serves as a theological first principle for me as a Californian. All our works will indeed dissolve, but in the case of many of them, better that they not be built in the first place.
undiscerning might accuse them of misanthropy, but Jeffers and Abbey understood what it means to take the longest of long views. Long before anyone ever heard of a Prius, these two knew what it really meant to protect this land from humans whose very deathstyle is so frequently parasitical.
I think calling people “parasites” has to be the dictionary definition of “misanthrope”.
Hugo — Huges — I love you as my friend and mentor. But your environmentalist/vegan views drive me crazy. One week you oppine about the right of women to reproduce free from judgment (great post about the “octumom”). Then you turn around and say women should have as few babies as possible to protect the earth. YIou condemn classism but Kotkin is right that there is an environmental classism at play here. How can you be so intuitive about relationships and so freaking dense about class?
Hugo, I say this to you because I notice that you don’t have the voice in the feminist blogging world I think you should have and would have had. If you look at all the fights you’ve been i with other feminists, like over Amanda’s book, fights where you have aquitted yourself honorably, it’s always issues of race or class or the environment where you make unceccesary enemies. If you just blogged about feminism, about raising young men and women, about relationships, you wouldn’t piss off as many people and you would have a much wider readership.
I am probably not the only one who feels this way. And I love that I know I can say this to you without you getting mad.
I’d like to respectfully, but strongly, disagree with Luisa. Environmental activism is a compelling moral duty; it is at least as important a facet of humanism as activism on feminist or class issues, and it also has a moral claim that transcends humanism itself. If Luisa is uncomfortable with some of the bitter truths of the physical world we all inhabit, then I submit that this is her issue to deal with, not Hugo’s.
Luisa, your point seems to be that drought and plague are terribly classist and probably sexist. This is no doubt true. The proper reaction to this fact, however, is not to pretend as though they don’t exist.
I tend to disagree with Hugo on certain animal rights issues, but I respect his position and recognize that our differences of opinion are based on fairly arbitrary choices about what to value. I assume that you have a similarly reasoned justification for ignoring ecological issues, but your post doesn’t suggest what this might be. Perhaps if you made a reasoned plea to Hugo instead of a naked appeal to elevate politics over truth, it might spark a productive discussion?
Picador, I’ve known Hugo since I was a freshman in high school, so I may take advantage of our friendship and his role as my advisor and my “second dad.”
I re-read my comment and regret that it had so many typoes in it, as well as not carrying my point as I would have liked. Suffice it to say that Hugo grew up in Carmel. Carmel is a very beautiful place, worth celebrating in poetry. I visited Carmel, once. Hugo’s family lives there, and takes that nature for granted, and doesn’t think about the need to balance reverance for nature with job creation.
I don’t know if you know the San Gabriel Valley, but I grew up in a place called West Covina. No one writes poems about West Covina. We’re a bedroom community on the 10 freeway. People try and leave “Covee” for somewhere else. People in West Covina include people like my Dad, who worked in sales for many years but hasn’t been able to make much money lately. People like my uncle and aunt, who are contractors and nearly bankrupt right now. When Hugo talks about cutting off water to new projects, what are people like my family supposed to do? Move to somewhere where there’s more water?
Hugo wants a world with fewer people in it. Long-term, that might be a good idea. But how we get there? Who pays the price to keep the land intact and the rivers flowing? My family pays that price before Hugo’s family.
When it comes to friendship, and Hugo (I call him “Huges”, which rhymes with “cougs”) who is my friend… well, I think I can challenge him where he, to use his favorite phrase “falls short of the mark.” When he talks about sexuality and gender and relationships, he’s right on. I’m a freaking teenage lesbian, and I never thought a more or less straight man could mentor me through what Huges has mentored me through. But his insights into one area of life are so cogent that it is painful, really painful, to see how blinded by privilege he can be in another area of life.
Hugo made me feel loved and accepted for who I am in terms of my gender and my sexuality. He makes me feel invisible sometimes because of what I assume would be called a lower-middle class background from suburbia. He does it to other people and I am calling him out on it. And Joel Kotkin was right: their is a narcissistic part to this kind of environmentalism in which affluent people whose ancestors got here a long time ago get to practice NIMBYism to keep “folks” like my family from getting ahead.
Luisa, no worries, I appreciate you bringing this up — I’ve taken a hiatus, as you know, from blogging about vegan things (though I will be back to it soon). In the meantime, I’m determined to find a way to strip the classism, if that is what it is, out of my writing about green issues. I am sensitive to the charge of NIMBYism; it’s not like I want a prison built in, say, Covina so that it won’t be built in Carmel. Rather, I want to participate in a conversation about a new economic model, one based on sustainability rather than growth and on gently encouraging a declining human population over a long period of time.
As one who feels compelled both to conserve resources and to be liberal with justice (Amos 5:24, etc.), I am caught on the horns of this very dilemma. Hugo, is none of the material scarcity of which you speak in your head? Conversely, Luisa, is the material scarcity of which Hugo speaks all in his head?
You know, never mind those questions — of course the answer to neither of them a solid “yes” or “no”. And I am interested in finding, as near as possible, that precise point between “yes” and “no”. Only I feel lost in that middle ground; privileged as I am, I don’t trust my own bearings.
Luisa, thank you for your patient and measured response. On re-reading your comment and mine after I posted, I felt like a bit of a jerk for injecting in the middle of what is obviously a long-standing conversation between friends.
And I certainly identify with your concerns about the disproportionate impact of “green” measures on already (relatively) marginalized groups. I’ve been very wary about the recent trendiness of environmentalist rhetoric, and I’ve seen it used again and again as a mask for classism, racism, and exploitation. You are of course right to chide Hugo, and all of us, to stay on our toes with regard to this trap.
That being said: if you reject Hugo’s solutions, what do you propose instead? Yes, cutting off water will affect developers like your family disproportionately, and they will have a hard time moving on to another place and/or another profession; does this mean that all unsustainable ways of life must be supported by society indefinitely? Environmental changes will eventually disrupt the “American Way Of Life” no matter how deferential we are in the short term to unsustainable arrangements; why not start adjusting now, instead of waiting until we reach the edge of the cliff? This may sound heartless, as it obviously hits close to home for you, and of course it is also not /fair/ that one group’s life must be disrupted and not another’s. But surely society must anticipate such changes and do what it can to facilitate relocation and/or changes of profession for people engaged in unsustainable living, rather than simply propping up their activity once it has ceased to provide a positive output. Contractors and developers are one group affected by this, but of course farmers have been in this situation for decades, and our disastrous agricultural policies have resulted not only in poverty abroad but in outsized consumption of petroleum at home, leading in turn to our recent military adventures in the middle east. The romantic idea that the old (i.e. mid-20th century) ways of life must be preserved at all costs is a dangerous and ultimately futile one. Hugo has proposed one possible solution; what is your counter?
I don;t have a specific ounter solution, and I wish I did. Perhaps it’s the tone I object to as much as anything else: there’s a way Hugo writes that suggests jobs are of no account compared to nature. I just want a balance, and honestly, I don;t have a good counter suggestion.
I don’t really see any equitable way of determining who California ‘has room for’ as it were.
Obviously, it’s a lot easier to say that if you’re not personally affected, but whether we eventually destroy the environment of the state by subsidizing growth and development, or simply do nothing and allow the real environmental limitations of the region to come to bear, it will be economics that ultimately determine who can and can’t remain (perhaps mitigated by the political process, though I doubt in any way favorable to most folk).