The Tarnished State

I find myself in partial agreement with New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo:

But lately my affinity for my home state has soured. Maybe it’s the smoke and the blackouts, but a very un-Californian nihilism has been creeping into my thinking. I’m starting to suspect we’re over. It’s the end of California as we know it. I don’t feel fine.

It isn’t just the fires — although, my God, the fires. Is this what life in America’s most populous, most prosperous state is going to be like from now on? Every year, hundreds of thousands evacuating, millions losing power, hundreds losing property and lives? Last year, the air near where I live in Northern California — within driving distance of some of the largest and most powerful and advanced corporations in the history of the world — was more hazardous than the air in Beijing and New Delhi. There’s a good chance that will happen again this month, and that it will keep happening every year from now on. Is this really the best America can do?

Probably, because it’s only going to get worse. The fires and the blackouts aren’t like the earthquakes, a natural threat we’ve all chosen to ignore. They are more like California’s other problems, like housing affordability and homelessness and traffic — human-made catastrophes we’ve all chosen to ignore, connected to the larger dysfunction at the heart of our state’s rot: a failure to live sustainably.

but I don’t think he quite understands California’s problem. It isn’t just an assumption of infinitude. I would say it’s more a rejection of history and reluctance to manage the implications of your choices. California was and has been settled by people eager to leave their prior lives behind, to assume new identities and new lives in a new state. Go West! As Horace Greeley put it:

I believe that each of us who has his place to make should go where men are wanted, and where employment is not bestowed as alms. Of course, I say to all who are in want of work, Go West!

But what can you do? and how can your family help you? Your mother, I infer, is to be counted out as an effective worker. But what of the rest? And you – can you chop? Can you plow? Can you mow? Can you cut up Indian corn? I reckon not. And in the west it is hard to find such work as you have been accustomed to. The conditions of living are very rude there.

On the whole I say, stay where you are; do as well as you can; and devote every spare hour to making yourself familiar with the conditions and dexterity required for the efficient conservation of out-door industry in a new country. Having mastered these, gather up your family and Go West!

It is impossible to “live sustainably” when your economy is premised on continuing explosive economic growth in a fragile ecosystem. San Francisco and Los Angeles’s air qualities are poor because of the geographic conditions in those places and there are simply too many people living lifestyles in excess of what the land can support. They need too much space. Their ability to build up is limited both by risk and preference so they build out. They need too much water. They need too much electricity which they don’t care to produce themselves. They want the land to remain wild but their very presence calls for it to be managed.