2015: Another Dry Year
My grandfather watched the weather to see if he’d get enough rain for the sod he grew; my dad watched the weather because he liked to go windsurfing. This year, I too became a person who watches the weather — and rather obsessively — because of the California drought, a story that became central to my writing and editing in 2015.
As someone who came to journalism through food writing, I have always had a slight fear that I will get stuck writing about one thing. And while I loved covering restaurants while I was at TastingTable, dining always felt like a topic too narrow to be creatively satisfying in the long term. There’s a wealth of stories to cover on the beat, to be sure, but my interests lie elsewhere too—and I want to be professionally curious about many subjects, not just one.
This all has something to do with the drought because, as an editor, I have always tried to push the boundaries of what qualifies as a food story. This year, writing about water has taken me from dry farming, drip irrigation, and restaurant’s drinking water policies to flood plain restorations, groundwater recharge, and habitat protections for endangered species. (I was even a talking head!) Professional obsession with drought issues also changed how I looked at my own garden, and in order to explore a more private relationship with water and plants, I started a TinyLetter, the Inconstant Gardener, about growing things in Southern California. The newsletter is, I think, the perfect semi-private platform for writing that overlaps personal and professional work.
(I edited/co-edited two big projects this year to: one on the weird travels food takes before we eat it, and the other on how 2015 changed the future.)
With the last big story I published in 2015, about the L.A. River, I finished making a jump that I began, rather unintentionally, at the beginning of the year: it’s a piece of environmental journalism, most simply put. Perhaps I will be boxed in as a food writer professionally in 2016 and beyond, but if I accomplished anything this year, I proved to myself that I could write — and write well — about issues that fall well outside of my beat. All I had to do was stick to the same story.
Just as there are troubling implications for the state and the national food supply, there are real solutions too — if not for the actual lack of rain, then for using what water there is more conservatively. They run together like a litany, a secular prayer for rain: reservoirs, dams, drip irrigation, microsprinklers, soil moisture monitoring, desalination, low-flow appliances, variable flush toilets, rain barrels, shorter showers, groundwater recharge, drought-tolerant rootstock, cover crops, wastewater recycling, big data, intensification, stormwater capture, no-till farming, double-cropping, composting, mulching, gray water — and, perhaps, the end of agriculture.
What Should California Look Like After the Drought?
“It’s like wearing suits — men used to wear suits and were free of thinking about fashion or appropriateness,” Pollan said. “They were like a uniform. In many ways, the lawn is the uniform of the American landscape.” A uniform, that, in light of the drought, which is now affecting nearly a third of the country, is going out of style.
The day she picked out her strawberry, there was a woman at the nursery who, like me, was also shopping with her daughter in tow. The girl was probably 8 or 9, and, based on the way she answered her mother’s prompts, was well versed in the native plants species of California available for sale at the Theodore Payne Foundation. I found myself wondering if the endgame of having a two-year-old who screams “MONKEYFLOWER” when she sees those little orange blooms was a kid with a parentally enforced encyclopedic knowledge of native plant species. It was one of my first moments as a parent where I saw how fleeting the time will be in which my child thinks I am cool, and that the things I am interested in are cool — many of which decidedly are not.
Los Angeles Remembers It Has a River
The city promises unleashing the river would be for the good of all of the above, but as residents of the low-income neighborhood of Frogtown, the locus of change along the river, face dislocation, and many endangered species are left out of plans altogether, the first major stage of the grand restoration project could be seen to follow the Mulholland mold. Critics worry that the communities that have long called the river’s edge home — Frogtown’s human residents, as well as the locally extinct red-legged amphibians that gave the neighborhood its name — aren’t being factored into the river’s future. The proposals for the river could turn a city popularly (and incorrectly) considered a desert into an oasis for people and wildlife in the changed climate we’re already grappling with — or not. Is a multibillion-dollar infrastructure project decades in the making worth all the trouble if it can’t benefit all the city’s broad social strata, its water supply, and its ample wildlife?
