The Tulare Basin of California's Central Valley

March 11, 2021 10:58 AM

The Tulare Basin had four lakes. The Tulare Basin is a land of superlatives. Long story short, the Tulare Basin was a huge and healthy wetlands ecosystem with diverse flora, fauna, and people. Then new people showed up, did the genocide thing (what's it called when it's a genocide of people AND environment?), and now it's a polluted agricultural "breadbasket of the world" (previously). Until the water runs out. But a U-turn is possible.

- Here is a pretty picture of Tulare Lake, CA in 1875 (after the California genocide). Here is a drawing of the past/present/future of the Tulare Basin.
- Aquapedia background - Tulare Lake Basin (Agricultural Drainage; Next Steps; Land Subsidence)
- Tulare Lake was once considered largest body of water west of Mississippi
- Here is a map of the Tulare Basin. Here is a modern rain map.
- Here is that map of the Tulare Basin again. Here is a map of California tribes and languages at first contact with Europeans. Here's a similar map but with highlighting. Here is the about page for the Tachi Yokut tribe (includes 5-minute video).
- This article argues that re-establishing Tulare Lake is the smart way to go.
- Duck hunters re-creating a new wetland in a drought (pdf).
- Land Restoration Strategies (Seasonal Wetland Restoration; Flood Plains & Deeper Water Areas; Shallow Water Habitat; Permanent Wetland Restoration; Riparian Restoration; Upland Restoration; Unproductive Farmland Restoration; Native Species Reintroduction)
- Tulare Lake is still on the map. Google. duckduckgo image search results

posted by aniola (24 comments total)

Ugh...

This is such a discouraging article. We are so fucked.
posted by Windopaene at 11:06 AM on March 11, 2021

I tried to make it hopeful, but yeah, it's a bummer. Maybe commenters can help with the injecting hope part?
posted by aniola at 11:07 AM on March 11, 2021

Water in the western US is super complicated...the ways in which surface water vs. groundwater are managed, and their connections in California is especially complicated. The Tulare basin is a big huge example of what has happened in California in almost every water basin. Some more general reading on public policy in CA for water and the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.
posted by th3ph17 at 11:38 AM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]

Maybe commenters can help with the injecting hope part?

Maybe after we're done dousing Fresno and Bakersfield with a biblical flood, we can set up a rainbow hologram.
posted by pwnguin at 11:43 AM on March 11, 2021 [7 favorites]

It is pretty amazing how much modern human habitation has changed California. The outlines of historical lakes are very clearly visible in today's valleys. The thought that the central valley has physically dropped due to pumping out groundwater. Many of these lakes were already precarious in that they depended on a small number of inflows and as the article indicates, cut off from rivers and facing aggressive outflows, they just disappeared. I can sort of cut early colonizers some slack in that I don't think they actually knew it was possible to actually destroy a lake. But it's tragic that that's what came to pass. It would be amazing to try to rebuild these lakes and restore the habitat, if it's possible.
posted by GuyZero at 11:50 AM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]

Maybe after we're done dousing Fresno and Bakersfield with a biblical flood, we can set up a rainbow hologram.

its happened before, sans hologram.
posted by th3ph17 at 12:01 PM on March 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

Looks like there's a book in its second edition. Floods and droughts in the Tulare River Basin.
posted by aniola at 12:27 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

Not uplifting, but if you like your fiction topical this is something to check out: The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi.
posted by elkevelvet at 1:11 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

See also: the kankakee marshes in the Midwest. Once they were home to food and fowl. Then the time drains came. Now that agriculture is petroleum based, the nitrate flows up from CF Industries in Louisiana, in dumped on the drained marshes, where it flows off these Ghost marshes into the river. The USA has one of the largest dead zones in the world in its southern ocean.

It s hard to imagine the massive switch from petroleum agriculture, much less the re-creation of those miles of wetland soils.

On the other hand, even Louisiana has been able to commit almost a billion a year to wetlands restoration, after 30 years of debate and study.

Surely the USA can afford to restore it's wetlands, even if it takes a couple generations
posted by eustatic at 2:32 PM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

One of the biggest drivers of water shortages in the west are the frankly ridiculous way water rights are handled. The system encourages the waste of water through its very structure. There is little or no incentive for any particular farmer to use water efficiently even as there is a great need for them to collectively use the water less wastefully both for their own good and for the good of downstream wildlife/habitat.
posted by wierdo at 2:42 PM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]

great need for them to collectively use the water less wastefully

so many catch-22's for water...for some aquifers, flood irrigation works great because it does actually help recharge the groundwater supply, but if you take the same amount of water and use it super efficiently over a much much larger area, you can make more money, but the water is mostly gone. Or you can illegally pump the water to other locations and waste it there...great documentary about that here: Water and Power, A California Heist.

I live on a farm in the central valley, work for an agriculture-based company, and worked on a water policy research project last year for a public policy class. But i'm not a water scientist or anything. Just a really relevant topic for me.
posted by th3ph17 at 3:20 PM on March 11, 2021 [6 favorites]

Maybe commenters can help with the injecting hope part?

The SF Bay Area has made some encouraging progress in restoring large portions of the wetlands that were turned into salt-production facilities during the early 20th century.

There are two Federal bird sanctuaries in the area (Alviso and Fremont); the work on these started in 1972. Two-minute YouTube video overview. (Bonus--there is a ghost town slowly sinking into the wetlands--five minute YT Video).
posted by JDC8 at 3:50 PM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

I can sort of cut early colonizers some slack in that I don't think they actually knew it was possible to actually destroy a lake.

Like a hundred years later the army corps of engineers came along and diverted water away from the lake to protect the (subsidized) cotton crops from flooding. At that point, they definitely knew it was possible to destroy a lake.

But we also know it's possible to restore a lake.
posted by aniola at 4:45 PM on March 11, 2021 [6 favorites]

Man, that Saudi Arabia thing was wild. Growing wheat in the frigging desert, even to exporting it. Like, zero fucks given for anything but very short-term gains, at the extremely obvious expense of thousands of years of hardship for future generations.

Doesn't leave me with kind thoughts about humanity in general, and the people who wind up leading us specifically, that's for sure.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:31 PM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

The list that goes on and on on page 12/12 of the conservation vision for the Tulare basin are also our leaders.
posted by aniola at 5:36 PM on March 11, 2021

after we are done what we now name Tulare lake will return,
posted by wmo at 6:29 PM on March 11, 2021

Apologies if this is in one of the links is above, but I recommend The King of California, if you want a deep narrative time into big agricultural business.

It would be one thing if the ecological mess we've created actually supported family farms, but thanks to deep pocketed lobbying, the big farmers have figure out how to shape policy
posted by CostcoCultist at 9:51 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

See also:
The Wonderful Resnicks; the largest water users.


posted by CostcoCultist at 9:52 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

It can be so beautiful out there but usually it's just bleak and depressing, or maybe hot and depressing. I think a sad truth about this part of California is that they are 100% going down with the ship. The land of "is growing food wasting water? build more dams, vote republican" isn't backing down. As King of California goes into detail on, some of these counties have had their water agencies completely captured by private interest in addition to being standard issue company towns writ large. Beyond that, you can't untangle the irrigation projects from the drinking water projects. It's the same canals. We're beholden to the California Aqueduct in many ways.
posted by feloniousmonk at 10:03 PM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

The positive feedback loops are not being discussed, which makes the larger scenario worse than described. Aquifers refill slower due to less rain and snowmelt from a warmer climate. Smaller aquifers collapse faster. Collapsed aquifers require more electricity usage to pump from deeper reserves, which worsen climate extremes that reduce aquifer refill rates, and around and around it goes.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:03 PM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

Goodish news from Central Asia: Aral Sea rises a bit.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:10 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

I have so much to say about this but should probably explore more of the first. I grew up near there and when I was younger, sometime in the mid-80’s they had the last big flood in the lake basin. I went with my father, who had some small influence at the time, to see the flooding. Acres and acres, as far as I could see, and still just a fraction of what there once was. Even in his life time. There was once a steamboat. Fish pulled from the lake and taken up river to San Francisco.

When my my brother in law was still alive he paid $80-grand for a new well to water his almond trees. Don’t buy California almonds, or even drink almond milk if you want to pretend to care about the environment. It’s all a wreck. Joan Didion touches on some of this, in more than one title. I just watch Greg Judy videos and pretend all farmers are as smart as him.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 10:05 AM on March 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

Joan Didion

I don't really know anything about Joan Didion, except that that name shows up in The Wonderful Resnicks; the largest water users article mentioned above. Do a ctrl+F. I guess people are complicated.
posted by aniola at 2:32 PM on March 12, 2021

The Resnicks...if I could know less about them I would. The Joan Didion book I’m thinking of is Where I Was From. She talks about what California was and how it got to now. Pretty sure she also touches on that a bit in The White Album. My father was a small time politician, but agriculture plays such an outsize role in the Central Valley that even he got courted by the rich and powerful. If only he’d kept it together long enough to get some of the rich. I’ve yet to read this but Boswell had a big influence on my fathers political career. I think my father even worked for him as a young man, loading crop dusters around the time I was born. Thanks for this, even though I left 30 years ago I still think about all of this a lot.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 5:08 PM on March 12, 2021