Reply #23: The Central Valley is not a desert in the normal sense.

[Xithras]

Most of the Valley was floodplain, forest, and marshland before people came in. Tulare Lake, once the largest lake in the U.S. east of the Mississippi, existed in the now bone-dry farm "deserts" southwest of Fresno. When John Fremont marched up the Valley in the mid-1800's, his journals recorded the land as being a "paradise". When the Mormons marched west looking for a remote place to settle and create their society, they sent Jim Bridger ahead to scout out their original destination...the Central Valley. Bridger returned and suggested that the instead go to Salt Lake...the Central Valley was so fertile, full of game, and beautiful that he knew that it would eventually attract large numbers of non-Mormon settlers. Whenever John Muir crossed the Central Valley on his way to Yosemite and the Sierra's, he always recorded it as being full of wildflower meadows that stretched as far as the eye could see, blackberry bushes that stretched for miles end to end, rivers so full of fish that you could walk across their backs, and riparian forests that rivaled any forest back east.

It's true that the region doesn't get an incredible amount of rain, but the Central Valley is one of the flattest places on Earth and was crossed by a maze of rivers and streams running out of the four ranges that flank its edges. The huge amount of water flowing through the incredibly flat ground kept the water table between two and five feet below the surface, and the land thrived because of it.

Then white people came. We cleared the land, cut the trees (only 2% of the original forest remains), dammed the rivers, drained the wetlands, and converted it into a giant grid of farms. It was only then that people started thinking of it as a desert. Before that, people thought of it as paradise.

The Valley isn't dry because of geology or the weather, it's dry because we killed it. It's dry because we ship half of its water to San Francisco and Southern California. It's dry because we straightened and levied its river channels so the rivers can't water the plains anymore, so that water just runs out into the ocean. It's dry because, to this very day, we continue to pump water out of its lower spots to prevent "productive farmland" from returning to its natural marsh. It's dry because we clearcut the forests and cleared natural groundcover that once held moisture in the ground during the hot summer months.

Nature didn't make this area a desert, humans did. Nowadays we just teach our children that the area was naturally a desert to propogate the myth that we have somehow "improved" it, and to hide the fact that the Central Valley is one of the most degraded and environmentally sterile eco-regions on the planet.