California

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Oak savanna river terrace, Sacramento River. @ C.Michael Hogan


California, situated on the Pacific coast of the USA, is the third largest state of the United States in land area and most populous state. The 2009 population estimate pf the U.S. Census Bureau for California is 39.51 million or 12% of the U.S. population.

It has a rich prehistory of Native American habitation that extends to the earliest Holocene, and a vibrant period of European settlement and resource exploitation that began about three centuries ago. Since the mid twentieth century, California had become a major world technology center in the aerospace, environmental science, biotechnology, agricultural sciences and other related fields; however in the twenty first century, a major exodus is occurring in high technology and other wealth sectors, chiefly due to excessive regulation and taxation, as well as increasing crime. Resource outlooks for water supply, energy independence and biodiversity are problematic due to a rapidly expanding population and governance mistakes; however, air quality and water quality have shown steady improvement in the last four decades.

Geography

Topographic map of California. Source: State of California

California has an extensive western coastline formed by its boundary with the Pacific Ocean; moreover it is bordered by Oregon to the north, Nevada to the northeast, Arizona to the southeast and Mexico at the south. The state can be divided into eleven distinct geomorphic provinces: Klamath Mountains, Cascade Range, Modoc Plateau, Basin and Range, California Coast Ranges, California Central Valley, Sierra Nevada, Transverse Ranges, Mojave Desert, Peninsular Ranges and Colorado Desert. The Pacific Ocean coastal zone including the Channel Islands and Farallon Islands can be considered a twelfth marine province.

Along much of the Pacific Ocean coastline, sea level decline continues, deriving from Isostatic Rebound, the process wherein land surfaces rise when pressure from prior overlying glaciers is relieved during interglacials such as the present era. In this coastal region (notably, Sonoma, Mendocino, San Mateo, Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties) the decline of sea level due to the post glacial rebound continues to present time as attested by dramatic raised beach coastlines. The decline in sea level over the last 170 years due to delayed isostatic rebound can be estimated by the coastal cliff heights.

There are numerous significant rivers in California. North coast rivers draining to the Pacific include the Klamath, Smith, Eel and Russian Rivers. The Central Valley is drained by two primary great rivers, the Sacramento River and San Joaquin River, which merge to form the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta, whose flow discharges to the San Francisco Bay. Central coast watercourses discharging to the Pacific include the San Lorenzo and Salinas Rivers. Major drainage basins of the South Coast include the Ventura and Santa Ana Rivers.

The state's three major population centers are the Los Angeles Basin, San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego metropolitan area. Many allude to Southern and Northern California as distinct places, althought this terminology is more cultural than geographic; generally, locations north of Santa Barbara are deemed to be Northern California.

Ecology

California fan palms, a threatened species, in a desert wash at Anza Borrego Desert State Park. Source: C.Michael Hogan

The state of California extensive diversity of ecosystems including desert, grassland, chaparral, coastal oak woodland and Sierra Nevada forests, some coastal areas and the far north state. Remarkably, much of the landscape, particularly riparian forests, have been little changed from a period from 20 million years before present[1] until 1700 AD.

Specific ecoregions of California are: Northern, Central and Southern Coastal Regions; North Coast Ranges; Klamath Mountains; Modoc Plateau; northwestern Basin and Range; Southern Cascades; Central Valley; Sierra Nevada and Sierra Nevada Foothills; Central Coast Ranges; Mojave, Sonoran and Colorado Deserts; Southern California Mountains and Valleys; Mono Basin; southeastern Great Basin.

Wiithin the system developed by Dr. Robert G. Bailey, a geographer for the U.S Forest Service who developed one of the most widely used systems to define, describe, and map the world's ecoregions; herein we are using a modified version of Bailey, in which the San Francisco Bay Area is not considered within the Central California Coast, but assigned to its own domain, in keeping with modern ecological mapping practices:

Morro Bay viewed from a prehistoric Chumash tribe settlement site within the Elfin Forest. Source: C.Michael Hogan

Agriculture

Sonoma Valley vineyard with the Mayacama Range on the horizon. Source: C.Michael Hogan

Although California Native Americans are known to have cultivated a number of grains and other crops since the mid Holocene, a dramatic change in the landscape did not occur until the late 1700s with the arrival of the Spanish missionaries and other European settlers. Major production of cereals, fruit, almonds and viticulture ensued, as well as the beginning of widespread livestock cultivation. As early as the end of the 19th century some claimed that California agricultural productivity per acre exceeded Europe by a factor of two, due to superior climate and soils.

Wine production was viewed as the Holy Grail of crops from a very early time, with Sonoma, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles Counties all claiming early plantings. Arguably a Montecito vineyard dating to at least 1795 may have been the oldest documented. Cuttings from Spain via Mexico and others originating in Central Europe were some of the first sources of vine stock introduced into California. At the present time California wines offer some of the greatest diversity and quality of any world wine region.

Livestock grazing propagated rapidly in the early 1800s predating most intensive cropping activity. Cattle prospered chiefly between the Russian and Stanislaus Rivers, both in the Central Valley as well as coastal prairies and sheltered vallies of the Coast Ranges. Winter rains led to lush spring grasses, with a more sparse grazing diet after the summer dessication. After the grasslands and savanna had been sacrificed, numerous forests were cleared to make way for the profitable business of cattle, and to a lesser extent sheep. By the mid 1900s there were many instances of overgrazing leading to massive topsoil loss, sediment water pollution and reduction of natural species richness.

By 1879 the culitvation of fruit crops became very significant with leading counties being Santa Clara, Alameda, Sonoma and Los Angeles.[2] Major fruits produced early in large quantities were the orange, apple, pear, peach, cherry and strawberry. Along with the success of agriculture came destruction of vast tracts of grassland and savanna habitat, particularly in the Central Valley, where today only a few refugia such as Butte County's Table Mountains serve to protect vestiges of once thriving expanses of biodiversity.

Forest Management

Wildfires have been a growing concern in California, especially over the last four decades. The major causes of wildfires are rising levels of arson and homeless encampments in forests; however, one of the greatest causative factors is failure to manage the forest fuel reduction. Scientists and forest managers have mapped the majority of forest areas that need dead brush clearing and removal of forest dead wood. However, the state administration has failed to fund these activities. In addition, there are many areas that could benefit from managed preventative burns, which can be highly effective in reducing risks of large wildfire events. Experience in western USA forests over the last century has clearly proven that managing forest fuel reduction has been very effective over the period 1920 to 1970. In the ensuing five decades, there has been undue emphasis upon keeping forests pristine, at the risk of incurring massive wildfires. Studies in Glacier National Park have proven this case in the most comprehensive manner; in Glacier, active management and also fire suppression was vigorous from 1920 until 1970, with an outcome of very small acreages of wildfires. After 1970, abandonment of both fire suppression vigor and reduced attention to forest fuel reduction led to massive escalation of wildfire destruction. The false argument that climate change is responsible for escalating wildfire destruction has no basis in fact.

Resource outlook

Color enhanced Chumash rock art, Santa Barbara County. Source: Millennium Twain at English Wikipedia

There are numerous resources under great pressure within California, chiefly due to the rapidly expanding human population. These population pressures exert enormous demand upon water, energy and agricultural resources,[3] and create irreversible adverse impacts upon the state's once vast biodiversity. Some have argued that these resources may eventually become self-limiting to population growth, but history illustrates that technology coupled with advancing resource exploitation finds methods of serving population expansion at the expense of the environment.

Water

As early as 1976 a severe imbalance was present in California's water use, with only three crops (rice, hay and citrus crops) consumed 45 percent of all freshwater supply, including industrial and human uses.[4] The first two of the crops are very low economic value commodities; thus political power was and still is used to subsidize and promote excessive water use for commodities of questionable priority to the state's success. In the last four decades the California water crisis has compounded by the large population explosion, particularly in Southern California, which has the least water resources. Diversion of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta has strained the wetland ecosystem. With continuing subsidies to maintain water delivery to economically marginal crops, and with no let- up in population growth, the water crisis can be expected to continue. Longer term, massive desalination plants may be required to bridge the resource gap.

Energy

Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, San Luis Obispo County, California. This plant was found to have produced kills of abalone and other marine organisms, when thermal discharges were inadequately analyzed or mitigated. Source: David Searls

California's energy dilemmas are twofold: regulatory failure and inadequate generation/distribution. With regard to California's now legendary failed regulatory scheme, energy expert McGrew asserts: "California's energy crisis is the poster child for how not to restructure the electric utility industry".[5] The state is still recovering from an obscure set of regulations begun in the late 1990s, having cost consumers and embroiled many parties in extraordinary legal battles; these mistakes in regulation by legislators and attorneys lacking an understanding of the electric utility industry have sapped intellectual resources that could have been advanced to the planning and production of energy. A major error (especially in the last several years) is the extremely high Water Wastage, at 76% percent, leading the nation in water wastage; this contributes to seas level rise by failure to store water and recharge aquifers. There is a growing shortfall of electric grid supply, notably in nuclear power that is the safest and least in greenhouse gas production.

Solar power in integrated building design has been badly mismanaged with disproportionate subsidies for large solar farms which are inherently not economically sustainable. The green building program has also not lived up to its potential by neglecting some of the most leveraged strategies of attacking building energy wastage, such as over-illumination reduction; the program has instead focused on a number of dogmatic elements such as lighting retrofit, which while of some use, have ignored some of the faster payback energy savings that can be achieved by aggressive use of natural light and avoiding over-lamping. California's recent policies of aggressive promotion of solar farms have not only destroyed massive amounts of desert habitat, but resulted in blackouts and strangling of the electric grid; this happened by abandoning reliable elements of baseload electricity generation such as nuclear and natural gas. Ironically, reduction of natural gas plants has necessitated in import of huge amounts of high pollution coal burning energy from other states.

The more recent push for elimination of gas heating is not only economically bad judgement, but will result in higher fire risk, home deaths, and higher indoor air pollution (from mercury emissions of electric heaters).

Biodiversity

Juvenile California Condor, a critically endangered species having the largest wingspan of any North American bird. Source: Scott Frier/USFW

California has been a leader in providing structure for preservation of open space and developing habitat protection plans for endangered species. The issue ahead is a mathematical equation that weighs the pressure of an expanding population with the limited resources available for species protection. To date California has destroyed proportionately more of its wetlands than any other U.S. state.[6] Before California's initiatives that began to aggressively protect the natural environment, a full ninety percent of coastal wetlands had been lost; goals for the next two decades may provide for restoring about ten percent of the loss. A near term threat to biodiversity is the initiative for large photovoltaic arrays in the Mojave Desert; while well intentioned for energy, the proposals would destroy and fragment large areas of sensitive desert habitat. More effective programs lie in smaller scale integrated solar assemblies that can collectively achieve much greater installed capacity with virtually no impact on biodiversity.

Important biodiversity features are represented by an array of significant forest types including Monterey Pine, Coast Live Oak and Monterey Cypress forests. These features are not only important for the tree canopy, but also for expansive biodiversity in the understories, particulaly for mixed oak woodlands. Pacific Madrone is another iconic California tree, favoring near coastal areas.

Pollution indices

San Francisco International Airport, whose operations generate considerable noise pollution on the San Francisco Peninsula. Source: Calbookaddict at English Wikipedia

California laid the groundwork in the early 1970s for effective environmental protection in the fields of air quality, water quality and community noise control. These methods rely upon relatively simple regulatory elements, most of which are effectively integrated into the planning process. In the case of air quality, pollution levels had steadily declined in the twentieth century,[7] from emission controls on vehicular and stationary sources as well as progress in using computer modeling of air pollution in urban design. However, in the last 25 years, California has achieved the dubious distinction of worst air pollution in the USA.[8] In the case of water quality, important strides have been made in cleaning up rivers and streams as well as coastal estuaries. Much of this progress was due to communities aggressively planning for secondary wastewater treatment in the 1980s, but considerable advances are due to more intelligent methods of managing surface runoff (Surface runoff) in urban areas, as well as reductions in use of pesticides. With regard to sound level reduction for sensitive receptors, California has led the nation in establishing planning methods which minimize noise exposure to the general population; since 90 percent of community noise is transportation generated, many of these efforts have involved suitable acoustical technology[9] to assist in zoning decisions, urban highway design, use of transit and traffic management techniques.

See Also

References

Citation

C. Michael Hogan (2010, updated 2022). California. ed. Peter Saundry. Encyclopedia of Earth. National Council for Science and Environment. Washington DC. Retrieved from http://editors.eol.org/eoearth/wiki/California

America's Health Rankings analysis of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, United Health Foundation, AmericasHealthRankings.org, Accessed 2022.  https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measure/air/state/ALL

  1. Richard E.Warner and Kathleen M. Hendrix. 1984. California riparian systems: ecology, conservation and productive management. 1035 pages
  2. H.H.Bancroft. 1890. History of the Pacific States of North America: California
  3. Joseph B.Knox and Ann Foley Scheuring. 1991. Global climate change and California: potential impacts and responses. 184 pages
  4. Ernest A.Engelbert. 1982. Competition for California water: alternative resolutions. 208 pages
  5. James H.McGrew. 2009. FERC: Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. 294 pages
  6. Michael G.Barbour, Todd Keeler-Wolf and Allan A. Schoenherr. 2007. Terrestrial vegetation of California. 712 pages
  7. Ronald E. Hester and Roy M. Harrison. 1997. Air quality management. Royal Society of Chemistry (Great Britain) 160 pages
  8. Michael G.Barbour, Todd Keeler-Wolf and Allan A. Schoenherr. 2007.(US. EPA, 2022)
  9. C.Michael Hogan. 1973. Analysis of highway noise. Journal of Water, Air & Soil Pollution. vol.2. no.3. pages 387-392, Springer Netherlands