Tom Hothem: Drought might help shape California’s new story

We Californians tend to trace our history in terms of centuries, and usually just a couple of those. After all, our numbers grew with the Gold Rush, and many of our ancestors realized it might not be a bad idea to stick around.

Back in the 1870s, John Muir recognized the great Central Valley would eventually be “tilled like a garden, when the fertilizing waters of the mountains, now flowing to the sea, will be distributed to every acre, giving rise to prosperous towns, wealth, arts, etc.”

Since that time, we’ve generally enjoyed ample water; relying on it, we learned to make our homes here. The larger climate history was rarely, if ever, an issue.

Until, of course, it was – with at least one multiyear drought per decade during the 20th century. We coped with those droughts and resumed our concept of progress once the rains resumed. But now, having weathered the first two decades of the 21st century with few indications that nature’s tap will reopen, we find ourselves needing new, longer timescales to measure drought.

With our subsistence at stake, the stories we tell about ourselves in this place are faltering. New narratives, spurred by advances in geological science, might help us formulate a bigger picture of what it means to live in California.

In their recent book “The West Without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow,” B. Lynn Ingram and Frances Malamud-Roam place our current predicament in stark perspective – looking at it over a context of some 20,000 years.

Ingram, a professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley, and Malamud-Roam, a senior environmental planner with Caltrans and a geographer for 20 years, will speak at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Merced Theatre. The event, presented by UC Merced’s Sierra Nevada Research Institute and Center for Climate Communications, is free and open to the public.

As the authors demonstrate through engaging descriptions of their research, our region’s climate has been as “boom and bust” as its economy. There have been copious rains inundating the Central Valley with megafloods followed by stubborn climate patterns that have spawned megadroughts spanning centuries.

Their picture of California is an environment whose climate fluctuations are the stuff of slow time – a prospect that surely tests Californians’ imaginations, but also invites ways to contemplate what we’ve got and to generate fresh hope for living in a state has endured both extremes.

Renewing our sense of California’s landscape as it is might strengthen our sense of living within it. If California has endured these climate changes, Californians might learn to become even more durable.

Challenged as we are by the current drought, perhaps we can yet rely on the creativity that got us here to foster a more reflexive and lasting ecological imagination supported by new stories that we tell about our world.

In his book “The Dream of the Earth,” Thomas Berry writes: “We are in trouble right now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story.”

Ingram and Malamud-Roam’s “The West Without Water” is an excellent start at telling a new story, with its wider, informed, intensive account of how we fit into our environs. It eloquently recounts the scientific story of where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re headed climatologically.

It succeeds partly because of the tales with which it is ornamented – the great flood of 1862, the Dust Bowl drought that brought so many migrants, the ancient testimony of the bristlecone pine, the legacy of the hydraulic era and, above all, the authors’ personal experiences as researchers and the infectious wonder with which they relate their work. Listening to their story might help us envision new ones of our own.

This story was originally published May 5, 2015 at 9:59 AM with the headline "Tom Hothem: Drought might help shape California’s new story."