The Rewilding of California’s Parched Central Valley
Roaring winds engulfed the southern San Joaquin Valley in nearly mile-high plumes of dust, five days before Christmas in 1977. Severe drought had parched the region for years, and gusts reaching an estimated 192 miles per hour tore across the farmland. Highway traffic came to a halt; paint was sandblasted off trapped vehicles. The dust was so thick that it blocked out the sun.
The storm raged on, spanning three days. Dust crept into homes through every nook and cranny. When residents finally emerged, they found that livestock had been buried alive, along with creeks and irrigation canals. Over the next several months, hundreds of people came down with valley fever, a disease caused by inhaling the airborne spores of the dirt-dwelling fungus Coccidioides immitis, commonly called cocci. The event became known as the Great Bakersfield Dust Storm, and it resulted in at least five deaths and $40 million in damages ($200 million today), not including subsequently ruined agriculture.
The threat of destructive dust storms looms again as the Central Valley reckons with drought, new limits on groundwater use, and wells running dry from decades of unsustainable pumping. To stem the groundwater system’s collapse, California passed the historic Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) in 2014, which requires balanced groundwater use in the coming decades. For the first time in the state’s history, farmers can’t extract more water from aquifers than is replenished. As a result, groundwater users face having to take swaths of their land out of production to comply with irrigation limits. In the San Joaquin Valley, over half a million acres—10 percent of that valley’s irrigated farmland—will need to go dry by 2040, according to estimates from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), an independent research institution.
The PPIC also investigated whether taking land out of agricultural production—known as fallowing—under SGMA might “turn the San Joaquin Valley into a dust bowl,” according to the study’s author. It found that about 75 percent of the valley’s rural communities at high risk from dust-prone soils will need to fallow land. Yet there is no overarching plan for what to do with all the unirrigated fields; the fate of each acre will be determined by the farmer who owns it. Researchers fear the valley could become a chaotic patchwork of cultivated fields and barren land that harbors weeds, pests, and dust in a region that sees some of the worst air quality in the nation.
“No one wants a California dust bowl,” says Ann Hayden, associate vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund’s climate resilient water systems program.