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As it happened, the drought was just a backdrop against which a patently Californian sturm und drang was being acted out. In 1989, northern California was hit by an earthquake that, though not exactly colossal—it released about 3 percent as much energy as the San Francisco earthquake of 1906—killed dozens of people and caused seven billion dollars’ worth of damage to homes, buildings, and public infrastructure. Two years later, an enormous wildfire swept the Oakland Hills, destroying twenty-five hundred homes, taking more lives, and inflicting at least two billion dollars’ worth of damage. Only a few weeks afterward, on Interstate 5, the worst mass highway collision in U.S. history occurred, involving 151 cars. About a year later, a pair of walloping earthquakes jolted the Mojave Desert, which has become suburban Los Angeles. In the midst of this litany was a hard winter freeze that wiped out a $1.5 billion citrus crop and yet another earthquake, which reduced much of the lovely town of Ferndale, far up on the north coast, to rubble.

Joan Didion once described the state as an “amphitheater of natural disaster,” and all these events bore her out—life in California was imitating a heavy metal cartoon. Only none of these was a natural disaster in any true sense. Earthquakes are quite harmless until you decide to put millions of people and two trillion dollars in real estate atop scissile fault zones. California is not Brazil, and it is far north of Florida—orchard growers are always gambling with frost. The mass collision, a macabre excitement on the world’s most boring stretch of interstate, was caused by a huge cloud of dust blowing off a cotton field that had been plowed bare and then fallowed due to the drought. Everything about California that is contrived and man-made and therefore vulnerable came together for the Oakland Hills fire: It began with a match or a cigarette dropped in a field of Turkish grass gone to straw (the native bunchgrasses, which can tolerate drought, have been all but usurped by invasive varieties); the grass fire spread into a grove of Australian eucalyptus trees, which can stand a drought but not a hard freeze; the resin-rich eucalyptus, which burn fiercely when frost-killed, went off like Roman candles, showering embers from roof to wood-shingle roof.

The drought itself, which may end up a more costly disaster than all of these combined, qualifies best as punishment meted out to an impudent culture by an indignant God. But the worst damage—ecological and economic—could have been averted, even after six dry years, had it not been for acts of man precipitated by the usual combination of wilfulness and avarice. It wasn’t a man-made drought, but man made it very much worse.

Before the Gold Rush, the streams that drain into the Central Valley from the Sierra Nevada and the northern Coast Range represented so many miles of salmon-spawning habitat that you could have stitched it all together and run it across the continent and back again. By the 1960s, 97 percent of it was gone. Friant Dam single-handedly wiped out a spawning run of a hundred and fifty thousand fish by blocking and dewatering the entire San Joaquin River. Salmon could live with the small hydroelectric dams built high in the mountains decades ago; they cannot live with giant, impassable multipurpose dams built low in the foothills, whose main purpose is usually to capture as much water as possible that can then be taken out of the rivers.

Despite the worst disruption of salmon habitat that you can find anywhere on earth, the Sacramento River and a few tributaries, in the late 1960s, still supported a surprisingly robust salmon fishery—the most productive south of the Columbia. There were four distinct subspecies: a fall run, reared mainly in hatcheries, that was the bread and butter of the commercial salmon fleet; a distinct late-fall run; a large winter run; and a rapidly declining spring run, a superfish that goes over forty pounds and blasts through Class Five rapids on