Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [313]
The contribution of Southern California to the ongoing increase in the world’s average per-capita human impact, as a result of transfers of people from the Third World to the First World, has for years been the most explosive issue in California politics. California’s population growth is accelerating, due almost entirely to immigration and to the large average family sizes of the immigrants after their arrival. The border between California and Mexico is long and impossible to patrol effectively against people from Central America seeking to immigrate here illegally in search of jobs and personal safety. Every month, one reads of would-be immigrants dying in the desert or being robbed or shot, but that does not deter them. Other illegal immigrants come from as far away as China and Central Asia, in ships that unload them just off the coast. California residents are of two minds about all those Third World immigrants seeking to come here to attain the First World lifestyle. On the one hand, our economy is utterly dependent on them to fill jobs in the service and construction industries and on farms. On the other hand, California residents complain that the immigrants compete with unemployed residents for many jobs, depress wages, and burden our already overcrowded hospitals and public education system. A measure (Proposition 187) on the 1994 state election ballot, overwhelmingly approved by voters but then gutted by the courts on constitutional grounds, would have deprived illegal immigrants of most state-funded benefits. No California resident or elected official has suggested a practical solution to the long-standing contradiction, reminiscent of Dominicans’ attitude towards Haitians, between needing immigrants as workers and otherwise resenting their presence and their own needs.
Southern California is a leading contributor to the energy crisis. Our city’s former network of electric streetcars collapsed in bankruptcies in the 1920s and 1930s, and the rights of way were bought up by automobile manufacturers and subdivided so as to make it impossible to rebuild the network (which competed with automobiles). Angelenos’ preference for living in houses rather than in high-rise apartments, and the long distances and diverse routes over which employees working in any given district commute, have made it impossible to design systems of public transportation that would satisfy the needs of most residents. Hence Los Angelenos are dependent on motorcars.
Our high gas consumption, the mountains ringing much of the Los Angeles basin, and prevailing wind directions generate the smog problem that is our city’s most notorious drawback (Plate 38). Despite progress in combating smog in recent decades, and despite seasonal variation (smog worst in the late summer and early autumn) and local variation (smog generally worse as one precedes inland), Los Angeles on the average continues to rank near the bottom of American cities for air quality. After years of improvement, our air quality has again been deteriorating in recent years. Another toxic problem that affects lifestyle and health is the spread of the disease-causing organism giardia in California’s rivers and lakes over the last several decades. When I first moved here in the 1960s and went hiking in the mountains, it was safe to drink water from streams; today the guaranteed result would be giardia infection.
The problem of habitat management of which we are most conscious is the fire risk in Southern California’s two predominant habitats, chaparral (a scrub woodland similar to the macchia of the Mediterranean) and