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By Root 2031 0

oak woodland. Under natural conditions both habitats experienced occasional fires from lightning strikes, like the situation in Montana forests that I discussed in Chapter 1. Now that people are living in and next to those highly flammable habitats, Angelenos demand that fires be suppressed immediately. Each year, the late summer and early fall, which are the hottest and driest and windiest time of year in Southern California, are the fire season, when somewhere or other hundreds of homes will go up in flames. The canyon in which I live has not had a fire get out of control since 1961, when there was a big fire that burned 600 houses. A theoretical solution to this problem, as in Montana forests, might be frequent controlled small-scale fires to reduce the fuel load, but such fires would be absurdly dangerous in this densely populated urban area, and the public would not stand for it.

Introduced alien species are a big threat and economic burden to California agriculture, the current leading threat being the Mediterranean fruit fly. Non-agricultural threats are introduced pathogens threatening to kill our oak trees and pine trees. Because one of my two sons became interested as a child in amphibians (frogs and salamanders), I have learned that most species of native amphibians have been exterminated from two-thirds of the streams in Los Angeles County, as the result of the spread of three alien predators on amphibians (a crayfish, bullfrog, and mosquitofish) against which Southern California amphibians are helpless because they never evolved to avoid those threats.

The major soil problem affecting California agriculture is salinization as a result of irrigation agriculture, ruining expanses of agricultural land in California’s Central Valley, the richest farmland in the United States.

Because rainfall is low in Southern California, Los Angeles depends for its water on long aqueducts, principally from the Sierra Nevada mountain range and adjacent valleys of Northern California, and from the Colorado River on the eastern border of our state. With the growth of California’s population, there has been increasing competition for those water supplies among farmers and cities. With global warming, the Sierra snowpack that provides most of our water will decrease, just as in Montana, increasing the likelihood of water shortages in Los Angeles.

As for collapses of fisheries, the sardine fishery of Northern California collapsed early in the 20th century, the abalone industry of Southern California collapsed a few decades ago soon after my arrival, and the rockfish fishery of Southern California is now collapsing and has become subject to severe restrictions or closure within the last year. Fish prices in Los Angeles supermarkets have increased by a factor of 4 since I moved here.

Finally, losses of biodiversity have affected Southern California’s most distinctive species. The symbol of the state of California, and of my university (the University of California), is the California Golden Bear, but it is now extinct. (What dreadful symbolism for one’s state and university!) Southern California’s population of sea otters was exterminated in the last century, and the outcome of recent attempts at reintroduction is uncertain. Within the time that I’ve lived in Los Angeles, populations of two of our most characteristic bird species, the Roadrunner and the California Quail, have crashed. Southern California amphibians whose numbers have plummeted are the California Newt and the California Tree Frog.

Thus, environmental and population problems have been undermining the economy and the quality of life in Southern California. They are in large measure ultimately responsible for our water shortages, power shortages, garbage accumulation, school crowding, housing shortages and price rises, and traffic congestion. In most of these respects except for our especially bad traffic jams and air quality, we are no worse off than many other areas of the United States.

Most environmental problems involve detailed uncertainties that are legitimate