The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [44]
By August, eighty-five of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties had been declared federal disasters. FEMA’s response team had grown from thirty-nine to fifteen hundred. Two million acres of the world’s finest farmland had lost twenty tons or more of topsoil per acre; six hundred thousand acres of bottomland were simply scoured away. 183 The statewide damage estimates had swelled to $10 billion—roughly $3,500 for every man, woman, and child in Iowa—and would later go even higher. By 2009 damage estimates to the University of Iowa alone were approaching one billion dollars.184 Forty thousand Iowans—almost half the number of voters who in January helped send Barack Obama to the White House—had been displaced from their homes.
Meanwhile, six states and eighteen hundred miles to the west, a very different water-related disaster was unfolding. On June 4, 2008—right in the middle of those wettest fifteen days of Iowa history—Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger strode to a podium in Sacramento to declare an official state of drought in California, the largest total producer of agricultural products in the United States.
Conditions in the Golden State had deteriorated rapidly in an already dry decade. The year before, rainfall in Southern California had been 80% below average. Statewide snowpack and rainfall levels were so low that farmers had begun abandoning their crops. By October, the extreme dryness had fueled a series of vicious wildfires, killing ten people and forcing almost a million more to evacuate. Thousands of homes were destroyed. 185 By May 2008, northern California was also suffering. In many areas its rainfall, too, fell 80% below normal. Flows in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers were critically low. Reservoir levels were down across the state, and Lake Oroville, a key supplier to California’s massive State Water Project, was half gone. More than a hundred thousand acres in California’s sprawling Central Valley—the very heart of the state’s gigantic agricultural engine—went unplanted.
Schwarzenegger issued an executive order setting into motion water-transfers, conservation programs, and other measures to combat the crisis,186 but the drought deepened. Water levels fell further and more fires burned. Eight months later, in February 2009, he proclaimed a state of emergency. Citing “conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property” and “widespread harm to people, businesses, property, communities, wildlife, and recreation,”187 he ordered even more draconian measures to be taken. Experts were predicting that field fallowing would rise from one hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand acres—meaning that nearly 20% of the Central Valley’s farmland would go unplanted.188 Suddenly, on top of a historic economic crisis from collapsed housing and global credit markets, California was bracing to lose another eighty thousand jobs and $3 billion in agricultural revenue from drought.
Iowa and California were not alone in their water-related crises. As Schwarzenegger mobilized California, the southeastern United States, which is usually moist, was also in historic drought, triggering a wave of outdoor-watering bans, withered crops, and unheard-of water battles between states like Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas.189 Mexico had been in severe drought, with only limited relief, for fifteen years.190 Exceptional droughts were under way in Brazil, Argentina, western Africa, Australia, the Middle East, Turkey, and Ukraine.191 Drought emergencies were triggering food aid in Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Mauritania, and Moldova.192 By February 2009, precipitation was 70%-90% below normal in northern and western China, threatening 10% of the country’s entire cereal production. 193 That same month, extreme dryness primed “Black Saturday,” when six hundred blazes killed two hundred people in