I listened last night to an interview with WP weather editor Kasha Patel who talked about the impact of these moonsoony rains on California. Really listened. And I heard her say something that made a lot of sense. Namely that the strange pattern of long dry spells and flash rain has changed our soil. Really changed the way it works. Made it harder and less likely to absorb water. Made it more like places of flash floods and cracked soil. And then I remembered this:
In 1950, government agents proposed to get rid of prairie dogs on some parts of the Navajo Reservation in order to protect the roots of sparse desert grasses and thereby maintain some marginal grazing for sheep.
The amused officials assured the Navajo that there was no correlation between rain and prairie dogs and carried out their plan. The outcome was surprising only to the federal officials. The desert near Chilchinbito, Arizona, became a virtual wasteland. Without the ground‐turning process of the burrowing animals, the soil became solidly packed, unable to accept rain. Hard pan. The result: fierce runoff whenever it rained. What little vegetation remained was carried away by flash floods and a legacy of
erosion.
Terry Tempest Williams: Finding Beauty in a Broken World
In California there is now no one left to cry for the rain.
Our many years of drought has made our soil impervious to water. The ground is hard and cracked with heat, Jon says on his walk in the hills the mud is barely sticking to his shoes. Even now with everything that is pouring from the sky. The very earth beneath us has changed. Nothing from the sky comes all year to to make our soil receptive and remind it why to hold onto the water that falls.
Only it’s not just climate change that’s to blame. And not our faltering snow pack. We killed the prairie dogs, and we just as righteously exterminated and continue to kill off the handiwork of their fellow keystone species who could help:
The water-savers.
