the fifth biggest economy on Earth, and yet it also ran at carbon neutrality, having established strong policies early on. They were intent to continue that process, and obviously the people at the meeting felt what they were doing was a model other people could learn from. Mary was happy to be taught.

Esther introduced her to people from the State Water Board, the California Native Plant Society, the University of California’s clean energy group, also its water group; also the head of the department of fish and wildlife, the state’s biodiversity leader, and so on. Together a group of them walked her to a cable car terminus, and they all got on an open-sided cable car and rode it north to Fisherman’s Wharf. Mary was surprised, thinking these quaint cars, canting up and down steep hills like Swiss cable cars attached to slots in the streets, were for tourists only, but her hosts assured her that they were as fast as any other transport across the city, and the cleanest as well. Up and down, up and down, squealing and clanking in the open air, and again she got the sense of a place enjoying its own sublimity. In some ways it was the topological reverse of Zurich. The California Forward crowd, enthusiastic enough already, were now all bright-eyed and red-cheeked, as if on holiday.

From Fisherman’s Wharf they took a small water taxi to Sausalito, where a van drove them to a big warehouse. Inside this building the US Army Corps of Engineers had created a giant model of the California bay area and delta, a 3-D map with active water flows sloshing around on it. Here they could walk over the model landscape on low catwalks to see features better, and as they did that, the Californians told her and showed her how the northern half of the state was now functioning.

The state’s Mediterranean climate, they told her, meant warm dry summers and cool wet winters, nurturing an immense area of fertile farmland, both on the coastal plains and in the state’s great central valley. This central valley was really big, bigger than Ireland, bigger than the Netherlands. One of the chief breadbaskets of the world: but dry. Water had always been the weak link, and now climate change was making it worse. The entire state was now plumbed for water, they moved it around as needed; but when droughts came, there was not much to move. And droughts were coming more and more frequently. Also occasional deluges. Either too little or too much was the new pattern, alternating without warning, with droughts predominating. The upshot would be more forest fires, then more flash floods, and always the threat of the entire state going as dry as the Mojave desert.

Hydrologists pointed at the model below as they explained to Mary the water situation. Typically, the Sierra snowpack held about fifteen million acre-feet of water every spring, releasing it to reservoirs in a slow melt through the long dry summers. The dammed reservoirs in the foothills could hold about forty million acre-feet when full. Then the groundwater basin underneath the central valley could hold around a thousand million acre-feet; and that immense capacity might prove their salvation. In droughts they could pump up groundwater and put it to use; then during flood years they needed to replenish that underground reservoir, by capturing water on the land and not allowing it all to spew out the Golden Gate.

To help accomplish all this they had passed a law, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which they called “Sigma.” In effect it had created a new commons, which was water itself, owned by all and managed together. Records were kept, prices were set, allotments were dispensed; parts of the state had been taken out of agricultural production. In drought years they pumped up groundwater, keeping close track, conserving all they could; in flood years they caught water in the valley and helped it to sink into the basin.

How they did this last part was a particular point of pride for them, as they had discovered that the central valley’s floor was variably permeable. Much of it was as hard as a parquet floor, as one of them put it, but they had located several “incised canyons,” created when powerful flows of melted ice had poured off the Sierra ice cap at the end of the last two or three ice ages. These canyons had subsequently filled with Sierra boulders and been slowly covered with dirt, so that they now looked just like the rest of the valley floor; but in fact, if water was trapped over them, they would serve as “gigantic French drains,” allowing water to sink into and through them, thus recharging the groundwater basin much faster than other areas would allow. So California’s state government had bought or otherwise claimed the land over these French drain areas, and built dams, dikes, levees, baffles, and channels to and fro, until now the entire valley was plumbed to direct heavy rainfall floods onto these old incised canyons, holding water there long enough for a lot of it to percolate down rather than run out to sea. Of course there were limits to how much they could retain, but now pretty good flood control was combined with a robust recharge capacity, so they could stock up in wet years and then pump again in the drought years that were sure to follow.

Good in itself; great, in fact. And not only that, this necessity to replumb the great valley for recharge had forced them to return a hefty percentage of the land to the kind of place it had been before Europeans arrived. The industrial agriculture of yesteryear had turned the valley into a giant factory floor, bereft of anything but products grown for sale; unsustainable, ugly, devastated, inhuman, and this in a place that had been called “the Serengeti of North America,” alive with millions of animals, including megafauna like tule elk and grizzly

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