Finishing Nature: The Making of California's Environmental Crisis

The immense waters of Tulare Lake were repurposed long ago for irrigation of industrial farms in the Central Valley, leaving a dry expanse. But even now wet years conjure the ghost of the lake: Recent atmospheric rivers have flooded nearly 100,000 acres of nearby farmland. The Eaton fire, the failure of Oroville Dam, depleted aquifers, land subsidence, megadroughts that bring contaminated wells—whether sudden or incremental, these disasters all arise from California’s attempts to reengineer nature. The state’s immense infrastructure of levees, dams, transmission towers, and aqueducts, built across centuries to remedy its natural deficiencies and dangers, has itself become a threat in an age of global warming. California has become a victim of its own success.

Finishing nature was originally a Jeffersonian idea of improvement adopted by California horticulturists. But with the growth of a modernist complex of industry, cities, and bureaucratic management, improvement became control as efforts to reorganize nature exploded in scale and ambition. Large landholders, big agriculture, public utilities, the fishing industry, and other interests all worked politics and the courts for control of resources. State and federal agencies created to manage the power of these interests—the Forest Service, the Bureau of Reclamation, the State Water Project—became intertwined with them, strengthening their influence. With the state’s highway system supporting a heavy reliance on the automobile, California made significant contributions to climate change and the new order of environmental challenges we are experiencing.

From one of our finest historians, Finishing Nature is an absorbing story of hubris, corruption, and the failure of expertise.