Saturday Morning Essay: Absurdity & the California Drought

Let us return once again to those halcyon years of Berkeley undergraduate education, so to speak, late-mid-1960's, and the storied class taught in something or other by the great Oscar Pemantle in a class entered from one of the hallways girdling the cavernous Wheeler Auditorium.

That sets the stage.  Sprawled in one of those oak chairs with the funny writing surface built into the right arm rest (were there left-handed versions? I never noticed), we studied the classics of postmodern philosophy.  Such as: The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus. Al starts with the conclusion that life is meaningless, which saves a lot of time.  No logical trickery in the style of Pascal or the other Frenchies trying to back their way into a belief in theism.  Such "proofs" are tiresome and hopeless.

The answer to the fundamental cosmological question posed by Wilhelm Gottfried von Leibniz, Why is there something instead of nothing?, is: I have no freaking idea.  That takes care of all philosophical and religious ideas and frees us up for what's left, which is phenomenology: the study of what is.

With meaninglessness as his start, Camus explores a different question. How does the feeling of Absurdity arise? Here he constructs a kind of triangle.  We have Man, who can think about ultimate questions.  We have the quest to understand. And we have a silent, implacable Universe which yields no answers.  The feeling that this arrangement engenders is the Absurd.

I was thinking along similar lines with respect to the Great California Drought.  Over the decades, one is lulled into a complacency about the availability of water.  From November to March, it rains. Never enough in Southern California to meet local needs, but with exogenous sources from the Colorado River and the reservoir system up north, it's enough.  Northern California is semi-arid, a "Mediterranean" climate, but the snowpack collected by the Sierra Nevada massif solves the problem.

That is, until the drought started in 2011, which coincided with the cessation of the La Niña pattern which had extended wet and cold conditions into May, for a couple of years. That's all a distant memory now.  Cal Tech says that California has a year of water left.

At first a catastrophe such as the California drought titillates human beings, who are always looking, unconsciously or not, for things to get dramatic about.  If you've been paying attention all along, you can feed your narcissistic supply by acting the role of soothsayer or prophet. That always gives the ego a boost.  Hey: tough guys face facts, and the tougher the facts, the tougher you are.  However, in the slightly longer run, such egotism gives way to basic animalistic fear and to a feeling of what you could call "secular" Absurdity.  This can't be happening.  This isn't real.  No advanced technological society with 38 million people suddenly finds itself with an inadequate supply of the quintessential molecule necessary to sustain human life:  H2O.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the building of a riprap barrier in the San Joaquin Delta to block the intrustion of salt water into the flow from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, which lack the flow to keep the brine out themselves.  The Chron notes during the article:  
"State officials expect to remove the wall in November as the rainy season begins." 

Sure.  Right on schedule.  It could happen that way.  Climate scientists can't tell us, at this point, one way or the other.  I think their prognostications are based on emotional biases.  If you're into abrupt climate change, you tend to read a lot into the concepts of "polar amplification," "disruption of the jet stream," "perturbed Rossby waves," "diminution of the Polar-Equator temperature gradient," and other phenomena which appear to have a scientific basis, but the problem is too complex, with too many variables, to allow confident assertions about the future in a specific region. Although a word to the wise: it's a big hint.

Somewhat ironically, the uncertainty gives rise, in this liberal state, to a species of Denialism. The drought is an "aberration."  I do not hear anyone say, for example, that even if the rains were to return for a while that this relatively wet period might itself be the "aberration."  You can point to disturbing analogous situations.  The Colorado River, fed by snow melt in the Rockies, has been declining in its flow for close to fifteen years.  Lake Mead, on which Las Vegas and Southern California are heavily dependent (Vegas almost exclusively), is nearing the point where the only way Las Vegas will be able to draw water is through tunnels under the bed of the lake.

This situation does indeed give rise to feelings of existential absurdity.  This cannot be happening, yet it is.  Life cannot be meaningless, yet it is.  Jews living in Germany, that great nation, that pinnacle of Western Civilization, had tremendous difficulty believing, in 1936, that things were as bad as they seemed, that the country had been seized by a gang of anti-Semitic thugs determined to bring about their destruction, that German Jews could be driven from their Heimat.  Yet that was exactly the case, and the far-seeing got out while there was time.

I wonder what I will do.