Even Before Drought, Large Areas Of Central Valley Farmland Winking Out - Salt, Aquifer Loss, More
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Decades of irrigation have leached salts and toxic minerals from the soil that have nowhere to go, threatening crops and wildlife. Aquifers are being drained at an alarming pace. More than 95 percent of the area's native habitat has been destroyed by cultivation or urban expansion, leaving more endangered bird, mammal and other species in the southern San Joaquin than anywhere in the continental U.S.
Federal studies long ago concluded that the only sensible solution is to retire hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland. Some farming interests have reached the same conclusion, even as they publicly blamed an endangered minnow to the north, known as the delta smelt, for the water restrictions that have forced them to fallow their fields.
The 600,000-acre Westlands Water District, representing farmers on the west side of the valley, has already removed tens of thousands of acres from irrigation and proposed converting damaged cropland to solar farms. Many experts said if farmers don't retire the land, nature eventually will do it for them.
"We can make the decision now, when we actually have the choice about how to rationally back out of that bad situation and make landowners whole," said Jon Rosenfield, a conservation biologist for the Bay Institute, an environmental group. "Or we can just wait until the worst is upon us, we've driven the species extinct, we've plowed under the last bit of naturalized landscape in the area, and then we're going to retire these lands anyway."
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http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/California-drought-Central-Valley-farmland-on-5342892.php
= new reply since forum marked as read
...and all the diseases this system spawns are a continuing source of fodder for the Medical-Health culture that science/capitalism also provided. Hmmm......
- I guess when we die we should all be considered toxic waste. Unless we grow a pair and finally decide to take our lives back.
K&R
''Whomever's in-charge, gets to define everybody else.'' ~Paul Cienfuegos, Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
that depended upon it lasted very long. The only exception was irrigation in Egypt, but that worked because every year the Nile brought fresh silt and nutrients from upriver, and flushed the soil. Then they built the Aswan Dam....
Lord, what fools these mortals be....I remember reading in a book by John McPhee (The Control of Nature) about mudslides ("debris flows"
in California and the attitude of at least one engineer in the 60s was "We can stop the mountains from eroding!" 
And we're clearly so much more advanced, what with our technology and all, that there's NOTHING we need to learn from the collapse of previous societies when they fucked up their ecosystems. We've been told this over and over again by posters right here on DU, so there's no reason to worry about silly things like civilization collapse or any such thing.
Modern tool-monkey is in no way comparable to Bronze-age or Roman tool-monkey.
And just in case 
