Excellent read. Helped me understand better what's changed. I knew that water ways around the Bay Area had been massively transformed. But I had no mental picture for Tulare Lake and such.
One personal frustration that I have is the inevitable knee-jerk "cite needed" skeptical response whenever someone casually mentions one of these impactful historical facts. Ya, I get that we're all ignorant of our history. But ffs it's exhausting to always be challenged. Whereas actual disinformation is greedily consumed.
Increasingly, per Bartolini's Law, IRL I just keep my observations to myself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Thanks for the link. Sorry for the whining.
What an interesting read. I had no idea that the Central Valley had been so full of water, nor that it had been drained so early. After reading the article I found this "conceptual" map which illustrates approximately what it may have looked like circa 1851: https://geocurrents.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Californ...
The cynic in me thinks this is what our future generations are doomed to - reading articles of what the world was like before massive global climate change and thinking, "wow, I wonder what that world was like, I can't imagine it," and simultaneously, "what were those people thinking, how could they care so little for the environment?"