The Fall and Rise of the Wetlands of California’s Great Central Valley (review)

The promise of interdisciplinary work is that it will help us to ask better questions, which is exactly what Garone’s important and impressive new book does. California’s Great Central Valley has appeared in famous histories by Hundley, Pisani, and Worster on the history of irrigation, by Nash on the history of ideas about disease and health, and Kelley in an entire career of works on U.S. political culture.¹ Yet no published monograph has treated this vast and complicated region as a physical unit deserving its own history. Garone’s first, bold claim is that California’s inland wetlands are a legible unit, a composite place deserving a history of its own. To write that story, he leans on work in ornithology and stream ecology in addition to the history of science, environmental history, and the history of the American West. He draws on several historical traditions, synthesizing classical political histories of land ownership as well as more recent cultural histories of land use. Particularly impressive is his clear explanation of the extremely complex political and legislative history of state and federal water-supply projects.

The book’s second contribution is to attack what Garone calls the agricultural mystique in the American West—the centuries-old assumption that the best use of land is remaking it to enhance its economic productivity. Using careful archival work and deftly summarizing scholarship in wetland science and wildlife ecology, Garone shows that converting California’s interior wetlands to fields was costly and, in many cases, shortsighted. Central Valley wetlands were rapidly and brutally transformed because of large capital investment and federal subsidies. Yet within decades, much of this farmland was threatened by scarce water supplies and, paradoxically, by the residues of irrigated agriculture itself. Moreover, the terrible ecological consequences of the wholesale destruction of California’s interior wetlands—extinct races of salmon, decimated wildfowl populations, and lost habitat types—contributed to a societal shift that, by the 1970s, led to efforts to preserve and restore wetlands in California.

This point leads to the book’s third great contribution. Garone’s central claim is that wetlands disappeared only to reappear thanks to an unlikely private–public partnership. Americans typically think of public lands, especially designated refuges, as the most accommodating places for wildlife habitats because private ownership has historically been devastating for them. Rice growers in the Central Valley were responsible for some of the greatest destruction of wetlands in the nation’s history. In the past twenty years, however, rice growers have begun managing their fields as wetlands. Flooding rice fields after harvest has more than doubled the available seasonal wetland habitat in California, helping to reverse the collapse of duck populations and boosting Pacific waterfowl populations to levels not seen since the 1970s (252). Since 2003, “the extent of flooded rice fields exceeded the combined total acreage of all public refuges and private wetlands in the Central Valley” (250). This reversal is due to a mix of private, state, and federal expertise, money, and cooperation. Garone’s conclusion is unusual in the field of environmental history: The future may be brighter than the recent past.