Russell Berman: How bad is the California drought in the context of state history and U.S. history?

Patty Limerick: I would not use the word bad. I would just say "severe, and severe at a new scale, and a new intensity, and a new urgency. I guess I’m not using the word bad because it is a call to action. It is, sorry to use the cliché, but it is a wakeup call, and that might be good. Though I also don’t want to call it good, because there are people who are in a pickle now. So I guess I wouldn’t use the term good or bad, but this certainly puts us in a new framework for thinking about who we are and how we live and what are necessities and what are luxuries. And that has virtues and values to it.

Berman: What makes it so severe? Is it the length that it has gone on, or the level of the drought, or both?

Limerick: Both. Well, three or four years—as people have said, in the interior west there is evidence of 30- or 40-year droughts from the tree ring, so two or three years, you might say you’re just getting started. But that’s of course part of the uncertainty: You can’t say, "Oh, we can stand this for two or three years, and then we’ll have some abundant rainfall again." Nobody knows whether that prediction is worth anything. So it’s not yet the duration, but it’s the inability of human beings to say how long this goes on.

Everybody yearns for the answer to be, "well this will be only two or three years." But we don’t know that. So it’s standing on the edge of the future and pointing, and not being able to see with clarity what’s coming up. Best to assume a long haul.

Intellectuals and commentators have been saying for decades that there is going to be a reckoning with the water supply in the West, and there’s a little bit of the “chicken little” problem. Some of those predictions and prophecies were way ahead of time and easily discredited. Some of the very first explorers in this region, Zebulon Pike and Stephen Long of the 19th century, said this is too dry for a conventional American settlement.

If you’re thinking in geological times, making a prediction that’s a couple centuries off is not much of a margin of error. I mean, that’s what you would assume.

The California drought, at least at this stage, is not purely a matter of duration, because we don’t know what its duration is going to be. But those meadows in the mountains that usually would have five or six feet of snow—just exposed surface. That is really significant, because the whole system of the interior West and on the coast goes on snow pack, on the melting of snow pack. That’s what Zebulon Pike and Stephen Long didn’t get in the early 1800s, which is that you could capture that run-off.

That’s the game-changer, if some of the predictions of climate change head in that direction.