3 Stars
The lifestyle of rich southern Californians is decadent, awful, and unsustainable.
It hardly ever rains in Los Angeles. That makes it a beautiful place to live but also tough because there isn’t much water.
Early 20th Century Angelinos solved this problem with good old-fashioned Roman ingenuity. They built an extraordinary aqueduct that piped in fresh water from hundreds of miles away.
In “The Longest Straw,” young documentarian Samantha Bode decided to learn first-hand where her city’s water really comes from. So she took a month and backpacked 338 miles – the entire length of the aqueduct.
Along the way, she discovered that the aqueduct gets much of its water from rivers that have been diverted away from their original sources, leaving lakes barren and dusty.
Bode introduces us to some of the unfortunate people who live near Owens Lake. In 1913, the Owens River was diverted into the LA aqueduct and the once majestic lake dried up. Now the community is plagued by horrific dust storms. The dust billowing up from the lake bed contains cadmium, nickel, and arsenic.
As its water demand grew, Los Angeles began pumping water from under the ground of faraway rural communities. The water table dropped from 10 feet down to 40 feet, reducing arable land to barren steppe.
Essentially, Los Angeles turned central California towns into resource colonies to be ruthlessly exploited. How the heck do they get away with it? Samantha Bode learns that the founders of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had the foresight/villainy to purchase the land around the aqueduct, leaving the upstate locals completely at the city’s mercy.
It is clear that the people of Los Angeles owe their rural neighbors a debt of gratitude. The very least they could do is keep LA a moderately sized city and all go vegetarian because raising animals uses ten times the amount of water as growing crops.
Instead, southern California has done everything imaginable to waste water like pigs.
Bode scolds Los Angeles residents for keeping grass lawns just because that’s what people do on HGTV. Grass is not consistent with the climate and Angelinos have to run sprinklers just to keep their lawns green.
And who takes care of the rich people’s huge lawns? The millions of immigrants that California eagerly invited to their state. That’s on top of the millions of Americans who moved there from back east. It is absolute madness. LA is running out of water and they are throwing an epic pool party to celebrate.
Finally, there’s the almond and pistachio industry. Southern California is diverting countless millions of gallons of water to feed thirsty tree nuts. It takes 1.1 gallons of fresh water to produce one almond, and most of those almonds are exported.
The lifestyle of rich southern Californians is decadent, awful, and unsustainable.
It’s hilarious that the jokers at award shows lecture us about how to live.
