In “Questions of Theory” (1988) Stuart Hall and Bill Schwarz provide a useful definition of crisis. “Crises occur when the social formation can no longer be reproduced on the basis of the preexisting system of social relations” (96). The pivotal verb “to re- produce” signifies the broad array of political, economic, cultural, and biological capacities a society uses to renew itself daily, seasonally, generationally. Crisis is not objectively bad or good; rather, it signals systemic change whose outcome is determined through struggle. Struggle, which is a politically neutral word, occurs at all levels of a society as people try to figure out, through trial and error, what to make of idled capacities.

The deepening division of California into richer and poorer is a function of what Richard Walker (among others) identifies as three “central contradictions” (Walker 1995): (1) the changing mix of jobs and industrial and residential location; (2) Anglos’ fear of their demotion to minority status, coupled with capital’s differential exploitation of labor market segments defined by race, gender, locality, sector, and citizenship; and (3) the state’s failure to put idled capacities back to work through infrastructural, educational, employment, and other projects. As the multi- generational abandonment of California’s children to poverty shows, wealth does not circulate the way it used to. “Some power resources appear to be increasing within the system, while others appear to be declining” (Mike Davis 1986: 181). [...]

[...] The severe drought of 1976–77, preceded by several dry years, raised the specter of a permanent water shortage. Farmers responded to the crisis in different ways. Some took part in federal programs that pay farmers who agree to idle lands on which they would otherwise have grown federally designated “surplus crops” (Howitt and Moore 1994; Gottlieb 1988). Other growers used land as collateral to borrow money so that they could invest in the latest irrigation technologies or drill deep wells to supplement aqueduct-provided Sierra snowmelt with fossil water from ancient aquifers. Investor-farmers included both those who planned to keep growing the same commodity, such as cotton, and those wishing to change crops (Reisner 1986; CDF-CEI 1978). And finally, some farmers got out of the business altogether, discouraged by the prospect of expensive water.

The removal of irrigated lands from production far exceeded the rate of land use for suburbanization. Some 76 percent of the irrigated land in California is in the Great Central Valley. The surge in the gross population in the valley over ten years added 1.1 million people to the area. The average California household in that area is 2.8 people (CDF-CEI 1989). If all new households represented new houses built on suburbanized farmland, at the average of three houses per acre (Sokolow and Spezia 1994), residential development over ten years would absorb about 122,000 acres, or about 16 percent of the idled acres in the Great Central Valley. Thus we can see that the idling of land, and the coming of suburbanization, did not produce a transfer of land uses, but rather stiff competition between places trying to attract developers’ capital to absorb the surplus land.