Commentary
From its pristine headwaters in the San Gabriel Mountains all the way to its sordid finale as a gigantic culvert emptying into Long Beach Harbor, the Los Angeles River—what’s happened to it and what the future brings—is an apt metaphor for California’s story and ultimate fate.
Until a few years ago, the Los Angeles River was an unrelieved victim of human progress. In less than 150 years, its lower watershed has been transformed from an Arcadian floodplain to an urban metropolis with over ten million inhabitants. After a series of floods in the 1930s devastated the growing city, the Army Corps of Engineers was brought in to tame the river. By the time they were done, what had been a verdant ribbon of life had become a concrete wasteland, dry enough and wide enough for car chase scenes in countless movies, occasionally deluged with safely channeled floodwaters whenever California’s infrequent storms hit the mountains and the water raced down to the sea….