The End of California
California, the most populous state in the US and the world’s sixth largest economy, is built on completely borrowed time. It should not exist, and without constant and incredible transformations to the landscape it would not continue to exist. The major cities have no potable water anywhere near them. There is no way to irrigate the state without hundreds of dams and thousands of miles of artificial rivers, reservoirs, and aqueducts. And under all of this lurks a massive fault system poised to liquefy the very ground on which California’s cities are built.

California is indeed built on borrowed time – time borrowed through an expenditure of incredible amounts of human labor, effort, and resources. And at some point, when the humans are gone or the pharaohic expenditures necessary to preserve it are no longer possible, California, as we know it, will come to an end. In this post-human, or as some geologists might call it, post-anthropocene, era, California will again become governed by geologic and climatic processes. Large portions of the landscape will go back to being regularly subsumed by fire. The deserts will creep back into and through the great unirrigated valley. Only the traces of the human’s massive efforts will remain, eroding and slowly decomposing.

The eroding human landscape is the subject of this project.