Nilsen, E. (2023, January 21). Faucets in McCarthy’s district are running dry after years of drought. Constituents want him to do more. CNN. Retrieved January 29, 2023, from https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/21/politics/mccarthy-district-drought-water-crisis-climate/index.html 

California’s drought is causing severe water shortages for rural communities, many are left without running water and are forced to rely on water deliveries, for which many are insufficient. Many communities have requested that Sen. Kevin McCarthy did something about the extreme water shortage in his district, however, he has failed to take any sort of meaningful action. A lot of the communities are located next to large farms, which have used up all the underground water in the area. Furthermore, these farms have the finance to drill further into the ground to access deeper aquifers, leaving the residents without water.

This article shows the extreme side of agriculture’s effect on the environment. The large farms in California have used up so much water that residential wells can’t even reach available aquifers. Being in a drought, these farms are so inefficient that they are endangering the lives of people in nearby communities. Not only is there a shortage of water, but even when there is water, it is contaminated by runoff from the nearby farms and is essentially unusable, one citizen interviewed by CNN even mentioned that the water was “treated with so much chlorine that it turned his family’s black clothing gray in the wash.” This article made me really scared to think about the future of California. I didn’t really think this type of thing happened in California and I definitely think there has to be action taken right now. However, it is hard to get things done especially because of how important agriculture is to California and the whole country.