2023-08-23 11:02:11
By Adrian Jaulmes
Posted yesterday at 4:41 PM, Updated 4 hours ago
Corcoran after a series of storms, April 25, 2023. Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
THE DECLINE OF THE CALIFORNIAN DREAM (3/6) – America’s orchard, California’s Central Valley invented the “field factory” and continues to experiment with revolutionary production techniques. But at what cost?
Incarnation of modernity, California represented an enchanted world where the individual enjoyed immense natural resources and infinite technological progress. The dream began to crack. Natural disasters, suffocated suburbs, housing crisis, gluttonous agriculture, mechanization of Hollywood, Orwellian drift of Silicon Valley… From Los Angeles to San Francisco, from Sacramento to the Central Valley, Le Figaro explores this crisis, that of our modernity.
Special Envoy to Corcoran
The road and its row of electric poles disappear into a vast inland sea. The surface of the water shines like polished metal under the hot sun. The layout of the fields is distinguished by the half-submerged embankments. The roofs of a few buildings and metallic structures emerge like the vestiges of a submerged civilization. Near the town of Corcoran, in the San Joaquin Valley, the great central plain of California, Lake Tulare had disappeared for almost…
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