After The California Downpour, 'The Drought' Offers Some Dry Reading

J. G. Ballard did not fully predict the current drought in California's 1964 novel "The Burning World" (later renamed "Drought"). However, as with many of his books, there is a creepy hint that humans will accelerate competition to overtake nature.

Burning World was part of a series of distorted science fiction written by Ballard in the 1960s, later known for his "Impact" and "San Empire."

Each of these early books imagined a different catastrophic scene. In "the burning world", many years of drought exhausted the earth. On the premise of suppression of heat and pursuit of water without end, the remnants of the human race are giving in to this apocalypse of slow motion.

Climate change is the cause, but ballads are not environmentalists. As a former medical student, he chose civilization as if he had undergone a necropsy. He is neither ethical nor implied. The burning world is more related to how the collapse of society changes our basic view of reality and how our nightmare and dreams shape reality.

According to Ballard, "The wet dunes at the bottom of the lake seems to emerge from another side, with a wide water surface contraction, first entering a shallow lake and then entering the maze of the stream." This hallucinatory condition is "a burning world" It makes it even stronger. It is not a story of warning, but like an illusion

It rained in California this week, but experts say that it is not enough to reverse the drought. Not only that, rain caused floods and landslides. Ballard likes to explore with its cold clinical method that is paradoxical. His novel was right before the "burning world" in 1962, "the world of diving". He is an equal opportunity alarmist

Dr. Charles Ransam was an independent hero of Burning World, he felt himself an agent of Ballard himself, and spent two years in the camp in Shanghai during the Second World War. From a ballad story point of view, he observed that the resignation of others is his own reflection: "He seems to accept that the end of the reservoir's water finally brings him to the desert" , Ballard wrote, he now will accept him according to his own terms. "

Leave it to Ballard, one of our most sneaky writers to surrender as a way to deal with the disaster.

Even after the recent rain, California has experienced another dry season after another dry season. According to the US drought monitoring phrase, 99% of California is "abnormally dry". 95% is in constant drought. 60% are experiencing "extreme" drought. 10% of people have "abnormal drought". The satellite photograph at that time was vividly depicting the seriousness of the problem, and he had already traveled around the internet. The lack of snow in the west was a natural water reservoir for a dry summer ecosystem for a long time.

Historically, the western drought has passed. Jay Lund, Director of the Basin Science Center at the University of California Davis, says: "In the Middle Ages, the majority of California's drought was far more serious than the five-year drought and some continued for more than a century." For ecosystems, abnormally dry conditions may be normal elsewhere. At the same time, precipitation is increasing in some areas due to climate change. In fact, according to the United States International Development Agency (USAID), everyone on the planet has sufficient water. It says that the real challenge is to ensure that everyone has access to clean water.

After five years of drought, Southern California finally began to rain. Due to the drought, many creeks dry up this year and are separated from estuaries and the ocean. The water is flowing again now! This is a welcome remedy for the southern Steel Yariica which is in danger of extinction. "We have worked hard on restoring Arroyo Sekku Creek and they expect that the steel head will return to a large male spawning place of five miles as the rain comes back.In the past decade, "There were only a few steel heads observed at that time," stated Stacie Smith, a marine habitat expert at the NOAA restoration center.