By John Rieping | Published 15 May 2015 in The Madera Tribune | All rights reserved |
Empowering affirmations have perhaps become some of our era's most popular cliches, doomed to be drained of meaning and impact by casual overuse.
Even so, one made me think when I heard it on social media. It says: "You are enough."
To me, the phrase begs for the reply: enough what? Am I enough of an annoyance? Enough of a man? Does it mean my body mass index is healthy? Or that my income is above poverty level?
How am I enough?
The more I pondered the words, the less sense they made to me. If anything is clear, it is that humans are social animals by nature. We're not self sufficient.
This is especially clear in the U.S. today, in which most of us rely on others to feed, house, and equip us in exchange for money. We lack the skills to survive on our own.
But, even if we did, we still would need other creatures around us for the sake of our hearts and minds.
In the 1950s, psychologist Harry Harlow of the University of Wisconsin studied the effects of solitude on rhesus monkeys, who were placed in an inverted pyramid they could not climb out of. After a day or two, most monkeys seemed to lose hope.
They became "profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in places for long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves," Harlow said.
Most recovered after returning from isolation, but not all. "Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially," according to Harlow.
The results of solitary confinement on human prisoners are similar.
In one study, psychiatrist Stuart Grassian of Harvard Medical School found about a third of such inmates were "actively psychotic and/or acutely suicidal." Being cut off caused hallucinations, panic attacks, paranoia, hypersensitivity, severe obsessions, difficulty thinking, and more.
Half of all prison suicides in California from 1999-2004 were by those in solitary confinement.
On our own, we are not enough, and we don't have to go to extremes to discover that.
In 2014, a series of 11 studies led by University of Virginia researchers found that most people would rather do something — even if painful — than be alone and undistracted from their own thoughts for 15 minutes.
Among this majority, two out of three men and one out of four women even preferred to self-inflict an electric shock instead of think while undisturbed for 15 minutes.
Not everyone is like this, of course.
I, for one, am an incurable daydreamer and can happily spend hours lost in idle thoughts, whether inventing worlds or solving puzzles in my imagination. During my years as a Benedictine monk in temporary vows, half a year could pass without the itch to walk down the hilltop on which the monastery stood.
I tend to be content.
Yet I too am not immune to loneliness, restlessness, frustrations, failures, pain, or so many other aches that remind us we are not enough.
We humans have a longing for "enough," for fullness, that drives us to connect with the world around us to find what we lack. It is a universal hunger and, if we deny it, we devour ourselves.
This hunger is the "emptiness" I wrote of near the end of my last column.
Neither pain nor pleasure can do more than distract us from this ache, and nothing in our lives can ease it for more than a time. As a Christian, I suspect it is this hunger that led our first parents to aspire to become like gods -- self sufficient -- by rebellion (Bereishit/Genesis 3:1-6).
It is a hunger for divinity.
We who claim to be Christians must offer this emptiness to God by resisting the urge to fill it with anything less than the divine.
That can be hard.
In heaven, Christians believe, we will be united with God fully and be fulfilled utterly. So much so that sadness will be impossible. Our hunger, so endless, will be satisfied by the infinite one.
Meanwhile, though, we don't experience this. We may love God, but we ache even so.
That is what makes the offering of our emptiness so pleasing to God. It is the yearning of a faithful lover.
"No gift is proper to a Deity; / no fruit is worthy for such power to bless. / If you have nothing, gather back your sigh, / and with your hands held high, your heart held high, / lift up your emptiness!"
— Jessica Powers, aka Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (1905-1988)
By John Rieping | Published 25 Jan. 2014 in The Madera Tribune | All rights reserved |
My New Year’s Day resolution to spend less time on Facebook is somewhat intact as January approaches its end. Meanwhile an uncharacteristically action-oriented drive for self-improvement twirls and leaps in my heart like a child who emptied a bag of Halloween candy.
There is movement in the deep.
One superficial wave provoked by such unseen churning has been, as mentioned in a previous column, an online class I’m taking in computer programming from Harvard University. Another is a renewed self-investment in websites built to help people connect in real life.
Those who know me in person realize I am an introvert, that strange species of human whose thoughts leisurely walk a meandering path to every destination. There is a quiet efficiency born of a kind of laziness in the brain of every introvert, and a secret garden behind the sometimes nondescript walls that surround it.
Nonetheless all introverts, whether cool or warm blooded, have a heart that feeds life to countless screaming “children” who have no one else — our desires and dreams, loves and loyalties. By these children, man differs from machine. They are — in a sense — born of a union between the natures of angels and beasts.
The efforts of this introvert to meaningfully connect are hardly unique. In 2012, a 30-something mathematician, Chris McKinlay, found a fruitful distraction from writing his University of California, Los Angeles, dissertation for his Ph.D. in applied math. He wanted to find the optimal strategy for finding a true match on a popular dating site.
So he set up 12 fake dating accounts and programmed his computer to gather information on the female members of the website who fit his general requirements for a mate. After collecting the answers of 20,000 California women on 6 million questions, he learned that they clumped into seven distinct clusters.
Based on their traits, he nicknamed the clusters: Diverse, Dog, God, Green, Mindful, Samantha, and Tattoo. The Greens were new to online dating. The Gods were strongly religious or ethical. The Samanthas were often relatively older, professionally creative, and adventurous. The Tattoos had multiple tattoos and sometimes as many jobs. And so on.
He then set up his real dating profile to honestly answer the questions that were relevant to the clusters of women that most interested him, and then had his computer visit more than 10,000 of their online pages on the site in two weeks. He soon received 400 views of his page daily.
Online messaging and in-person dating followed until, on date 88, he found the woman with whom love bloomed — 28-year-old artist Christine Tien Wang. At the moment, they’re engaged to be married.
Some may find his calculated efforts to find Miss Right cynical, offensive, or immoral. But Wang, as quoted in the February edition of Wired magazine, commented: “People are much more complicated than their profiles. So the way we met was kind of superficial, but everything that happened after is not superficial at all. It’s been cultivated through a lot of work.”
One insight McKinlay uncovered in his labors is the importance of not presenting one’s opinions in a timid fashion. The dating website he used has members assign a weight (from “irrelevant” to “mandatory”) to one’s own answers to a question as well as those of others. Agreement on weightier questions is interpreted as a greater match.
His tests revealed that, regardless of whether you wanted to appeal to many or to a select few, a wishy-washy presentation of one’s views was the worst possible strategy. Either wholeheartedly answer the most divisive topics or reply to the innocuous ones with equal gusto. But a lukewarm person fares badly.
How often many of us allow a desire for the approval of others to dim the unique light we have to offer. Instead of beaming, we glow comfortably. The Jewish founder of Christianity allegedly had a low opinion of such behavior. If the visionary testimony of his “beloved disciple” is true, Yeshua (Jesus) compared it to an unappealingly tepid beverage.
“I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot: I wish you were cold or hot. So then because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of my mouth.” (Revelation 3:15-16)
Come. Let us shine.
By John Rieping | All rights reserved | Published 24 August 2013 in The Madera Tribune
A fictional little boy who was being punished studied his mother with fascination. Finally he asked, "Why are some of your hairs white, mom?"
Irked by the day and the reminder that a few strands of her hair were indeed turning gray, she replied, "Well, every time you do something wrong and make me upset or cry, one of my hairs turns white."
He pondered this a long time and then said softly, "How come all of grandma's hairs are white?"
I suspect many of us can easily forget the words of a Jewish rabbi spoken less than two millennia ago: "as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you." (Matthew 7:2)
One needn't wait until Judgment Day before God to discover the truth of this warning. In a different and far lesser sense, it occurs even now.
A 2010 psychology study by Dustin Wood, Peter Harms, and Simine Vazire concluded "how we perceive others in our social environments reveals much about our personality."
How do our judgments expose us? As an ancient text on Jewish laws and history, the Talmud, said: "We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are."
In the study, university students were asked to rate the good and bad traits of acquaintances. Researchers found that those with more positive characteristics themselves, according to a self-rating and the opinions of others, were much more likely to see others positively.
Yet the sunnier students didn't simply assume others were similar to themselves. Instead they were able to recognize good in others even if they did not share in it.
How positively students saw others also matched their own level of likability and their satisfaction with their own lives. In contrast, those who viewed acquaintances darkly were more likely to have a personality disorder, such as narcissism or depression.
The students were not merely tested once for this study. They were tested across a year, and surprisingly the results were stable. The fickleness of momentary moods didn't seem to have an impact.
Nonetheless, I trust Jesus had something deeper in mind than psychology when he spoke long ago.
Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) of Savannah, Georgia, wrote popular short stories, novels, and more, often in a style known as Southern Gothic. The genre uses macabre twists to highlight the values of the U.S. South. Her tales often featured an ugly and morally flawed character who unpleasantly received God's help to see more clearly.
She explained in a letter, "All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful."
You never saw her dramas illustrated by the late painter Thomas Kinkade or in television movies sponsored by a greeting card company. She confronted and challenged rather than soothed. But she was unapologetic and even defiant when faced with the critics of her day.
"Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter," she said.
"Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look."
Some, such as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, have said the greatest danger to Christianity is we Christians, who wound self and others as we fall short of its ideals.
According to a vision by the apostle John, Jesus lamented those followers who were neither hot nor cold. He preferred either of those to the lukewarm, which he viewed as vomit worthy (Rev. 3:15-16).
That points to a deeper truth behind the admonition of Jesus to not be judgmental of others. How many of us are truly and completely on fire for God? We should pray no one gets what he or she deserves from God, but rather that they receive God's mercy -- for that is our own best hope as well. We all sin.
As rock band Reliant K sang, "The beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair."
So how can we be hot and not lukewarm? With God's daily help, love self and others as God loves you, and love God most of all.
By John Rieping | All rights reserved | Published 27 April 2013 in The Madera Tribune
I went to a woman's funeral in Fresno less than two weeks ago. I did not know her well. But some of those dear to me loved her much. So I mourned with those pained by her absence.
Love shows itself in such seemingly opposite ways, from laughter to tears. But despite its many expressions it always, if true, draws us out of ourselves. Love is a kind of gravity that pulls us.
But it isn't fate.
A joke tells of a 7-year-old girl who shocked her parents by telling them a boy in her class had kissed her after school.
The father asked, "How did that happen?"
"It wasn't easy," she said, "but three girls helped me catch him."
In another joke, a kindergarten teacher at a Christian school explained the 10 Commandments. After explaining the command to "honor thy father and mother," she asked, "Is there a commandment that teaches us how to treat our brothers and sisters?"
One boy quickly raised his hand and answered, "Thou shall not kill."
Love cannot be forced. It must be a free choice or it is not love. We all know this, yet this freedom can frighten us. All of us fear rejection at times.
Professor Brene Brown, Ph.D., of the University of Houston has written three New York Times best-sellers based on her decade of research on shame and vulnerability. Yet her study came about unexpectedly. She had intended to study personal connection, but when she asked people about it they kept sharing about heartbreak and exclusion.
After six weeks of this, she decided to follow this common thread in people's stories. She wanted to decipher what it was that seemed to undermine relationships again and again in people's lives, and discovered it was shame -- a fear of being unworthy of connection.
So she spent the following decade trying to define and find the solution for shame.
She found that shame prevents people from being vulnerable with others, because we don't wish to be fully exposed as we are. However prudent vulnerability is necessary to connect with others.
Those who suffered least from shame were those who believed deeply in their worthiness to connect with others -- their lovableness. Because of this, they had the courage to be exposed as imperfect and had compassion, first for themselves and then likewise for others. They accepted emotional risk and vulnerability as necessary to connect with others.
There's more Brown concluded from her research, but you can pursue her words yourself if interested (www.brenebrown.com). Instead let us consider a comment left under an online video of a 2010 TEDxHouston talk of hers, "The power of vulnerability" (http://goo.gl/opQRQ).
"The problem with believing that one is unconditionally worthy of connection is the fact that people seem to like you and connect with you based on many conditions…," wrote sn3192 on Wednesday. "Believing that you're worthy of connection for simply breathing oxygen may be wonderful, but delusional."
That question returns to the uncomfortable root of the problem I think. Where does our worth and lovableness lie? If who we are is defined by what we think, say and do, then how can we be lovely despite the ugliness in some of that?
After all, shame is comfortable with partial exposure. It is only unpleasing parts of ourselves that it wishes to conceal. Yet such "invulnerability" is enough to unravel love, because it prevents us from being wholehearted with others.
Christians, I think, have an answer to this puzzle. We humans are lovable because God first loved us and loves us still. Even if we were the worst of terrorists, God would love us no less. We could be the greatest in every possible way, and God would love us no more than now. Because God loves us utterly and completely in any case.
We have worth not because we breathe oxygen, but because we humans were made in the "image" of God.
Like God, we have a higher understanding and a free will. This freedom that can unnerve us with fear of potential rejection by others is the same freedom that God reverences and respects in us. God loves us wholeheartedly while knowing we can reject him.
So what now?
"A new commandment I give unto you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." (John 13:34-35)
By John Rieping | All rights reserved | Published 2 February 2013 in The Madera Tribune
I'm mud puddle famous. Doubt me? Well, your skepticism means you're reading my words, which proves my point, soggy and murky as it may be.
In contrast, I remember being a somewhat big fish in a little pond, as the saying goes, when I attended Madera High School.
Eager to come out of my isolated shell, I had joined more organizations and activities than I could reasonably handle. Yet that turned out far better than I deserved due to the relative apathy of many of my classmates. When student involvement is low, the 50 percent or less I invested in each commitment seemed tolerable to student advisers.
The reward was well worth it all: my smiling face sprinkled generously in the club section of the yearbook each spring. Puff puff, little ego, puff!
Besides my excessive clubbing, I pushed myself to grow by competing in public speaking (aka Forensics) for all four years. Since it didn't fit into my class schedule, I never actually took a class in the art of rhetoric. But I learned from lunchtime coaching, exposure to the talents of others, and perseverance. As a result I... umm... qualified for varsity competition in my senior year, a feat normally achieved by freshmen.
Yes, clearly the world lay at my mildly ambitious and talented feet.
As could be expected with the prejudice of hindsight, I wrote, edited, and doodled for the school newspaper amid all this. I even had a column entitled "Straight Talk" and regular editorial cartoons. Someday, I knew, I would be a published novelist and poet, but in the meanwhile I had my heart set on the lofty goal of working for The Madera Tribune, to strengthen my writing while avoiding starvation and destitution.
Yes, fair reader, some dreams do come true. (Go, ego, go!)
I graduated and, bereft of my prized metal kazoo that a classmate "borrowed" before the pompous circumstance of the commencement ceremony itself, moved on to the far bigger pond of Drake University in Iowa.
There the somewhat large fish in a small pond became like an asthmatic minnow in Hensley Lake.
But jump ahead, gentle folk, and thanks to the wonderful tubes of cyberspace (aka the Internet) I have advanced to mud puddle status. Risibly visible I am. Yet beyond my local area this is not for my writings for the Tribune from the '90s onward nor for this oddly "meandering" column (forgive me, Mo).
I have become a microscopically significant "guru" on personality types at the website Facebook or so I'm told, and most of the traffic to my personal website is for my essays on the topic.
Theories of personality are nothing new of course. Ancient Greco-Roman physicians, such as Hipocrates (c. 460-377 B.C.) and Galen (c. A.D. 129-216), proposed categorizing humans by their dominant bodily fluids, which were believed to influence behavior. Hence these four temperament types were named after them: choleric (yellow bile), sanguine (blood), melancholic (black bile) or phlegmatic (phlegm).
The choleric could be imperfectly described as an outgoing, visionary leader, who may be swiftly angered by incompetence or laziness. The sanguine would be the socially skilled butterfly, quick to forgive and initially eager to tackle new challenges and brave new dangers. The melancholic could be the idealistic introvert with a painful hunger and zeal for perfection. The phlegmatic might be the introverted philosopher, wise and kindly yet often detached from it all.
This quartet would dominate Western, Christian, and Islamic thought through the middle ages and would not be fully overthrown until the 19th century, although 20th century psychology affirms a bit of it, such as the implied notion of introverts (primarily introspective persons) and extroverts (mainly outgoing persons).
However long before then it would be Christianity that would create the basic idea of a "person."
Early Christians had a problem. They believed in one God, and yet that God consisted of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The struggle wasn't explaining how this could be so, because it was accepted as a divinely revealed mystery that could not be understood. The issue was describing it. The necessary words for speaking of a distinct individual did not yet exist.
So Christian theologians borrowed a word from theater, persona. The Latin word originally referred to a mask worn by actors, but persona had come to mean the character an actor portrayed. Now Christians put it to a new task, and the idea of the person finally could be spoken.
For that, we fishy folk should be thankful.
In our activities and learning, we work so hard to define and understand ourselves and others. But we shouldn’t forget that pondering God helps with that too.
By John Rieping | All rights reserved | Previously published September 8, 2012, in The Madera Tribune
More than a century ago, local California grapevines allegedly required no irrigation, and a hand pump could draw water from a hand-dug well. Now machines perform the well drilling and liquid lifting, and wells in the San Joaquin Valley may extend 400-800 feet from the surface.
A basin of lakes, marshes, and grasslands has become a vale of cities, towns, irrigated farms and orchards, ranches, dairies, oil derricks, and desert.
Valley farms have only grown drier as droughts and environmental regulations reduced federal government water deliveries in recent decades. Those deliveries supply water that once flowed freely in natural rivers but now sits behind dams in reservoirs.
The last great California dam would be 1979’s New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus River in the Sierra Nevada foothills. It and others were built to provide irrigation, flood control, water for Californians, recreation, and in some cases electricity. But despite them the valley suffers chronic water shortages, especially since the 1980s.
Not all valley water comes from reservoirs however. Deliveries from the Sacramento Delta have been problematic for areas with poor drainage. Used for irrigation, it leaves salt behind as it evaporates, and eventually sterilizes the farmland.
The Roman Empire allegedly would salt the fields of defeated enemies as a punishment. Without the ability to grow crops, the area would be unlivable for generations.
Time will reveal what the future of the San Joaquin Valley holds, but it already shows its partial desertification. In a way, it is the Judeo-Christian story of creation told in reverse.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void…” (cf. Bereishit/Genesis 1:1) The Hebrew word “tohu” (translated here as “without form and void”) signifies a completely empty wasteland. Tohu appears again in Deuteronomy (Devarim) 32:10 and Psalm (Tehillim) 107:40.
The Bible starts with a desert, and the desert never disappears from it.
Another scriptural word for desert is “midbar,” which means a lively wilderness in which sheep and goats may graze and wild beasts roam. It is used in the book of Exodus (Semot) and elsewhere.
A third word, “arabah,” is an arid and desolate desert plain sometimes spoken of by the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. A fourth word, “horbah,” is a dry and desolate ruin of a previously inhabited land. A fifth, “jeshimon,” is an untamed land without water, and is mentioned frequently in Exodus. A sixth, “çiyyah,” is a drought region.
There are many ways to speak of a desert it seems, and that includes spiritually.
In the Jewish scriptures, the prophet Elijah (Eliyahu) retreated to the desert when fearful of execution and despairing, and instead encountered an angel to encourage him and, later, God on a mountainside (Sepher M’lakhim/1 Kings 19). Likewise the princely foster child of Egypt, Moses (Moshe), fled from justice to the desert after slaying an abusive slaveholder (Exodus 2). The Jewish tribes, in turn, would wander in the desert for 40 years after escaping slavery in Egypt.
The desert seems a refuge for the desperate — and not just for humans. In the Christian scriptures, the rabbi Jesus (Yeshua) said of demons, “When an unclean spirit is gone out of a man, it walks through waterless places, seeking rest, and finds none.” (Matthew 12:43)
Yet Jesus himself had a habit of withdrawing to a desert or mountainside to pray (cf. Luke 5:16; 6:12; Matthew 14:13, 23). His cousin John the Baptist preached primarily in the Desert of Judaea (Matthew 3:1). On one occasion, Jesus spent 40 days fasting and praying in a desert, although the devil did not leave him unmolested there (Matthew 4).
But the desert is more than a safe haven for the overwhelmed or a demonic home away from home. In the book of Hosea (Hoshea), God promised to lead his wayward people away from the idols and comforts that preoccupied it and into a thirsty desert.
“She shall follow after her lovers, but she shall not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find them. Then shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better with me than now… Therefore, behold, I will allure her, bring her into the desert, and speak tenderly to her…” (Hosea 2:7, 14)
Like a rehabilitation clinic, the desert can be a challenging place of healing — if we turn to God.
When we next journey through a desert, will we choose restlessness or renewal?
By John Rieping | All rights reserved | Previously published August 31, 2012, in The Madera Tribune
The San Joaquin Valley, the southern half of the large flat mountain-bound interior of California, has undergone many changes.
The Pacific Ocean birthed this valley we Maderans call home about 65 million years ago when it began to intermittently flood parts of the region. Eventually sediment from the sea and the rise of coastal mountain ranges choked off the valley from its mother 60 million years later.
Around 2 million years ago, glaciers started to transform the valley from a salty oceanic remnant into a freshwater lake. This was the Pleistocene Epoch, a time of ice ages, woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, longhorned bison, birds with 25-foot wingspans, the first humans, and more.
For a glimpse of the former locals, visit the Fossil Discovery Center of Madera County at 19450 Ave. 21 1/2 in Chowchilla.
The last of San Joaquin Valley’s great lakes would be Lake Corcoran, which filled much of the valley about 700,000 years ago. The lake drained into the Monterey Bay via the Salinas River. Then shifts in the earth’s crust lifted the valley and lowered the San Francisco Bay area. This threw part of the lake against the coastal mountains, and the brute force of rushing water, boulders, and other sediment gouged paths to the bay. To this day, those channels remain the deepest parts of the bay.
San Francisco owes us one.
About 12,000 years ago, three major lakes persisted in the valley: Tulare Lake, Buena Vista Lake, and Kern Lake. The ancient trio would slowly starve to death after the Kern River became increasingly redirected for agricultural use from the late 19th century onward. Two small lakes, Lake Webb and Lake Evans, are the only survivors. Both rest on part of the former Buena Vista lakebed.
Before then the lakes supported much life in the valley, which consisted of grasslands and tule grass marshes. The artistic Chumash tribe depended mostly on ocean fishing to live, and yet their villages ranged from Southern California’s coast to the western edge of the San Joaquin Valley. The Miwok tribe, in contrast, dwelled in the nearby foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains here. The Yowlumne Yokuts occupied the valley and the foothills. All three tribes relied at least partly on fishing.
Then came the Spanish, and local tribes were decimated by the European diseases carried by the newcomers.
The first to visit the San Joaquin Valley, then known as the Valle de los Tulares (Valley of the Tule Grass), would be Lt. Gabriel Moraga of the Spanish Army. In 1808, he left the Mission of San Jose (Saint Joseph) to scout for potential sites for new Christian missions from which to evangelize California natives. During his exploration, he named a small creek San Joaquin (Saint Joachim) after the grandfather of Jesus and father of Mary.
When it was later realized that the creek fed into a larger river, it too received the same name. As the river was the major ocean-going stream in the area, the valley too eventually adopted the name.
In time, the Spanish presence grew into dominion, which passed first to Mexico and then to the United States — and not peacefully.
The Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and more would settle here and transform the valley into the “the food basket of the world” responsible for most of California’s agricultural exports. A variety of traditionally Mediterranean and Middle Eastern crops can be produced during its year-round growing season, and ranching and dairy are also strong.
Yet the ancient lakes are no more, and 95 percent of the valley’s wetlands perished for the sake of farm irrigation in the 19th and 20th centuries. In many places, the valley is now semi-arid desert.
Meanwhile farmland itself is being swallowed up by water-hungry urban sprawl — with 70,231 acres (28,092 hectares) lost from 1990 to 2004.
A two-year study in Madera County reported earlier this month found some land to be sinking about a foot per year due to overuse of groundwater. Overpumping water from an aquifer layer called Corcoran clay makes the clay unable to withstand the weight of the land above it. It’s compacted, incapable of holding water in the future.
The valley has a history of such subsidence, yet its cities and farms rely heavily on groundwater.
According to Judaism and Christianity, God delegated authority over the natural world to humanity (Bereishit/Genesis 1). We are caretakers of God’s property. Are we good stewards? Can we become better ones?