Los Angeles was never a dry desert. The LA River than now flows down a concrete channel used to be an alluvial river that ran freely and flooded areas from Los Angeles to San Pedro. Many native villages flourished in the basin’s marshlands. Progress and water battles turned it into a desert.
I believe we may be attempting to make a similar point, but through a different set of filters. The vast majority of LA county & Southern Cal, in it’s natural state, is arid. Whether it be high or low desert elevation shrubbery, or rocky mountainous regions, unless there is a water source, the land is significantly arid. Throughout the Southwest, indeed, Native Americans typically clustered near water sources for obvious reasons, and lived in numbers that were in balance with the resources available.
“Progress” & water battles did not turn LA into a desert - unfortunately it was just the opposite. Schemes to bring water to LA, such as the Owens Valley project, turned LA into an oasis (at the expense of the Owens Valley), and this man-made oasis attracted millions of people to the region from the eastern US who were looking for a new beginning and a better life. It all worked out swimmingly if what you were after was to develop the largest city imaginable. But growing up there in the ‘50s & ‘60s, in almost any direction I traveled through most of the region, as soon as you left a developed cityscape or perhaps a slice of irrigated orange grove, you typically would be traversing a tinderbox landscape - because it was still in it’s natural state. Sadly, if not left naturally arid, a new and rather fitting name was eventually applied to describe much of the land: The Concrete Desert.
