And Then There Were 33.9 Million of Us

And so the first cut of census data has been released, enumerating trends that ought to be obvious to any Californian who has not slept through the past decade. There are more people in the state than ever before. California presents an increasingly complex tapestry of racial and ethnic lineage. With coastal cities filling up, much of the new growth has vaulted through the passes and into the interior valleys.

Still, the new numbers are certain to generate much discussion, not so much about the decade they document, but about the implications they raise for the future. Thus, it perhaps might be helpful early on to make a semantical distinction: Whatever the numbers say, California in fact is not growing. No, the state remains the same 163,707 square miles it’s been since the boundaries were drawn 150 years ago.

What is growing, of course, is the number of Californians who occupy those 163,707 square miles. And as the population escalates, so, too, will the public fretting. Where to build the new subdivisions and towns demanded by a growing population? Where to place the energy plants and garbage dumps and schools and prisons and freeways? Will there be enough water to go around? How much farmland will be sacrificed?

These are the kinds of questions that growth experts chew on constantly, and Census 2000 material should keep them masticating for years. As for the average Californian--if, indeed, such a creature exists--the general reaction to the 33.9 million population number is not difficult to predict.

Nearly 40 years ago, Gov. Pat Brown proclaimed a four-day holiday to celebrate California’s emergence as the nation’s most populous state: “The assumption of first rank in population,” declared this last of the California booster politicians, “proudly underscores the achievements which already have put California at the front of all states in many areas, including education, water development, highways, science and agriculture.”

Interestingly enough, even back then many Californians weren’t buying Brown’s growth-is-good mantra. Veteran California journalist Peter Schrag, in his book “Paradise Lost,” recounted how the governor’s California First Days were, by and large, “a bust.” Grumped a San Francisco Chronicle editorial at the time: “What is there to celebrate” other than the “blight and misery” caused by growth?

The losing of paradise, in fact, has been a theme heard throughout the history of California statehood. Always it’s the same lament. California was such a wonderful place, and then “they” had to come along and wreck it. This passage from “How to Kill a Golden State,” William Bronson’s 1960s primer on the perils of growth, provides a typical and strikingly timeless example:

“In the old days we had such abundant land and the land was so rich that waste didn’t seem to matter. But millions of acres of our prime agricultural land has fallen to the tract builders and much more is doomed. Litter, endless billboards, honky-tonk commercialism, and banal slurb construction line the highways. Poisons and sewage pollute our bays, lakes and rivers.

“When I was born in 1926 there were slightly less than 5 million people in California, a large number of whom were immigrants, as opposed to us elite native-born. Today we are at the 20 million mark. We were handed a tradition of easygoing life which rested largely upon two natural factors--good weather and seemingly unlimited land, air and water resources. These are the features that attracted my grandparents, and to a lesser degree attract today’s out-of-staters.”

As the numbers evolve, one generation’s fretting can seem almost quaint when compared with the realities faced by the next. Bronson pined for the days of 5 million Californians. Today, a California of 20 million people would seem like, if not Eden, at least South Dakota. In a similar way, Californians who today bemoan a population of 33.9 million might well seem silly to those who, later in the century, will be coping with a population of 50 million.

Certain fundamentals, though, remain constant. There always have been and always will be more people coming into California than the Californians already here believe can be accommodated. There always has been and, regrettably, always will be a temptation to blame only the latest newcomers for what has been a 150-year pattern of migration. This scapegoating ignores the obvious fact that all Californians either had the good fortune to be born here or the good sense to move here--that, as a poet of California once wrote, the same road led everyone to this place.

Now it’s true that, depending on the economy, growth as a political issue in California can flare up or flicker down. In a larger sense, however, it never goes away. In fact, it has evolved into something beyond a mere issue, something more like an ethos. How to fit more people into a land of finite resources, while preserving the natural charms that draw people in the first place--this is to be California’s never-ending conundrum. And, in every meaning of the phrase, we simply must learn how to live with it.

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Fastest growing (California Counties)

San Benito -- 45.1%

Placer -- 43.8%

Madera -- 39.8%

Riverside -- 32.0%

Imperial -- 30.2%

Mono -- 29.1%

Kings -- 27.6%

Calaveras -- 26.7%

El Dorado -- 24.1%

Lassen -- 22.6%