The last day we were at Squaw Valley, Michele wanted to work (when most of your work is in cyberspace, you can work from anywhere). For some time now, I have wanted to photograph Sierra Valley and this was the perfect opportunity.

As I left Truckee, I, passed by Alder Creek, one of the two sites where the Donner Party was stuck over the winter of 1846-47.  Tamzene Donner and her husband, George, died here as well as George’s brother, Jacob, and his wife, Elizabeth. Still, all five of Tamzene and George’s children lived as did three of Jacob and Elizabeth’s seven kids. In addition, there was one single woman who lived. But, out of the seven single men who were with the party as teamsters and animal handlers, only two lived.

Two of the children who lived were only three years old. The five teamsters who died ranged in age from 23 to 30, the two who lived were both 16. The only person over 16, who lived, was Dorothea Wolfinger, the single women (who had been widowed on the trail). Clearly, this was not survival of the fittest. Rather, this was a case of the fittest sacrificing for the least fit. If it had been any other way, the survivors would have been considered beasts. If the teamsters had lived by letting the children die, they probably would have been tried for murder.

But I don’t think that is the reason they saved the children, I think that they considered themselves as part of a large family. Family might not be the right word; maybe small community would be better.

Going into Sierra Valley, it struck me that this was a community also.

It is a community that is spread out, but – in my imagination, at least – a community that would not let its three-year old children starve to death.

As I drove through the Sierra Valley, passing ranches, separated by miles of seemingly nothingness, I kept mulling over the idea of Community and how it affects its member’s actions. When Romney was running for president, he seemed particularly hard-hearted and out of touch, but people who knew him thought that he was generous to a fault. However, his generosity was to people that he knew or were in the same church, in other words, in his community. When I think back on the Conservatives I know and have known, they were all generous. Indeed, they are often more generous than many of the Liberals I know but, they are only generous to members of what they consider to be their community. The Liberals, however, tend to consider their community to be more diverse – and, I think, larger – than Conservatives so that their community includes homeless Guatemalan children trying to get back to their parents (although Liberals are not so diverse that they would want to give money to the Westboro Baptist Church).

I entered Sierra Valley from Truckee, going through Sierraville and as I left it at the eastern end of the valley, I saw a train loaded with Armored Cars. They fascinated me, they seemed so out-of-place and, in a very strange way, so lovingly conceived. They were brutal with exquisite detailing, the kind of that can only happen when something is built with, close to, an unlimited budget.

It also struck me that anybody inside that armored car – looking out through the bulletproof windows – was completely separated from whomever was outside. They are in a different community. Soldiers, riding in those behemoths, in Iraq or Afghanistan, are saying We are not you, we are separate, and we can do anything we want. Cops riding on city streets are saying the same thing, not only to the citizens outside, but to themselves.

San Mateo County is about 42% white, 27% Asian, and 25%  Hispanic with a per capita income of $57,906 and we have an armored car. Our armored car – owned by the people but run by our local Sheriff’s Department, to be used against the people, if needed – even has a ring on the top so that it can be equipped with a  machine gun. There is no sane use, in my San Mateo County – anybody’s San Mateo County – for a mobile fort. More germane is that there is no sane use for a mobile fort in Ferguson.

But, it turns out, the Armored Cars – were pretty much free – through a Department of Homeland Security program to fund armored vehicles after 9/11 – so they are hard to turn down. But, again, they are actually bad for everybody concerned. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail; armored cars get used. The police, looking through the windows, are no longer part of the community, they have become an occupying army. They say things like Bring it, you fucking animals!

That’s the problem, the militarization of the police is not good for anybody except the people actually selling the military equipment. Armored Cars don’t help deter crime, they don’t help catch criminals, Armored Cars don’t help with crowd control, they don’t even help in riot control (although, I guess, one could argue that they would help in a mass zombie attack).

It is raining and NOAA tells me that it will pretty much rain all week. Even better, it is cold – for here – so it is snowing in the Sierras. We need the rain and we need the snow even more. Living on the edge of the continent, in a semi-desert, we have based our survival strategy on storing water, as snow, in the Sierras during the winter so that we can have water for the summer.

But we are getting less snow. Here in Northern California – and Southern California, for that matter – the snow is much more important than the rain. We live on an ecological edge of a cliff; we have built our supersized Civilization on that edge. If we don’t get a deep enough snowpack, it will become very hard to maintain that Civilization. We need the snowpack not just to drink and waste in showers, but to grow food.

For a long time, we mined water from the aquifer to make up for the decreasing snow-melt, but the aquifers are going down. While our situation is not as serious – or fanciful – as Las Vegas or Phoenix, we are running out of water. The rain is great and the land is thirsty and stressed and needs the rain, but this rain is not really going to change much.

In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond investigates several past Civilizations and their economic and social collapse. Civilizations as diverse as Easter Island, Classical Mayan, and the Greenland Norse – and I would add us – pushed their environments to the very edge of capacity and then they got slammed by ecological change that, in turn, pushed the Civilization into collapse.

It seems to me that we are still in a mindset that explains everything as if it were an exception rather than the new rule and that mindset – of everything is atypical – gives false comfort. It is easy to think that this has been the wettest start to the month of March ever for Seattle because they are getting our rain – that the same, temporary, high-pressure ridge, that is keeping California dry – but it is not our rain, it is our past weather pattern. True, it may not be our future weather pattern, but it is possible that it is. Near Seattle, the rain caused a mudflow that killed somewhere around forty people but the disaster was also caused by over-logging. It is possible that it was not over-logging based on past weather patterns – however, there is evidence that it was – but it is over-logging for what is happening this year.

According to Diamond, that is typical; it is what happened to other Civilizations that collapsed. Those falls from grace were self created – over-farming, overgrazing, over-hunting, denuding forests, sucking aquifers dry – and, with Global Climate change and our refusal to correct for it, there is no reason to think that the result will be any different this time around.