Lynda and Stewart Resnick — the oligarch pistachio farmers of Beverly Hills — are going viral. Influencers are out making TikToks, tweets and reels. They’re outraged to find out that one Los Angeles billionaire family controls more water than Los Angeles uses in an entire year.

The viral interest in the Resnicks’ story makes sense. It’s connected to the fact that while fires are raging across the Los Angeles area, there are reports that fire hydrants are tapped out. There’s no water left to fight the fires, yet you have this family, with its ridiculous mini-Versailles mansion on Sunset Boulevard, hoarding an incomprehensible amount of water. I get the outrage. It is crazy that one family can seize control of so much water in a state that’s been bled dry for a century or more.

The Resnicks control a huge amount of water. They use it to irrigate their vast holdings of pistachios and almonds and citrus. And their holdings are vast: around 300 square miles of land spread around the Central Valley. That’s 10 times the size of Manhattan. But the problem with the Resnicks is not that they’re hoarding water.

Los Angeles is the most powerful city in California and it itself is a massive water baron that has huge amounts of water in storage — water that the city continuously plunders from regions hundreds of miles away. One of L.A.’s aqueducts crosses state lines into Arizona to take water from the Colorado River; another stretches for over 200 miles and reaches 3,500 feet above sea level into the Sierra Nevada Mountains; a third taps water from a dam 550 miles north of L.A. It’s not about the lack of water in Los Angeles. It’s about the larger political-technological machine that both L.A. and the Resnicks are plugged into.

I’m talking about the terraforming system that has been built over the last century in California.

This system, which involves massive dams and thousands of miles of aqueducts, moves water from the north of the state to the south.(Take note Chump) It is nominally owned by the public and run by a democratic process. But that’s mostly a ruse. The truth is, from the very beginning, this system has been under the control of a local California oligarchy made up mostly of billionaire farmers and real estate speculators. The basic function of this terraforming system is to move water from California’s mountains to California’s semi-arid valleys and coastal areas in order to fuel speculative agriculture and suburban development.