This article is published in partnership with Yasha Levine’s Substack newsletter, “Weaponized Immigrant”
Lynda and Stewart Resnick — the oligarch pistachio farmers of Beverly Hills — are currently going viral. Influencers are out making tiktoks, tweets and reels. They’re outraged at finding 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 being tapped out. There’s no water left to fight the fires, yet you have this oligarch 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 of water for a century or more.
I’ve been covering the Resnicks for close to 15 years. A documentary about them, which I’ve been working on with Rowan Wernham, will come out this spring, so I know quite a bit about this family. In fact, a lot of the viral content that’s circulating about the Resnicks is based on my reporting. So I want to add a few words about the Resnicks and the fires in LA.
The connection between the fire and the Resnicks is not as direct as people think. Or rather, it’s direct, but from a different direction. It’s less about their particular control of so much water, and more about what this control says about California and our world.
There’s no water left to fight the fires, yet you have this oligarch family (…) hoarding an incomprehensible amount of water.
The Resnicks control a huge amount of water. They use it to irrigate their vast holdings of pistachios and almonds and citrus fruit. 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 LA’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 LA. It’s not about the lack of water in Los Angeles. It’s about the larger political-technological machine that both LA. 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. 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.
Land in California is useless without water. And a lot of land in California is semi-arid. There’s a water supply for only a portion of the year, typically in the winter months. Without continuous access to water, much of the best land in California can’t be properly exploited — no cities can be built, no crops can be planted. But with water this land suddenly becomes worth a lot of money, no matter if you’re using it to grow pistachios or subdividing it for a new ritzy suburb. That’s what the terraforming system has always been about. It has put a dam on every major river and redirected their flows to the lowland cities and farmland, allowing insiders to buy land on the cheap, hooking it up to water and then making a huge profit. This has been the engine of California’s oligarchy from the Gold Rush to today, creating a civilization of cars and endless suburbs. This is what Roman Polanski’s ”Chinatown” is about.
To build out this system, the real estate speculators of Southern California have long been in cahoots with California’s powerful farming families. It’s gone on for more than a century. In fact, most of the old California money — with family names like the Bowles, the Millers, the Chandlers, the Crowleys — was built on this conspiracy. And newer California money has been getting its piece of the game, too.
Stewart and Lynda Resnick are relative newcomers to this ongoing terraforming conspiracy. They entered it in earnest in the 1990s and since then have, in a lot of ways, outpaced the old, tired California money, using modern production techniques and advertising strategies to build themselves into one of the larger agribusinesses in America. Their entire business — the Wonderful Company — depends on keeping this terraforming-aqueduct system in place, running as usual.
But this system has come with costs that are being borne by nature and society. The damming of every major river in California and the redirection of their water to other parts of the state has led to an ongoing ecocide, destroying river and riparian ecosystems and all the webs of life that depend on them. The dirty secret is that most of California’s rivers are essentially lifeless. They’re so broken up and there is so little water in them that they can’t sustain complex aquatic life.
It’s not just rivers that are suffering. This terraforming system has been able to deliver massive amounts of water to places where it does not exist. This has allowed real estate speculators to build homes and subdivisions wherever they want. Without care for natural limits, they’ve paved over natural habitats and wild areas and built way up the hills. They’ve built suburbs without end all across California, pushing out animals and contributing to the mass extinction that’s gripping the region — and driving global warming with endless car exhaust and endless consumption.
A lot of building and development has happened in the hills and mountains of Los Angeles and Southern California. These are areas that are supposed to go through natural cycles of fire. But now they’ve been packed with houses, ready for the right conditions to burn. To put it another way, this terraforming-water system has subsidized the creation of housing in places where it should not exist. It helped create the perfect matchbox. And this matchbox is burning right now in Los Angeles.
The dirty secret is that most of California’s rivers are essentially lifeless.
I’m glad that there’s attention on the Renicks. More people should know what they’re up to. But the issue is not so much that they personally control so much water; it’s about their connection to something much more sinister and political. It’s about the ecocidal terraforming system that underpins the California way of life.
The tragic thing about this system is that pretty much everyone is tied to it. Everyone who lives in Los Angeles — from the celebs to the TikTok influencers to the pistachio oligarchs to their guy who works in the kitchen — does so because this destructive terraforming system exists. Without the water it provides, the city would still be a sleepy little town, not the sprawling growth of pavement and houses that it is today. And yet, while everyone depends on it, only a small oligarchic class has been able to reap its full rewards. And the Resnicks are part of that class.