Pistachio Wars: The Back Story
Farmers are the key to power in California. They own the water. They own the land.
Last week, filmmaker Rowan Wernham and I launched a Kickstarter for Pistachio Wars, a documentary about the stealth privatization of California’s water — and the small group of billionaires who are driving it.
It focuses on a Beverly Hills billionaire power couple: Stewart and Lynda Resnick. They’re farmers — the biggest and most powerful in California. They’re also water barons. They control more water than the entire population of Los Angeles uses in one year — that’s 4 million people.
The doc tells a wild story. And it stands, in a very unexpected way, at the intersection of all sorts of ugly forces that are hitting us at the same time: oligarchy, global warming, environmental destruction, useless consumerism and marketing, the failure of liberal philanthropy, and America’s destructive neoconservative foreign policy. It seems like a lot of disparate issues to tie into a documentary about some pistachio farmers, but they all do come together in Pistachio Wars.
You can read more a detailed explanation of what the film is about here — and why we need your help to finish post-production. Check out the trailer!
What I want to do here is explain — and especially to readers who haven’t followed my reporting for very long — about how I got into this story, and how Rowan and I came to make this documentary.