Actually, San Francisco looks green all year long, if one ignores the rain-starved hills that lie disturbingly behind its emerald-and-white summer splendor, but this is the second part of the fraud, the part perpetrated by man. There was hardly a single tree growing in San Francisco when the first Spanish arrived; it was too dry and wind-blown for trees to take hold. Today, Golden Gate Park looks as if Virginia had mated with Borneo, thanks to water brought nearly two hundred miles by tunnel. The same applies to Bel Air, to Pacific Palisades, to the manicured lawns of La Jolla, where the water
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