You’d have to be hiding deep in a well somewhere to miss news about California’s crushing water shortage. More than 80 percent of the state is in severe or exceptional drought, a scientific classification not seen since before California’s 1849 gold rush.

Here at National Geographic, my colleague Dennis Dimick, the magazine’s environment editor, took a deep dive into the cracked dirt around the part of the country we both come from. Dennis covers enough ground to know that aquifers are being overtaxed and wells are being drilled to new depths. The damage to farms and the crops they grow is immediate. To say nothing of the businesses and residents that have been strained to cut back their water use