You should think about why California is growing almonds for the rest of the world.

Almond growers are acting against the best interests of their community for personal profit. Using fresh water that California cannot afford to use to grow their own bank accounts, with negligible benefit to Californians. Californians shouldn't tolerate this.

"But they pay tax on that profit, that means they are giving back!" you might object.

That is little more than a bribe to shut people up. What is California going to do, use that tax money to import fresh water? From where? From everywhere that they are shipping almonds to? Using that money to fund desalination plants might be a decent idea, but Californians seem fairly dead-set against desalination and I doubt the almond tax money would cover it anyway.

Well, it explains how it came to be that way. But then you wonder, "why". California is not water-rich. It's fundamentally incongruous. Should it be that way?