I was sitting in an airport, scrolling through my inbox, when an article from The New York Times caught my eye: America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow. The piece was accompanied by a map that showed, in stark contrast, the dramatic loss of groundwater across the U.S. over the last 80 years. Where once there were deep blue areas representing abundant water reserves, now there were red dots—signs of depletion, of wells running dry. I couldn’t look away. This wasn’t just a distant issue; this was happening in my own backyard in Oxnard, California.