I'll date myself a little for anyone in So Cal who was there during the era. At one point, a fruit fly, the Mediterranean Fruit Fly to be exact, was found in the region. Given that So Cal still pretended to give a fuck about agriculture at that point, it became a massive war to kill them all. They began massive nighttime air drops of a pesticide called Malathion. People quickly began to notice their plants wilting and dying, as if they'd been set on fire. The OFFICIAL story they squawked on the news is it was the result of concentrated acid rain that the region had been receiving. My grandfather kept a huge Nopales in his back yard that was killed to the root as a result of the spraying, and he kept cursing the news at the time saying "Acid rain my ass." I still wonder to this day what the long term ramifications of those dousings were to the region.