If you think it has rained enough, guess again.

In a recent feature on CA water, (subs req'd) High Country News contributing editor, Matt Jenkins, brings us back to a harsh reality.

Nothing can be done in California that will keep its farms and big cities thriving at today's levels and also keep the fish and the De;lta alive. There's simply not enough water to go around anymore.

The print edition has a different title "California Dreamin'" followed by Twenty years of wishful thinking have twisted the state's water politics -- with national repercussions. Every time you hear a local meteorologist opine that we have had enough rain, or that the ski areas love the snow pack, just understand that it isn't enough and never will be.

Jenkins feature article gives a truly (not faux) fair and balanced view of what is happening with this one piece of the CA water puzzle. It is by far not the only piece nor should it be the sole focus of Green ecological advocacy. Water is one part of a nexus of issues which, along with climate change and energy, are so intertwined as to defy any separation.

There is another aspect to this which Greens should consider. In the most recent (Jan. - Feb. 2011) issue of Orion Magazine, Derrick Jensen writes about just how idiotic it is to expect to have it all.

I'm continually stunned by how many seemingly sane people believe you can have infinite economic growth on a finite planet. Perpetual economic growth and its cousin, limitless technological expansion, are beliefs so deeply held by so many in this culture that they often go unquestioned.

We see this so clearly in the Obama administration's economic policy. If Larry Summers has had Obama's ear, then he has surely heard this bit cited by Jensen:

There are no… limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind at any time in the foreseeable future. …The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.

I would rather think that the idea that a consumerist culture is not bound by natural limits is an act of profound hubris, but the Obama / Summers economic policy requires that growth to solve our problems.

The question for Greens is whether we can find the political will to unmask the meme of perpetual growth and help society to live within it's means. If we return to the issues of water, climate, energy then we have to immediately confront the myth of perpetual growth.

That giant sucking sound...

When I first read Paolo Bacigalupi's story, The Tamarisk Hunter, I thought it was a good Sci-Fi depiction of one possible future for the American West, a stark landscape matching the bleakness of the tenuous relationships of those who inhabited it. As all water flows to a massive piping system known as the Straw, the only way to supply California and it's cities.

Given the realities of today's drought, the effects of climate change that some will not admit is happening and almost no-one is doing much about it, makes Bacigalupi appear to be more of a prophet than a spinner of yarns. When Dr. Steven Chu forecasts the demise of Agriculture in California, will Westland's Thomas Birmingham think much longer before he starts advocating to build the Straw.

That giant sucking sound is your water flowing down to preserve a California Culture and Agribusiness in the desert.

San Francisco Chronicle Prints Anyone

We all know that the current controversy about the California Delta is one of the most important water issues in the country. We will make a decision based on the data subject to scientific analysis or we will make a decision based on ideology and the pandering to political expediency. The point of the controversy is whether or not to spend $ Billions constructing a canal to divert water around (or through) the Delta with little regard for what happens to the delta, its fish, the livelihood of its farmers, the success of commercial fish industry.

Along comes the San Francisco Chronicle with an OpEd disguised as an article written by two flacks for the Wise Use lobby. If you want to know how embarrassing it is to see this stuff in a newspaper that you frequently read, click Read more! I'll spell it out.


First let me make a couple of points about the credentials of the authors.

Craig Manson is not a scientist nor a journalist. He is a lawyer who got a political job in Washington during the Bush Administration. While he is not one of the Dept. of the Interior officials so tainted by their association with Jack Abramoff, maybe that is only because he did not need to be bribed to do the damage that he did. It was enough, however, that a more reputable magazine, High Country News called him out for being part of the problems in Interior.

A Government Accountability Office investigator testified to Congress that other Interior officials should have been examined as part of the MacDonald investigation, including Craig Manson, Brian Waidmann, Todd Willens and Randal Bowman. Though the three were never actually accused of wrongdoing, some did their part aboveboard to stick it to endangered species. Willens was once senior staff advisor to Richard Pombo, the notorious California congressman who attempted to gut the Endangered Species Act. While at Interior, he pushed to remove the Florida manatee and other species from endangered species protection. Willens left Interior in 2008 and — you don't say!? — became a lobbyist.

Manson came back to his comfort zone in Sacramento to teach law.

Manson's co-author, Brandon Middleton is an attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation where a site search show his name attached to exactly one case. The Pacific Legal Foundation is key part of the Wise Use movement and has a long history of attacks on the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. Their claim is that they are "supporting freedom from environmental extremism." The reality is that they are the last desperate gasp of a 19th century mentality that saw all of nature as an abundance waiting to be exploited.

So, when these two lawyers say that

There is little science to support the notion that pumping restrictions will solve the problem of the smelt's decline.

they are not qualified to make that judgment.

What they do is to fall back on an old rhetorical trick. They demand absolute certainty that an action will produce results before any action that then don't like might be attempted.

In contrast, there is nothing close to a guarantee that increased pumping restrictions will help the delta smelt.

I will admit that they do list other problems with the delta, including contamination. Their reference to "a toxic water habitat for the smelt" seems a direct reference to the contamination of Delta waters through runoff from irrigation practices in the Westlands Water District. Just think of this. If the pumps that are referenced in this article are turned off, Westlands Water district would not have as much runoff and the water quality in the Delta would be improved. That would be a double benefit. Such goodness is too much to ask from a couple of lawyers.

It would also be much better journalistic practice for the Chornicle to have called this the the OpEd that it really is.

The Year of Ignorance about the West.

I am going only to give you a teaser about the editorial comments at High Country News. It underscores just how far we have to go, especially in the way that some media tries to write the story, you know... make it interesting... and let the truth fall where it will.

This was supposed to be "the year of the West" in national politics. States that had been reliably Republican were suddenly competitive. Two Westerners -- Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Republican, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat -- were credible candidates for the presidency. The Democrats are holding their national convention in Denver for the first time in a century.

So surely the candidates and the national media would take the trouble to learn something about the West?

Well, not exactly.

It would be funny if not for.....

The task of building a Jeffersonian "informed electorate" seems, at times to be Herculean. Maybe that is why we rely on others to do it. I read an email on a GP National Committee list from our national press secretary, Scott McClarty, reminding people that there was a lot they could do to help spread the word about the Green Party rather than relying on a national press release. I had to agree with him.

Erika McDonald sent our Media Committee links to two letters to the editor by San Francisco Greens today.

• Sue Vaughn on "Deconstructing Polls" in the Fog City Journal
• Marc Salomon on Shut Down the Zoo in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Let's all make an effort to put the Green Party into our local papers every week.