Food Grows where Water Flows

I have never driven down the Central Valley without seeing sign after sign that reminded me that “Food Grow Where Water Flows”. They are posted along both I-5 and Rte. 99, covering old tanks and stacks of cotton bales.


There is a truth in that statement that we all understand. California's major food producing areas are all valleys: Imperial Valley, San Joaquin Valley, Salinas Valley. They all rely on irrigation. It is mostly through irrigation that California has become the number 1 agricultural state in the country, producing $36.6 Billion in revenue in 2007.


That is a big argument for maintaining the status quo. In fact, we a growing population to feed, there is pressure to extend agriculture in to ever more lands, some of which are totally unsuitable. The environmental consequences of that are routinely ignored. -- more --

The only problem is that nothing can maintain the status quo. Things are always changing, becoming something different. That is the lesson of ecology, a lesson that Greens have learned even if others have not. We all live in a complex system of things that are created and things that die. Our hope is that we are not the ones who will die.

Currently the major change is climate. The most recent forecasts indicate that we may not be able to avoid a temperature increase of 6° C. by 2100. Such a change would entirely disrupt all of our natural systems and California's agricultural industry is rather ground zero in this

That is why I call attention to those signs. Food Grows Where Water Flows. They are no longer a simple description of California's agribusiness. They are a political slogan. Perhaps they always were. You will hear the same story repeated again and again. California's Agriculture needs water. The environmentalists think a fish is more important than people. Let's set aside the environmental laws so we can build more, develop more, pump more, grow more.

It is never that simple. There is not going to be much more water. The water that we will get will not be stored in the mountain snow pack to melt for summer use. Building more damns and more canals to store and carry less water does not make sense, but that is what almost every politician in the San Joaquin Valley wants to do.

The campaign to flush the San Joaquin Valley with Delta Water is well organized and picking up more force every week. It has now taken on the overtones of ethnic conflict. The California Latino Water Coalition are doing all that the land owners ask, showing up at organized protests as though Cesar Chavez were still leading them. This has the makings of a major split between the interests of farm workers and urban dwellers, though both are Hispanic.

California's State Legislature has failed time and again to make the substantive changes in how we deal with water. Each time the problem is recognized, they end up negotiating some compromise like Cal-Fed that solves nothing. Cal-Fed was billed as a compromise and promoted as such by Senator Feinstein. In reality, it was a capitulation to agribusiness interests.

In a similar manner, the Delta Vision process initiated by Governor Schwarzenegger was directed to define a comprehensive solution for our water needs with a concentrated focus on the Delta. Once delivered, every interest group is picking and choosing from a menu of solutions, choosing only those that they were looking for at the beginning and ignoring the rest. Schwarzenegger wanted the peripheral canal. San Joaquin Valley Agribusiness wants more guaranteed water. The Metropolitan Water District wants to keep supporting unlimited growth. We can't have it all. There is not now enough water to do that, even in a good year and we have had three dry years in a row.

Unless the people of California decide to tell their legislature to get serious about our future, we won't have a very good one. If our legislature is not ready to apply real science and ecological systems planning to the management of our watershed, then it is time to elect someone who will.

Two Green Party candidates for the State Assembly, Lisa Green (53rd AD) and Jack Lindblad (39th AD), have started their campaigns with strong positions about the changes needed in our water management systems. The California Green Party is the only option if we want to secure a future before our economy dies of thirst. Join Lisa and Jack and let's bring ecological accountability to Sacramento.

Health Hazards of Global Warming

With attention focused on Iowa, with even Jay Leno entertaining us with Mike Huckabee when he ran out of jokes, little attention is being paid to stories that will have much more far reaching consequences.

One of those stories is the report in the Sacramento Bee concerning a new study of the Health Consequences of Global Warming released by Stanford Univ.

Vehicle and power plant emissions of carbon dioxide, the predominant climate-altering gas, are estimated to cause 1,000 additional deaths and many more cases of respiratory disease every year in the United States for each degree Celsius of temperature rise in the Earth's atmosphere, according to the Stanford study.

The bulk of those deaths - an estimated 300 - are occurring in California cities already socked with smog, said Mark Jacobson, a Stanford environmental engineering professor who led the study.

This is really a major issue for many. It does not fall on the urban power centers of this state: Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego. Rather, its effect are more strongly felt in the Central Valley where we have 5 of the worst cities in the country in terms of air quality: Bakersfield, Visalia, Fresno, Merced and Sacramento, according to the SacBee report.

What that report does not say is that politics plays a very important role in how we deal with these facts. I received a recent email from Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla concerning those very differences. Barbara is the Campaign Director for Restore the Delta and the force behind their "Health Delta Communities" programs. Barbara wrote

"Kate, my five-year-old, developed walking pneumonia, then full-blown pneumonia, and severe asthma problems starting all on the 19th."

That is only a reference point for how serious this situation is for her family. The politics behind this is very much a power game, as Barbara made clear later in her note:

...why does the SJ Valley Air Pollution Control Board permit wood burning on moderate air quality days, when the Sacramento Valley restricts burning on those days? It seems that wood burning in our neighborhood is a major trigger for Kate, even though I am keeping her indoors. Her pediatrician at Kaiser says this is a major problem for asthma kids in Stockton.

This personalizes the facts. A 2006 study by California State University - Fullerton let us know just how gargantuan this problem really is. It costs California $3 Billion per year. There are thousands of families like Barbara's in the San Joaquin Valley and thousands of children like Kate.

The San Joaquin Valley would love for you to think that the primary cause of their ail pollution is from automobiles. That simply is not true. A much greater amount comes from agriculture. Methane from dairy operations is significant. So is the dust from discing; so are the pesticides from aerial spraying. No single source accounts for more than 35% of the air pollution. Yet, any attempt to increase regulation in the valley meets with stiff opposition from all levels of the body politic, right up to Congressman Devin Nunes (R-Visalia, CA-21).

His August, 2007 press release, New domestic energy production and air quality improvements the focus of Nunes legislation, is an example of his absolutely delusional propaganda. Other than this title, then entire release is about Coal Liquefaction, one of the worst technology solutions that gullible, scientifically challenged Congress Critters are talking about, but Nunes has no qualms in telling his constituents that this dirty technology will solve their air quality problems.

"Coal liquefaction has been proven as a viable fuel for decades. With today’s improvements in technology, we can produce domestic energy and improve environmental outcomes at the same time. This fuel would be particularly beneficial in the Central Valley of California, as we seek to address ongoing air quality challenges," said Rep. Nunes.

The counter argument comes from David Hawkins, Director of the Climate Center, Natural Resources Defense Council. In testimony before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, April 2006, Hawkins gave a very different picture of the processes.

The impacts that a large coal-to-liquids program could have on global warming pollution,
conventional air pollution and damage from expanded coal production are substantial.
Before deciding whether to invest scores, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars in a new industry like coal-to-liquids, we need a much more serious assessment of whether this is an industry that should proceed at all.

I would give Nunes a Climate Change Cretin award, except Oklahoma Senator Inhofe seems to win that every year.

More importantly, is we are are to truly reduce the costs of Health Care, especially for those least able to afford it, we have to address Air Quality. Some can keep their children indoors when air quality is bad. Those who can't afford health care may not be able to afford air conditioning in the summer either. Maybe they have to use wood for fuel because they can no longer deal with the rising cost to heat their homes in the winter We can not separate all of these problems into neat compartments and decide what solutions we need in a vacuum. We can not solve our health care crises now without addressing air quality. We won't be able to so do in the future unless we address climate change. We can not separate issues of social justice from the environment is we are going to have a future.

Five year old Kate Parrilla needs all of us to go to work for her. We need to get rid of bloviating demagogues like Devin Nunes. We need to make Schwarzenegger's new Queen of Air Quality do her job and forget about trading carbon credits. It there were ever a situation that cries out for the values of this Green Party to be implemented as policy, this is it. If we want to prove our abilities to practice governance, we need to be challenging the power structure of the San Joaquin Valley, to be "speaking truth to power", to become the agents of change that the Obama's of this world promise to be, but never will while still supporting environmentally destructive, unhealthy, unClean Coal and Ethanol from Corn for the sake of a few additional votes.