The speed of life appears to accelerate as our short teeth grow long. Digital social media surfing tends to be a frothy mix of astounding crimes against humanity supplanted by the banal failings of a professional dog walker caught skipping out on the excrement pickup duties that come with this vocation.
Climate related catastrophes are grabbing the headlines with an ever-increasing frequency.
I mention wildfire and most people I know will launch into how they’ve installed air filters, purchased emergency generators, cut back their trees and brush or have had either their homeowner’s insurance premiums increased or canceled altogether.
Drought awareness is spotty. If you’ve had your irrigation allocations cut, you are all to painfully aware of the consequences of the persistent drought patterns that shadow your best laid plans.
Just a few weeks ago Abbotsford, British Columbia was hit with flooding, all hell broke out and they received a month’s worth of torrential rains over two days that wiped away five bridges and twenty sections of roadway vital to getting supplies from the coast to the interior of this rugged diamond of a province in Canada.
This last June the entire town of Lytton, British Columbia in the grip of a record-breaking heatwave caught fire and burned most of the town to the ground.
Hurricane Ida a Category-4 storm first lashed Louisiana with wind and rain then spun north and east wreaking havoc upon New Jersey inundating Newark with over 8 inches of record-breaking rainfall. When something has never happened before perhaps it is time to give these events a second look, ask a few questions, make some assessments, consider your options. You know wake up and get about the business of fixing things before things fix you.
The colossal rare for December 200-hundred-mile-long tornado that cut a path across Kentucky this past weekend has the telltale signs of a climate change induced event. It’s become imprecise to describe such catastrophic events as a natural disaster given the scientifically proven effects our releasing gigatons of carbon dioxide is having on our planet. Appears our fingerprints are all over these weather events.
Allstate changing advertising agencies in 2020 seems to have retired the character playing Mayhem from their ad campaigns. In midst of a global pandemic and under lockdown, washing hands, wearing masks while 100’s of thousands are killed by a virulent pathogen might make this change in campaigns an appropriate inflection point to regroup, rebrand and reconsider what hazard coverage you might wish or not wish to cover. Seems obvious in light of events.
If you read my postings, you’ll see I keep picking at my concerns about whether we can continue to govern and keep the wheels on our civilization rolling in the face of such daunting problems.
In California’s San Joaquin Valley just west of Fresno lies the Westlands Water District. If you are a politician, you cross the drought intolerant Westland mega millionaire farmers at your own peril. Enter stage right the California State Water Board announcing on December 1, 2021, that it is “Zero Day” for much of California’s agricultural industry. All the dam building, aqueduct constructing, ditch digging, well drilling and cloud seeding isn’t going to get the Westlands Water District one more drop of water.
If you are heading up Interstate 5 from LA, the Westlands Water District of Fresno and Kings County runs parallel with the highway from Kettleman City north 90 miles to Mercy Hot Springs Road. This farmland is made possible entirely by irrigation and without it the land would be all tumbleweed, dry wash, and dust devils. This is 600,000 acres─ the largest irrigation district in the United States, land that is worked by 600 subsidized farms that could not exist had the Federal government followed their own science and surveys and declined to put into production this portion of the San Joaquin Valley.
In 1992 the Central Valley Project Improvement Act was passed. “This comprehensive legislation initiated water contract reforms, raised prices for water, established a fund financed by farmers to correct past environmental damage, promoted fish and wildlife restoration, and mandated a wide range of other reforms.” The Westlands Water District has fought this legislation at every turn, tooth and nail, tong and hammer.
What we’ve got here is our own version of Vietnam or Afghanistan, a water war with no end. Every time we say the jig is up the Westland Water District returns with another proposal to prop up their district by pumping yet more state and federal government funded water into their district. Time has run out and enough is enough. Whatever is in store for the Westlands Water District’s ought to be on their dime. Let them build the facilities to store the water, deliver it to their lands and drain it off of their fields, mitigate the pollution and remedy the salt and toxins that are wreaking devastation on the region’s wildlife.
Out here in the American West the megadrought continues to tighten its grip. A century ago, in our historically anomalous cooler and wetter era it appeared we might engineer our water resources into an unending bounty of agricultural abundance. Instead, we lavished water we no longer have on a group of too rich for their own britches farmers who have not a lick of tolerance for the drought that’s got the region by the throat.
Devin Nunes represents portions of both Fresno and King County. Defending the Westland Water District has been a favorite hyperbolic sport of this ill-suited hack politician now turning to become a social media CEO. His term of art for citizens in California trying to hold over-entitled subsidized millionaire farmers to account is to label them as “radical environmental activists.” This is what I call kick-down and kiss-up rhetoric. Like Kevin McCarthy, the Minority Leader in the House of Representatives you owe your political career to the government subsidized constituents that can make or break you should you forget who you are working for and cross them by even one precious drop of water.
I’ve never been inclined to building a life based on my receiving near free water so that I could grow Department of Agriculture crop subsidized commodities that fully guarantee whatever may come that I’ll be living higher than the other 99% of the nearby county citizens. That’s not a square deal, feels more like wheeling and dealing terms. Then, when it comes time to pay your fair share, to give some portion of your taxpayer paid largess back to help with all this nation is responsible for doing, that instead you fund political campaigns dedicated to lowering your taxes, reducing regulations, and worse still things have now spiraled so far out of control that a good many on your side of the isle have shown up in Washington on January 6th to commit sedition and topple democracy. It is a sad state of affairs when our tax dollars have been sent to such a place and instead of gratitude, instead of appreciation, these investments have bred only contempt for our government and cultivated a fool’s alliance with the growing threat to our nation’s stability.
Anyone and everyone knows Republicans have not one care for a smaller government, they want a more focused and constituency targeted government, one that serves the people that put them in office, and if that means reducing services and cutting programs for those citizens that don’t live in the Westlands Water District then that’s just fine and dandy, they’ll never vote for their party anyway.
Part of what is dangerous in this moment is that a whole lot of overcompensated agricultural interests no matter how much lobbying they might do can’t come up with the water that’s gone missing in this climate emergency and being rock-ribbed-science-denying partisans that they are they haven’t the least bit of interest in doing their part to live within their water budget means. That’s not their problem, they are water nobility, they think they are the creators of the abundance the nation enjoys.
It’s time we walk these subsidies back, send in teachers to the region, provide government sponsored civics lessons on how it is we’ve come to the point where you can no longer promise to be part of the solution to our problems the nation confronts, but instead are ready to make the climate emergency we face that much more dangerous and the government we all depend upon that much more unstable. That’s what we have here friends, “what we have here, is a failure to communicate.” Saddle up, we’ve work to do and a nation to build.
