[GPSCC-chat] Your Homework: Critique "California's Water Wars" by Victor Davis Hanson

[alexcathy at aol.com]

Dear Green Friends,

Checkout my blog post on    California Greeningabout Victor Davis Hanson's Op-Ed on "California's Water Wars" in Sunday's Los Angeles Times.

Wes Rolley, a onetime Goldwater Republican from Arizona, often says, Greens come by many paths to the Green Party.

Our challenge as Green Party women and men is to find the right words, metaphors, and narratives to apply our key values to our current global problems, especially environmental problems.

I am a Black man who was once a "good Democrat." Today I emphatically reject Barack Obama and partisan Democrats, including inner-city Democrats who look like me. In my insistence on total rejection of all mid-20th Century clichés and slogans of "liberals" and "conservatives" I ask others to do no more than what I try to do myself.

About Victor Davis Hanson -- Military historian and classics professor at Cal State, Fresno. A "Senior Fellow" at the Hoover Institute, he has written essays, editorials, and reviews for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Post, National Review, American Heritage, Policy Review, Commentary, National Review, the Wilson Quarterly, the Weekly Standard, Daily Telegraph, the Washington Times, and City Journal.

See below Hanson's analysis of California's "water wars" published in the influential  Sunday Los Angeles Times. Here's my Homework for Greens: critique Hanson's analysis and post comments applying the 10 Key Values of the Green Party.

Alex Walker
Los Angeles Greens

Published by The Los Angeles Times, Sunday, August 7, 2011
"California's Water Wars"
By Victor Davis Hanson


California's water wars aren't about scarcity. Even with 37 million people and the nation's most irrigation-intensive agriculture, the state usually has enough water for both people and crops, thanks to the brilliant hydrological engineering of past Californians. But now there is a new element in the century-old water calculus: a demand that the state's inland waters flow as pristinely as they supposedly did before the age of dams, reservoirs and canals. Only that way can California's rivers, descending from their mountain origins, reach the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta year-round. Only that way, environmentalists say, can a 3-inch delta fish be saved and salmon runs from the Pacific to the interior restored.

Such green dreams are not new to California politics. But their consequences, in this case, have been particularly dire: rich farmland idled, workers laid off and massive tax revenues forfeited.

. . .

The smelt and the salmon are now back in court, thanks to a hypothesis that Bay Area wastewater, not just river diversions and massive delta pumps, is also to blame for their still diminished numbers. U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger has approved a temporary compromise that tries, in wet years like this one, to grant farmers up to 85% of their contracted water deliveries. The deal has made environmentalists happy, since it keeps the rivers flowing to the sea. The farmers are less happy, reasoning that if they're getting little more than three-quarters of their deliveries during one of the wettest seasons on record, they'll surely receive even less in the inevitable drier years to come.

But in today's California — with vast Democratic majorities in the Legislature, statewide officeholders mostly Democratic, and a delegation to Congress that's also largely Democratic — there is almost no chance of restoration of the original 100% delivery contracts, no matter what weather the future brings. When the wet cycle passes, thousands of acres on the west side of the Central Valley will again become idle until Californians accept that unused farmland is a luxury that a struggling state can no longer afford.

. . .

To read the full text of Mr. Hanson's analysis andto carry out your homework assignment by leaving a commentclick here:
    http://cagreening.blogspot.com/2011/08/homework-for-greens-critique.html
 


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