Beauty and the beast
We were struck by the beauty and balance of William Tweed's prose about his rail trip through the San Joaquin Valley. Tweed lives in Three Rivers, gateway to Sequoia National Park. According to Amazon.com,
William Tweed, utilizing the knowledge and skills he developed during thirty years with the National Park Service where he worked as an interpretive writer, historian, and naturalist, specializes in writing that brings together the natural and human worlds.
His major published works include: Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks: The Story Behind the Scenery (KC Publications, 1980);Challenge of the Big Trees: A Resource History of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (Sequoia Naturalist History
Association, 1990) (Co-authored with Lary Dilsaver); Death Valley and the Northern Mojave: A Visitor's Guide (Cachuma Press,
2003) (Co-authored with Lauren Davis); and Uncertain Path: A Search for the Future of National Parks (University of California Press, 2010).
Tweed also writes a column for the Visalia Times-Delta on nature in Central California. Since 1997, when the column first appeared, more than 400 of his essays have appeared in the newspaper.
What strikes the reader unfamiliar with Tweed's work is a sense of balance that allows him to take in the whole picture of the valley today with deep respect for its history and an equally serious question about our future. He expresses a mood that abides in all of us who have lived here more than a few years. Things change fast here; "development" occurs in furious spurts; much is left behind, exhausted or unfinished. And yet, we remember 50 years ago when the whole development of the valley -- more about agricultural than housing -- was a positive, exciting phenomenon, that brought a simple, good meaning to people able and willing to work hard enough to share in it. It is not too much to say that a frontier spirit and, in the more remote parts of the valley and foothills, frontier customs and attitudes still prevailed. For the naturalist-conservationists that lived and worked in the high Sierra, these attitudes were always problematic. Tweed mentions the socialist Kaweah Colony, near where his home is today, and how its tremendously successful logging enterprises, which included plans for a logging railroad to the valley, were resisted. Tweed's view is that conservation opposition played a major role in idsbanding the colony. Others say that the socialists were too successful and had to go. Likewise, the giant Sequoia they named the "Karl Marx Tree" had to be renamed for General Sherman.
Be all that as it may be, Three Rivers has always been a home for artists of all kinds, naturalists, spiritualists and a quiet, romantic sort of radical. As often as it is said that cities are the great centers of learning, we in California can reply that our national parks are equally important and become even more important as the history of the nation lurches on. Would you rather be in a city arguing over how much to give the owners of a professional basketball team for a new arena on the bones of an old port? Or do you think it might be better for your mind to look at mountains and gigantic sequoia redwoods in a park that belongs to the nation?
Living in proximity to nature pursuing a livelihood not based on profits from exploitation and destruction of nature can a graceful mind.
Turning to the California Governor's Office, we find another kind of mind entirely. We guess, reluctantly, in retrospect, that Jerry Brown was a boy perpetually in search of a moral compass rather than a man who'd found one. Today, Wall Street seems to be his compass, a bad choice in our view, not that Jerry ever followed anything like our view.
He seems obsessed with "balancing the budget," by fair means and foul. Lately, foul means have taken center stage in a McClatchy Co. editorial against Brown's plan to raid the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and the Clean Energy Job Creation Fund for $500 million to put into the general fund.
Voters have sent a clear message on California's leadership role in reducing energy emissions and costs.
By a 22-point margin, voters in 2010 rejected an oil industry-led voter initiative that sought to roll back implementation of the landmark Assembly Bill 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.Also by a 22-point margin, voters in 2012 supported Proposition 39, which would put half of the proceeds from eliminating tax loopholes for out-of-state corporations -- about $500 million a year for five years -- into a Clean Energy Job Creation Fund for efficiency programs in public buildings.
Californians have a right to expect that the monies raised will be spent for the intended purposes.
However, Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing to betray Californians by raiding both the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and the Clean Energy Job Creation Fund -- unless legislators stop him between now and the June 15 budget deadline.-- Fresno Bee editorial, June 8, 2013.
This is a politician that apparently wants his legacy to be theft of funds appropriated by initiative for certain environmental purposes, weakening the California Environmental Quality Act, ramming through the peripheral tunnel conveyance system that will turn the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta into a salty slough, and then there is his golden bear hug of fracking.
On the other hand, he's rushing to embrace the anticipated fracking boom of California's Monterey Shale - an estimated 2/3 of all of the untapped oil in the United States. We're not talking fracking for natural gas, which arguably has half the carbon emissions of coal. Instead, Brown wants to frack California for oil. Not just any oil, but dirty heavy sour crude oil as carbon-intensive as the Canadian tarsands. I've previously done the math and found that California's fracked up oil will emit 6.45 gigatons of carbon, or over 1% of the total carbon budget of the planet; which means that California's fracked-up oil is roughly comparable to the Keystone XL pipeline. -- "Has climate hypocrite Governor Jerry Brown cut a deal with Chevron?" RL Miller, Daily Kos, May 23, 2013.
What do we actually have with this governor? Those of us who are old enough remember the hopes he raised and did not totally dash during his first eight years in office, 1974-1982. He wobbled badly but state finances were in much better shape. It is regrettable that Jerry seems to have hitched his wagon to the infinite greed of Wall Street, which looks like moral bankruptcy in a man who came into office preaching consciousness of limits.
In the mid-Seventies, timely warnings of the limits of natural resources appeared and became fashionable. In 1973, both Herman Daly's Toward a steady-state economy and Schumacher's Small is Beautiful were published. Schumacher toured the nation and became intellectually glamorous. Hand worn copies of Daly's book were passed about places like UC Berkeley like bibles among the very faithful. Here it was, the advance warning, and in time to save the planet. The whole theory was based on the rediscovery of a pre-capitalist sense of limits. Jerry was on board, speaking outrageously, driving a Plymouth, living in a modest apartment instead of the mansion he grew up in when his father was governor.
In the Eighties, capitalism, seeing the growing threat a sense of limits entailed, launched the successful "Greed is good" campaign with that wizard of destructive lullabies, President Ronald Reagan. America wasn't ready for limits. In fact, it wasn't ready for any kind of reflection and ended up declaring an end to history a few years before 9/11 and the unlimited police power that has followed at home and abroad.
Today Jerry's political philosophy seems to boil down to "Let the market run free." What looked like "leadership" when he got his budget bill passed last year was only Jerry surfing the waves from Wall Street as they come crashing down on our coastline.
The only way out of this dilemma is a state bank but Jerry doesn't have the guts anymore for something like that -- because state banks aren't any more fashionable that the climate crisis.
Jerry's friends these days are about as green as the endangered species tie the wife bought them from the Nature Store, although, it's true that they have their mountain cabins, vineyards and coastal houses for retreat from the city. But for them, Nature is a commodity like any other, producing its quantity of pleasure for a price, which the value of the prestige of the location of the vacation home, its address.
Badlands Journal editorial board
6-7-13
Fresno Bee
WILLIAM TWEED: View of Valley from train shows 'progress' brings blight, sprawl…William Tweed, a naturalist and historian, writes from Three Rivers.
http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/06/07/3333598/view-from-train-progress-bri...
Our great Valley is a complex place. Four million of us live here, and the web of development we have spread across the land dominates all. Yet, with only a little effort, we can still trace the origins of our modern network of cities and farms to a single, surveyed line.
Surveyors staked out that line over 140 years ago in a valley almost without human constraints. Construction crews soon followed the surveyors, their task to convert the surveyed line into a railroad. With nothing in the way, they moved south, establishing towns as they went. They began spiking down rails near Stockton on Dec. 31, 1869. By late May 1872, trains arrived for the first time in a new place called Fresno. By the end of the following year, the rails had reached the south end of the San Joaquin Valley.
Today that line of rails endures as the founding feature of our modern Valley. Our largest cities fall along it — Modesto, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield. Highway 99 closely parallels the rails. Busy freight trains roar by frequently, but the route has not seen passenger service since 1971.
Recently, however, an opportunity arose to take a fresh look at this founding axis of the San Joaquin. A notice announced that for a few short days Amtrak's Coast Starlight would detour from its usual route and pass southward instead through the San Joaquin Valley. The rerouted train would roll through the Valley on Union Pacific Railroad tracks — the original surveyed line from the 1870s.
So I bought a ticket and set out to take a fresh look. Looking out the window of my Amtrak coach, I traveled through time. I saw remnants of the beginnings of our modern world and examples of our most ambitious contemporary endeavors.
Perhaps the most fundamental thing that can be said about our Valley is that we have developed essentially all of it. In the heart of our Valley untouched land — natural land — essentially no longer exists.
Looking at what we have done, other messages came into focus. We take great pride in the agricultural productivity of the San Joaquin Valley, yet we have squandered great swaths of land on other purposes. From my Amtrak seat, I studied the many thousands of acres of land that have gone into shopping centers, warehouses and subdivisions. Astoundingly, much of this land-consuming development now stands empty and derelict. Considerable stretches stand as our own rust belt, a monument to changing technologies and the cost of tearing things down.
From the rails, our cities look little better. All the major population centers have sprawled without effective constraint, with new growth on their fringes and increasingly older and neglected facilities as one approaches their historic hearts.
Fresno, traditionally the Valley's economic heart, provides a sadly perfect model. Fresno's original rail corridor appears ghostly from the train. Highway bridges arc over empty land that once contained busy rail yards. Fresno's historic Southern Pacific Depot, built in 1889 and for decades the bustling primary portal to a growing city, today hides from the rails behind a concrete wall.
Something else shows from the train window — poverty. We read the numbers about the poor in our Valley, but from the train these numbers cease to be abstract. Piles of junk surround blocks of tiny, run-down houses. And I see clusters of truly desperate human habitations, 21st century "Hoovervilles" built of nothing more than cardboard and plastic tarps.
My train rolls on to the south — Fowler, Selma, Tulare, Tipton, Delano — and the same stories repeat themselves. This is what we have built in 140 years. In times past, we optimistically called the San Joaquin a "Garden in the Sun." Today the picture is far more complicated. The Valley provides a home for four million people and livings for many but not all of its residents. We feed much of the nation but not all of our own residents.
Seen in the shadow of places like China or even Europe, 140 years is not a very long time. We've been clever enough to fill our Valley with people and make some of them rich. Now, the challenge is to be wise enough to build an enduring and sustainable society.
Can we imagine the San Joaquin 140 years from now? What will the view be out the train window?
6-8-13
EDITORIAL: Brown's plan is wrong
Carbon funds should not be used to balance budget.
Fresno
http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/06/08/3332746/editorial-browns-plan-is-wro...
Voters have sent a clear message on California's leadership role in reducing energy emissions and costs.
By a 22-point margin, voters in 2010 rejected an oil industry-led voter initiative that sought to roll back implementation of the landmark Assembly Bill 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
Also by a 22-point margin, voters in 2012 supported Proposition 39, which would put half of the proceeds from eliminating tax
loopholes for out-of-state corporations -- about $500 million a year for five years -- into a Clean Energy Job Creation Fund
for efficiency programs in public buildings.
Californians have a right to expect that the monies raised will be spent for the intended purposes.
However, Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing to betray Californians by raiding both the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and the Clean
Energy Job Creation Fund -- unless legislators stop him between now and the June 15 budget deadline.
Brown is proposing to take $500 million from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and put it into the state's general fund. He
is calling this a "one-time loan" from auction proceeds for 2012-13 and 2013-14.
Before a dime is spent on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the money would be used for other purposes, going against everything AB 32 proponents told Californians. The aim of cap and trade is not, they assured voters, to raise money for the state to solve its budget problems.
The Legislative Analyst's Office has said that "revenues from the cap-and-trade auctions must be used only to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions or the harms caused by greenhouse gas emissions."
Then there is the $500 million-a-year Clean Energy Job Creation Fund. Brown wants to count the money as general revenue, which means 40% automatically would go to fund school operations.
The LAO concludes this would be "directly contrary to what the voters were told in the official voter guide as to how the revenues would be treated." And all so unnecessary. After five years, the Clean Energy Job Creation Fund goes away and the money goes into the general fund.
Legislators considering proposals for using the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and the Clean Energy Job Creation Fund must ask: Will the money go to projects that permanently, verifiably reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase energy efficiency?
If not, that's an improper use they should reject.