Response to a Sun-Star editorial

 
Merced Sun-Star Executive Editor Mike Tharp flew part of the Westside in a private plane with a realtor/Westside rancher named Gail McCullough and came back with revelations. It reminded him of Iraq, where he seems to need to go, whenever the reality of Merced and the San Joaquin Valley overwhelm him, to find refreshment in the Pentagon propaganda mill. You can sugar-coat failure with belief but it is still failure, out there on the imperial frontier or here at home.
 
He begins by announcing, “We live in a desert,” then extends the sentence to include everyone in California. But, I didn’t imagine dry-farming orchards on the coast for a decade. Tharp must be writing about Los Angeles.
 
The Golden State would have stayed a coastal and mountain redoubt for settlers except for the mammoth man-made water projects we all learned about from our history books.
 
Actually, the San Joaquin Valley contained one of the largest lakes in the country at one time, and the history of California didn’t begin with the settlers, even in “our" history books.
 
"If the contrived flow of water should somehow just stop," Reisner wrote in a later book, "A Dangerous Place," then "California's economy, which was worth about a trillion dollars as the new millennium dawned, would implode like a neutron star."
 
Yes, and Reisner’s point was that California’s economy is essentially, basically, and fundamentally unsustainable, nothing but a pawn for finance, insurance and real estate special interests.
 
It reminded me of flying over Iraq.
Gail, a Realtor and well-respected pilot at airports all over the state, wanted me to see -- with a 360-degree, 1,000-foot perspective -- what's happening on and to the ground. Isolated tractors tilled tan fields, leaving dust in their wake that looked like smoke or a brown wind sock. Hay bales resembled Legos near the Harris Ranch feedlot. Bone-white alkali deposits settled like waves on the surface of the soil.
"Nobody can afford to drill down and get water," Gail said. "It would cost them thousands a month."
 
And what else is new about the Westside in September, any September? The history of the Westside and of the San Joaquin Valley is not going to improve by total ignorance of its human and natural reality.
 
Tharp’s core argument is this:  
 
Sure, we humans can and should try to prevent the annihilation of, say, the black rhino or the snow leopard.
But ours is but a finger in the dike of evolution.
When it comes to picking whether to protect a fresh-water species or to help an almond grower in Mendota survive, here's where I come out:
Save the human.
So I favor suspending the ESA. Look hard at its provisions. Keep those that accommodate Americans' livelihoods vs. twisting human laws into knots that won't -- in the long, long run -- save a fairy shrimp or a smelt.
 
The black rhino and the snow leopard are glamorous prey species far away, out there on the dark continents, where imperial plutocrats sat around their hunting camps swilling whisky and gin and reading Rudyard Kipling to each other.
 
But ours is but a finger in the dike of evolution.
 
How poetical. How sentimental. What crap. Let run the dogs of war, subsidized agribusiness, finance, insurance and real estate? Are they facts of nature like global warming is?
 
The economic system is killing the fish and wildlife, and it is also killing itself. Evolution is not killing the smelt or the fairy shrimp.
 
In fact, those starving almond growers around Mendota, who keep a classic California agribusiness labor-depot town in 30-40-percent unemployment regardless of the amount of water they get, are now crying about seepage from the San Joaquin River when the first releases into the riverbed, dry for 60 years due to those amazing feats of hydraulic engineering.
 
So Tharp would suspend the ESA and rewrite it according to the bill Cardoza and former Rep. Richard Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy, tried to push through in 2006, after Cardoza had failed twice before, during the speculative boom, which has ruinously busted. Pombo lost his seat over that bill and his bullying chairmanship of the House “Resources” Committee, restored to its former name, Natural Resources, as soon as Democrats regained control of the House.
 
By “Americans’ livelihoods,” this Merced editor who writes like he never heard of Kesterson intends to make us feel that it is patriotic to destroy the environment. Just because his cowboy heroes have destroyed the environment of Iraq, are doing a job on Afghanistan, and desire to flatten Iran, does not make destruction of our own or others’ environments patriotic – unless, of course, what he means is that stupidity and violence is somehow intrinsically “American.”
 
As John Maynard Keynes, who knew quite a bit about economic times like these, once wrote: “In the long run, we are all dead.” In the “long, long run,” we will all be dead and forgotten; although, if we destroy the environment as we are presently doing, we will be cursed by our descendants because we will have destroyed their opportunity to have any kind of economy.
 
"Fish are important," Gail said as we headed back to Merced. Most of the horizon stretching from the Sierra was cupped in a purple haze. "But people have to make a living."
 
Why don’t you get Gail to fly you up to Bodega Bay, Ft. Bragg, Eureka or Crescent City for a weekend. The two of you should definitely go to a nice tavern in any one of those towns and tell the people there about making a living without fish.
 
The whining, the despair, and the actual disorientation of our leaders, reflected in this editorial beg the question of whether they can evolve into human beings capable of civilized care for anything. Having seen the housing bubble they created collapse around the ears of the community they have led down the drink, they still can’t understand the meaning of the tears of the county director of human services speaking to the supervisors about the destruction of her department  -- what it means for laid-off employees, people dropped from vital programs and for those of us who are capable of caring for ourselves, our communities and our environment.