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Agua
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was looking to get out of the election campaign game. I had just ran a Congressional race and it left a very bad taste about the future. It was a quick run, mostly consisting of spending a half-million dollars on television slamming the slimy incumbent — he had it coming. It enforced in me the power of television. With one ad we chopped fifteen points off the incumbent in ten days, but not enough. The experience made it exceptionally palpable to me the decline of political organization in America. Future campaigns were going to be overwhelmingly negative, televised character assassinations of the virtue challenged — most had it coming.
I was still greatly interested in the issues of the times. I always thought an essential part of being American was knowing about these issues and being politically involved helping to move them. Years ago, I spent a day in North Carolina with the beautiful democratic historian Lawrence Goodwyn. Larry promoted one idea politically disenfranchised people, that be most people across recorded human history, needed some sort of sanction to exercise political power. This could be bestowed by another person, group, or in those rare historical instances, the culture itself.
After about an hour of talking he looked at me and said, “Who gave you permission?” I just shrugged. At the end of a day talking about history, the world, politics, our experiences, Larry looked at me and said, “I guess you gave yourself permission.” Maybe, always just seemed to be there.
So looking to leave campaigning, but not abandon politics, I took a couple friends bad advise and opened a San Diego office for a national community organization. Right, national – community, should have been clue. Didn't take long to understand these organizations represented nothing more than the decline of democratic culture in America. They had first developed in response to the rot beginning to set across party politics, but maybe more importantly, they were also a response to the destruction of actual community, social organization disappeared by technology.
These new community organizations were best represented by two post-World War II figures, one was out of Chicago, Saul Alinsky. Alinsky wrote a book about community organizing that historically will go down more as a description on the decline of democratic politics than any sort of handbook to revive it. The other figure was Ralph Nader. I always liked Ralph, he’s a massive contradiction. A product of DC and television, he nonetheless tried reestablishing politically organizing people in their disappearing communities. After all, if you don't have some sort of organized citizenry, you don't have democracy, and well...
Modernity destroyed previously established community. The automobile, radio, and television were all technologies not democratically controlled, problematic at very best and largely destructive to the flesh and blood of community — communication, education, and healthy sociability. They did however provide a manufactured sense of identity, largely based on image and consumption. Trying to reestablish some past sense of community and democratic politics in the midst of this new technological order was doomed from the get-go.
The group I tried establishing in San Diego was supposed to operate with donations gained by people going door-to-door. No one went door-to-door anymore, not even neighbors. Of course the idea was the group was funded by the community, and thus only had the community's interest. However, not more than a month in, at a national meeting of all the various cities, we were informed by the national committee, we all needed to raise big money from big donors. Such was the fate of American democracy in the era of growing corporate oligarchy. A few years later, the national organization was caught up in a money scandal. I don't remember the details, doesn't really matter, names change, the scams all remain more or less the same.
For the short time I was involved, we organized around the issue of water. This was 1990-1991, fifth year of a California drought. San Diego was literally at the end of the waterpipes. We walked in and pretty much dominated the water issue. No great feat, the fact was despite putting twelve or so million people in the middle of the desert, California never talked about water, just as the greatest car culture on the planet never talks about oil. Talking about such matters deemed you radical.
One of the best things I did was bring in Cadillac Desert author Marc Reisner for a day of San Diego media. The book is still the most excellent go to read on the history of water in the American West. The rest of California, especially the politicos, always considered San Diego a sort of backwater, no pun intended. I got Reisner on radio, television, and a sit-down with the San Diego Union editorial board, the city's powerful conservative newspaper of record, which turned into a two page spread in the Sunday edition. Such was 1991 San Diego and water, as Prometheus said, necessity is much stronger than skill.
One of the state water people who accompanied Reisner that day was ecstatic. Patty worked on water for years. She was a fish advocate and nothing was more devastated by California's water policies than fish. At the turn of the previous century, salmon still ran up the San Diego river. They were long gone. If you wanted salmon now, they came shipped-in from hundreds and thousands of miles away, many from “farms.”
I left my brief stint community organizing at the end of the summer. That winter it snowed and rained, California returned to not talking about water. Since then, several more droughts occurred, increasing both in frequency and intensity. The Wall Street Journal just ran a piece on the Shasta Reservoir and one of California's great water projects. The Journal reports,
“The current drought is the most severe on record, and Shasta’s water level is now 33% of its capacity.”
“Opened in 1945 as part of the federal Central Valley Project, an elaborate system of man-made dams, pumps and aqueducts that aims to reduce flood risks and deliver water to farms and cities in the heart of the semiarid state.”
California's water supply is reliant on the snows that fall each year in the Sierras, which melt and flow down into it's great Central Valley. Before the Europeans arrived, much of the year the Central Valley was a vast wetland, teeming with wildlife – fish, birds of incalculable variety, elk, lions, wolves, and black and brown bears. The only brown bears in California today are on the flag.
Over the last century, the Valley became one of the premier agricultural areas on the planet, the Journal says “a $50 billion a year industry.” That industry made possible by a massive irrigation and road infrastructure, and all the other technological accoutrements of industrial agriculture.
The Journal being the Journal states, “Salmon get the highest priority because of federal court mandates” (remember the power of the federal courts). That's an inside joke of business politics, fish get little to no water, which makes it hard to be a fish.
They then write who actually gets Shasta’s water, “Near the bottom are farmers 400 miles south in the southern Central Valley.” Now, go back a paragraph and remember, the Journal said California Ag is a $50 billion industry. There's few farmers in the Ag industry, only a small number of massive corporations, but the Journal doesn’t quote any of them. The Journal eventually, though still euphemistically reveals, “The most senior water-rights holders include farmers at the northern end of the Central Valley, some of whose contracts date to the late 19th century.”
However, this drought is so bad, even Big Ag, which is responsible for 80% of California's water use is taking a hit,
“Some of the most-senior water rights belong to the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District. Until this year it had never received less than 75% of its federal water, which farmers use primarily for rice.
The amount of rice planted plunged from about 100,000 acres in the district to 1,000.
Colusa County officials estimate the overall economic hit there this year at $2.4 billion.”
Even in these inflationary times, billions is real money. Again, the Journal blames the fish, but the problem is simply lack of snow and rain, certainly not enough to grow rice in a “semi-arid” landscape. Across the Central Valley, industrial agriculture wastes a lot of water, including cultivating a lot of crops they have no business (pun intended) growing, case in point, “‘Buying water is critical to our survival,’” said Halbert Charter, a Colusa County almond farmer who bought water to help keep most of his orchards alive.”
To get to the south part of the Valley, water is pumped up and out of the Delta that flows, what’s left of it anyway, into the San Francisco Bay. But with less water from the north, the Ag industry in the Valley’s south relies more and more on pumping-up depleting ground water:
“The Westlands Water District, at 614,000 acres the largest agricultural water district in the nation, went from relying on groundwater for less than 10% of its supply in 2019 to more than half the next year, when its allocation of Central Valley Project Water was cut to 20%. District officials estimate that more than 75% of their water may now come from underground.”
Increasingly, Valley towns are in direct competition with the industry for water. “In Tulare County, community activists also blame agricultural groundwater pumping for leaving two towns, Tooleville (population 184) and East Orosi (population 624), without water this summer.”
The Journal goes back to blaming the fish, “Farmers blame the woes on a water-delivery system—both federal and state—that many see as focused more on protecting species than the economy.”
“Protecting species” is not anti-economic, it is a necessity to insure the health of ecological systems the human species remains part of and dependent on. The great post-industrial lesson Homo sapiens need learn is the economy is not separate from the greater environment.
We and our food supply are dependent on water. If it doesn't rain and snow soon, the Golden State is in for a lot more difficulties. Snow or not, California needs to dramatically change water practices. This requires a redefinition of politics and community transcending industrial life.
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