Big Green Dries Out Big Valley

OCT. 1, 2010

By STEVEN GREENHUT

When most people think of California, they think obviously enough about the populous and influential coastal cities, from the gleaming Southern California coast to the Bay Area. But east of the coastal ranges and west of the Sierra Nevada mountains lies a vast, fertile and highly populated agricultural region that offers the most varied produce in the nation, yet is suffering an agonizing fate thanks to the power of the environmental movement.

The signs on the dried out farmland along Interstate 5 tell the story: “Congress Created Dust Bowl.” They refer to the federal cut-off of water from the Central Valley to save the supposedly endangered Delta Smelt. It’s one of the clearest cases of the environmental movement’s priorities.

A region of about 6 million people suffers enormously high unemployment as a good portion of the area’s farmland dries out due to the lack of water. The water is being used instead to save what locals refer to as a bait fish. Because the bulk of California’s population lives near the coast, the Central Valley’s plight has received insufficient attention – at least until recent weeks on the campaign trail.

“I have spent a lot of time in the valley, and what is going on here due to lack of water is a humanitarian crisis,” GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman told a crowd near Fresno. GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina said that Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer “has walked away from every opportunity to help.” This attention can’t hurt.

Water supplies have increased after the Obama administration apparently traded water for votes from two San Joaquin Valley Democratic congressmen (Jim Costa of Fresno and Dennis Cardoza of Merced) for his health-care plan. But it’s still tough going in an area that is Ground Zero for the housing meltdown and that suffers viciously high unemployment rates.

Recent figures put the unemployment rate at 21.3 percent in Merced County, 18.9 percent in Stanislaus County, 18.3 percent in Tulare County and 18.4 percent in San Joaquin County. Some smaller towns have unemployment rates as high as 40 percent. Unemployment is traditionally high in those areas, but it’s much higher than normal given the water cut-off in an agriculturally dependent region.

But this crisis may not simply be a matter of the state’s elites having its priorities off kilter. Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare, believes the environmental Left is purposefully starving the region of water so that it returns to a more natural state. Rep. Nunes’ senior policy advisor, Andrew House, told me in March that 76 percent of the water that enters the Sacramento Delta flushes out to San Francisco Bay and is, essentially, wasted. This purposeful drying up of the San Joaquin Valley is part of a “green utopian experiment,” House argued. Since 1992, state policy has been pulling more and more water out of agricultural uses and diverting it to environmental protection.

Meanwhile, state officials refuse to upgrade a faltering water infrastructure, while environmentalists lobby for the destruction of the state’s dams.

I’ve interviewed and battled with many environmentalists in my days on a newspaper editorial page and it’s clear that these folks will use any excuse, or any fish for that matter, to achieve their goal of limiting growth and “protecting” the land from human uses, including agricultural ones. “The radical side of the environmental movement, working with their patrons in government, is fighting a war of attrition in the San Joaquin Valley of California,” House added.

Whether their motives are misguided or malevolent, the environmental movement clearly is wreaking destruction here. Given that the state’s real political power lies far from the inland farm regions, this is unlikely to change even if the worst offenders are booted from office in November.