Badlands Journal

THE BADLANDS JOURNAL

EDITORIAL BOARD WISHES

WILLIE NELSON THE

HAPPIEST 80TH BIRTHDAY

EVER CELEBRATED!!

--BLJ

As this Water-War year shapes up, the lies, the slurs, the gaffes -- the "air game" as the politicos call it -- heats up with the temperature.

If only the desire of the agribusiness plutocracy that things remain the same -- i.e. get better and better for the richer and richer -- could be realized, somehow. Then we could all be happy farmworkers on the west side, enjoying the sun and dust-and-pesticide free fresh air. And for excellent wages, no doubt.

But, the facts are that things are getting worse and worse and the agribusiness utopia is a pile of artificially manufactured well known substances.

The agriculture they seek to increase is increasingly salting its own soil, returning the west side to a worse desert than it was before water was added and the ground was stirred by the largest tractors in the land. Species are going extinct at 100-1,000 times the pre-industrial rate; global climate change is already beyond the tipping point for ice melt/sea rise; and we are taking 121 million tons of nitrogen out of the atmosphere by the Haber-Bosch process "when the proposed boundary to avoid irreversible degradtion of the earth system in 35 million tons per year" (The Ecologial Rift, Foster et al, 2010, p.15).

That nitrogen extracted from the atmosphere not used for gunpowder is used for nitrogen fertilizers, like the 270 tons of ammonium nitrate that blew a 10-acre hole in the middle of West, Texas, removing the town's top employer and creating as yet unknown hazard to its drinking water supply.

As long as we try to account for water policy from the profit and loss ledgers of agribusiness, we are not going to get anywhere at all on the problem of production, natural resources and consumption in the midst of a growing global eological crisis that most certainly does involve California in multiple ways, most of which are exascerbated by water policy established by oligarchs. Nothing rational can result from looking at the balance sheets of a miniscule number of agricultural plutocrats on the weat side of the San Joaquin Valley anymore than the leaders of finance, insurance and real estate can be counted on to develop anything rational about urban growth and water use.

California itself is a system of unsustainable growth.Until we begin from that standpoint, no helpful policies will develop.

Badlands Jouranl editorial board

4-15-13

Chronicles of the hydraulic brotherhood

 One member of the Badlands Journal editorial board, from Brooklyn and old enough to have seen Jackie Robinson play for the Dodgers and to have seen the Dodgers leave for LA, in short a man who had experienced the highs and lows of life before entering high school, wished to inform the rest of the board recently that he saw absolutely no resemblance between Robinson and President Obama. 

"Obama like Jackie Robinson? Ferget it!" he said..

Last week the eastern Merced County Integrated Regional Water Management Plan meeting (pronounced "Ear-Wimp") was edified by an hour-long report scheduled for 15 minutes by Merced Irrigation District. It was presented by the speaker as  a word-by-word repeat of MID's recitation before the state Water Quality Control Board in protest against the state's proposal to increase the flow of the Merced River to 35 percent of natural flow between the months of February and June for the benefit of certain species of salmon. The water board is proposing the same increase in flow for the Tuolumne and Stanislaus rivers, causing howls of protest in concert with Merced from the Turlock and Modesto irrigation districts.

This proposal was presented to the state and the assembled earwimpers as the worst thing since the boll weevil, brown rot and foot-and-mouth disease. The foundation of the district's argument was that it was going to destroy "thousands of small farmers in Merced County." The average size of a Merced County farm was declared by MID to be 49 acres. 

 It was exciting for a moment, even for a whole Easter weekend because the judge created suspense beyond the well-known events – Crucifixion, Sepulcher, Ascension. Stockton could go bankrupt! We would know on Monday.

Sure enough, by mid-Monday morning we knew that the judge had ruled that the municipal government of Stockton could do what it had desired to do and been obstructed from doing by its creditors and their insurers: declare bankruptcy and weasel out of paying whatever debts it could.

This was News, we thought. We opined at the end of last week that if Stockton were allowed to Do This, other cities would soon follow in its footsteps. We shivered slightly at the chilling notion that Stockton should lead anyone anywhere, but at least it was clear, straightforward governmental action against Wall Street. The other cities mentioned included San Bernardino, Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto and Merced. These are seats of the California counties worst affected by the Great Pop of the housing bubble.