Badlands Journal

 Millennials are money conscious and financially driven—one researcher found that 93 percent believed salary range was critical in choosing a law enforcement agency and almost 92 percent believed retirement benefits were important.⁶ Additionally, millennials desire a comfortable, relaxed work environment in which they have the opportunity for rapid upward mobility... Researchers also identified two additional cultural changes that have depleted the number of qualified applicants: increased financial indebtedness and increased levels of obesity, both changes that create challenges for a field that is not viewed as lucrative and requires physical fitness. -- Ben Langham, Police Chief Magazine, May 24, 2017

 

Alas, the judge denied poor Farmer John's request to have federal EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt testify in the federal court hearing that will decide if the Army Corps' $2.8-million fine for deep ripping will hold. Duarte's Pacific Legal Foundation lawyers barked like Chihuahuas at the passing caravan of Clean Water Act precedents.

--blj

6-16-17

 Duarte said he has received support from the American and California farm bureaus, but surprisingly little from other farmers who stand to face the same kinds of claims by the government. He told me a year ago he expected to spend $1 million in legal fees to fight the feds. The farm bureaus established Duarte Defense Funds and there is a GoFundMe account as well.

“But they have yet to raise $100,000 between them,” Duarte said. Every farmer in America, he said, could be “shaken down by government agencies.”  -- "Poor Farmer John," Badlands Journal, June 10, 2017

Maybe if Duarte hadn't sold an estimated 2 million diseased pistachio trees in past years farmers would be more willing to support him in his effort to make a federal political case out of his problems with the Army Corps of Engineers. 

If there is one thing that slip-slides away from easy quantification, it's water. None of its larger units of measurement, like the acre-foot, let alone a million gallons,  are easily imagined by the ordinary human being. Nor does it do much good to say that a family of four uses about an acre-foot of water a year, at least to people who remember when in the not too distant past the authorities said it took two acre-feet to achieve the same goal for the little family. And how big is a raindrop anyway?

 Farmers are exempt from needing permits to plow their lands under the Clean Water Act. But the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule, implemented by Obama in 2015, prohibits plowing below the clay beneath the topsoil that keeps vernal pools, which count as wetlands, from draining. Duarte’s land does, indeed, include some vernal pools. He said the field was plowed only from 4 to 7 inches in depth, and maybe a foot deep in one place. And farmers can till land with vernal pools as long as they don’t destroy the pool’s existence, he said.

An Army Corps inspector saw the plowing, told Duarte to stop and followed up with a cease-and-desist order. The inspector said Duarte’s hired hand was “deep ripping,” going three feet deep in some places ...

 

 “[Sadredin] is a state officer,” said Jared Blumenfeld, the EPA’s regional administrator in California until last year. “He swears an oath to uphold the Clean Air Act, and yet he is actively working to undermine this important environmental law.”

 

4-22-17

 It is not easy to put President Trump's exit from the Paris Climate Accord in perspective, perhaps because it is the new perspective, the world as it now is; and that is hard to accept. The general contour of this new perspective is that while large majorities of the public support environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water and Air acts even though they do impose limits on the capitalist economic system, today special interests have such a strong grip on at least two of the three branches of government (the judicial branch is still in question) that the United States government will no longer lead or follow intelligent environmental policies unless the sane majority regains control of -- for a start -- both political parties.

Our bar for sanity is low: stay on your medication and avoid overindulging your resentments.

 Looking through the May 23rd Merced Board of   

Supervisors agenda, we found the following item:

Now bee colony collapse disorder is having an impact on the police logs of the region. How soon can it be until it becomes a TV series? What we will probably not do in time is address the combination of environmental factors agribusiness, particularly almond production in the San Joaquin Valley, has inflicted on bees to produce the crisis. 

-- blj

5-17-17