This is a followup to my earlier post about California’s water woes. Some people are foolishly describing the situation as “a conflict between fish and people.” That’s a false dichotomy.
In reality, the conflict is people vs. people, and it’s happening because of unwise choices in population, agriculture, and other areas. The state has a very limited water budget, people are trying to live beyond it, and the results are disastrous. It’s not like you can destroy the river systems and the bay areas, and somehow not have that impact the ecology of the entire state. It wouldn’t just wipe out the fishing industry and severely damage tourism. With the rivers destroyed, the agriculture — which people are trying to support by taking too much water from rivers, bays, and other sources — will necessarily collapse as the water flow goes from not enough to none. The rest of the ecosystem will also be affected, for example becoming even more susceptible to wildfires; and that will impact everyone and everything in the state.
The California Water Wars: Not a Conflict Between Fish and People
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the California Department of Water Resources and corporate agribusiness have continually tried to frame the battle over restoring the California Delta and Central Valley rivers as one of “fish versus people.”
If you want California’s environment to survive, you have to learn how to live within the water budget your state gives you, such as by practicing xericulture and taking care of your rivers. If you can’t live on that water budget, then you need to move somewhere else with more water. We must learn to balance fish and people, the environment’s needs and our needs. Because there’s only one end to a scenario when more is taken out of a system than is put into it, and we live in the environment. Here’s another quote from that article:
South Delta farmer Alex Hildebrand put the current Delta fish and water quality declines and the effort to build a peripheral canal into the historical perspective of the rise and collapse of civilizations in his recent speech at the Restore the Delta symposium in Lodi.
”Societies rise, flourish and eventually crash because they misuse their water,” said Hildebrand. “As those ancient civilizations fell, they trashed their environment.”
*grim wave* Hi, Alex. It sounds like you and I have read some of the same books.
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gemma 03.06.09 at 11:06 pm
There is a tremendous truth to Hildebrand’s comment, ”Societies rise, flourish and eventually crash because they misuse their water,”. When the fish and crops die from poor water quality>disease>complete water depletion, we will too. It always amazes me when people are not able to see it. I wonder if this what could be called systemic denial. Simple but radical changes need to happen with regard to water, everywhere. Obviously government is not up to the challenge, for one reason or another. Maybe a collapse will force a restructure, the emergency will force community bases response. I doubt that people will people make changes before they are forced. I hope they will, but I’m planning for what happens after. I’m anxious to hear what others feel.
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Elizabeth Barrette Reply:
March 6th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
I think people don’t see it for a variety of reasons. They’re trained not to, because mainstream education breaks things up into tiny unrelated pieces; few people understand how to connect the dots and think systemically. That’s one reason I batch articles and comment on them together, and draw other connections in my writing. Another problem is that “history” classes mainly teach about wars, with a smattering of inventions and other tidbits. They almost never teach the reasons why things happen, the myriad connections and forces in play leading to a given event. I had one teacher who did those things — which is how I learned to plot fiction, frankly! — and a lot of underculture books and parents who were interested in what happened behind the scenes. Not everyone has those advantages. Then too, it’s hard to teach something to a person whose job depends on them not knowing it.I think we will see collapses — habitat foreclosure, I called it in another post. Some places are changing faster than others. Southwest America is drying out quite noticably already. So is much of Australia, as demonstrated by recent wildfires. The question is whether the early collapses will spur people to action, or whether they will just keep going until everything collapses.
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