I rarely read Victor Davis Hanson’s stuff. I have issues with some of his ideas. He has the specialist’s problem: while knowledgeable within his field there are odd lacunae within his knowledge. For example, I find his views on the American Revolution, American Civil War, and Russia skewed, to say the least.
However, I know that he grew up on a farm in central California and comes from a farming family so, when I saw he had a piece in City Journal, I thought he probably had a point-of-view different from the one being expressed in most major news outlets and that was worth considering.
Here’s the kernel of his post:
We do know two things. First, Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people. Second, the mandated restrictions will bring home another truth as lawns die, pools empty, and boutique gardens shrivel in the coastal corridor from La Jolla to Berkeley: the very idea of a 20-million-person corridor along the narrow, scenic Pacific Ocean and adjoining foothills is just as unnatural as “big†agriculture’s Westside farming. The weather, climate, lifestyle, views, and culture of coastal living may all be spectacular, but the arid Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay-area megalopolises must rely on massive water transfers from the Sierra Nevada, Northern California, or out-of-state sources to support their unnatural ecosystems.
Now that no more reservoir water remains to divert to the Pacific Ocean, the exasperated Left is damning “corporate†agriculture (“Big Agâ€) for “wasting†water on things like hundreds of thousands of acres of almonds and non-wine grapes. But the truth is that corporate giants like “Big Apple,†“Big Google,†and “Big Facebook†assume that their multimillion-person landscapes sit atop an aquifer. They don’t—at least, not one large enough to service their growing populations. Our California ancestors understood this; they saw, after the 1906 earthquake, that the dry hills of San Francisco and the adjoining peninsula could never rebuild without grabbing all the water possible from the distant Hetch Hetchy watershed. I have never met a Bay Area environmentalist or Silicon Valley grandee who didn’t drink or shower with water imported from a far distant water project.
He takes what I think of as a stewardship view. California cannot simultaneously be home to 40 million people which includes the jobs that sustain those people and remain in a wild state. California must either constrain its population or pay for new water development projects, something that will become increasingly difficult as its surrounding states scramble after the West’s scarce water resources.
