CA on Wrong Track

The Los Angeles Times was originally conservative, but has been reliably left-wing for the past few decades. When it runs an op-ed by conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, you have to know something is afoot.

Californians are beginning to question the implicit priorities revealed by the ramshackle state of Oroville Dam. It is exactly these which Hanson describes.

The poor condition of the dam is almost too good a metaphor for the condition of the state as a whole; its possible failure is a reflection of California’s civic decline.

A new generation of Californians — without much memory of floods or what unirrigated California was like before its aqueducts — had the luxury to envision the state’s existing water projects in a radically new light: as environmental errors.

The crisis at Oroville is a third act in the state’s history: One majestic generation built great dams, a second enjoyed them while they aged, and a third fiddles as they now erode.

I couldn't agree more. Hindsight will reveal the Sierra Club to be either the death of our civil life, or very nearly so. It's too late to make CA a nature preserve; we have to make it instead a place where people can live practically.

Former Governor Pat Brown, not his son and current Governor Jerry Brown, should be our model. Finish the water projects, build more reservoirs,  generate hydropower. Hat tip to Lucianne.com for the link.