WATER WAR DECEPTIONS

In 1986, Marc Reisner authored a popular book “Cadillac Desert” that mounted an environmental attack against the rice growing industry in California saying rice farmers were growing a “monsoon” crop in the middle of the desert with Federally-subsidized water..... According to the Pacific Institute the original Federal water contracts are pending renewal which will cost the taxpayers a reported $500 million over the next 10 years. The Institute report proceeds to tell us that 1,000 acre-feet of water produces 900 jobs in the semiconductor industry, 2,500 jobs in commercial offices, 35 jobs in grape and wine production, but a mere three jobs growing cotton. We are told that cotton and alfalfa produce only $60 of gross state revenue per acre foot of water compared to $1 million in the semiconductor industry....

What has been left out of the Pacific Institute press release is an awful lot. Firstly, the report fails to tell us that the water in the Sacramento Bay Delta, where most of the rice growing occurs, is not exclusively used for rice farming. It is used for flood control, for cultivating other irrigated farm crops, as natural habitat for waterfowl and wildlife, for natural water purification, and for public recreation. If farmers have to fallow land or rice paddies because of the ups and downs of the agricultural market, the water allocated to them remains unused.

According to the Audobon Society the rice fields of the Bay Delta are the home of some 40,000 birds. Rice paddies offer wetland habitat to huge number of ducks in a state that is always decrying that it is losing wetlands. And rice paddies serve as natural water filtration systems to break down herbicides used by rice growers. Even Marc Reisner, the author of the book Cadillac Desert, eventually changed his mind about rice farming and called it one of the most “progressive” agricultural enterprises.

And the illogical notion that using water for rice farming takes more economically productive jobs from the semiconductor industry or commercial economy, as the Pacific Institute report contends, is nonsense. Halting water to rice growers or making them pay the urban retail price for the water won’t produce more semiconductor jobs or vice versa.....

The not-so hidden agenda of the Pacific Institute apparently has little to do with stopping waste or even preserving the environment as much as it does in stopping population growth and development. It is probably not coincidental that Stanford University professor Dr. Anne H. Erlich, co-author of the infamously wrong 1968 book The Population Bomb, is on the Board of Directors of the Pacific Institute.

What think tanks in “blue cities” like the Pacific Institute apparently want to do is to stop agricultural enterprises and new housing development from thriving in “red counties” where the population is growing. What might be called liberal Land Rover environmentalism continues to paint a distorted image of California agricultural water politics as a Cadillac Desert rather than as a horn of plenty for both the economy and the environment.

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PROPERTY OWNERS STRIKING BACK

The nation's strongest laws against sprawl are beginning to buckle here in Oregon under pressure from an even stronger, voter-approved law that trumps growth restrictions with property rights.

In a collision between two radically different visions of how cities should grow, claims under Oregon's new law are pitting neighbor against neighbor, rattling real estate values, unnerving bankers and spooking politicians.

The property-rights law, which was approved overwhelmingly by voters last fall and is known as Measure 37, is on the brink of wrecking Oregon's best-in-the-nation record of reining in sprawl, according to state officials and national planning experts. They say the new law illustrates a nationwide paradox in public opinion: Although voters tend to favor protection of farmland and open space, they vote down these protections if they perceive them as restrictions on personal rights. "Measure 37 blew up our land-use system," state Sen. Charlie Ringo, a Democrat from suburban Portland, declared while presiding over a tense, standing-room-only hearing on the law that was held recently here in Hood River, a resort town in the Columbia River Gorge.

The law compels the government to pay cash to longtime property owners when land-use restrictions reduce the value of their property -- or, if the government can't pay, to allow owners to develop their land as they see fit. Because there is virtually no local or state money to pay landowners, Measure 37 is starting to unravel smart-growth laws that have defined living patterns, set land prices and protected open space in this state for more than three decades.

Although the unraveling is being watched with alarm by smart-growth advocates across the country, it is exactly what local backers of the new law say they want as recompense for what they describe as years of arbitrary bossiness in the enforcement of land-use restrictions. Smart-growth laws attempt to direct development to areas served by existing roads and utilities and curtail new housing and business construction that will sprawl out to rural areas. "If you are going to restrict what someone can do with his land, then you have to pay for it," said Dale Riddle, vice president for legal affairs at Seneca Jones Timber Co., an Oregon firm that was the largest donor to the campaign for Measure 37.

Thanks to Oregon's new law, anti-sprawl legislation has lost political momentum across the country, according to Harvey Jacobs, a professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin. "It has really excited the property-rights movement and suggests to its supporters that they can challenge smart-growth laws everywhere," he said.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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