Grass Growing from Pounding Stone: San Joaquin River Gorge Special Management Area |
Many years ago I heard a version of a legend about how one of the bluffs overlooking the San Joaquin River got the name “Squaw Leap." In this version a squaw during a skirmish pulled a Spanish conquistador over the edge of the cliff. I didn’t think much of the story then, but one meaning of the story has stuck with me over the years: Some people will, without hesitation, give their life to protect a place and a community.
Over the years I have come to understand the natural, cultural and spiritual “significance of place” at “Squaw Leap” and other areas in the foothills. I know where to find different species of flowers and birds every year. I know where to find many of the ancient Native American village sites. And I have experienced profound spiritual revelations in the river gorge and elsewhere in the mountains.
Fiddleneck and Popcorn: San Joaquin River Gorge Special Management Area |
When I was a younger man, one day as I hiked down to the river all stress disappeared and my senses opened. I noticed flower after flower, each with its own stunning color and design. Feeling adventurous, I decided to stray just a little from the trail to explore the creek and discovered a pounding stone with one mortar.
Pounding Stone next to River: San Joaquin River Gorge Special Management Area |
What we did to those cultures was unspeakable, and what we continue to do to what they left behind and to the natural world that was once their home is also unspeakable.
I have returned many times to the river gorge. If you have only been there once or twice, you cannot possibly have a true perspective of the place. You have not seen how the living tapestry has changed from one year to another. You do not know the different arrays of flowers that grow there given the varying weather conditions. You do not have, in relationship to this place, the living, changing tapestry of memory that is the basis for so much meaning in our lives.
Lupine Bushes: San Joaquin River Gorge Special Management Area |
A little farther down the path, just south of the second gate, over the past twenty-five years or so I have occasionally encountered a pale yellow flower that I have never seen anywhere else in the foothills (and I have seen much of the foothills). It only blooms when the conditions are right. I have never found it in wildflower books, so I don’t know its name. It’s possible that the home of one of the last specimens of an entire species is right next to a path that will be buried underwater by the dam.
Popcorn Flowers below Bluff: San Joaquin River Gorge Special Management Area |
I know from experience that the jargon of an environmental impact statement often hides what is truly happening. This process is all about legality--essentially about what makes the destruction of this river gorge legal. However, what is legal and what is moral are two very different things indeed in this case.
You cannot rip apart a magnificent tapestry thread by thread and hope to put it back together again. The habitat of the San Joaquin River Gorge is a majestic, sprawling tapestry in all its dazzling complexity and fragility. All the species, so interwoven and interdependent, have adapted to their own unique location and to each other over time immemorial. When you destroy an entire habitat individual “mitigation measures” become merely a piecemeal attempt to salvage the most threatened species.
Goldfields near Dead Lupine: San Joaquin River Gorge Special Management Area |
Once the water from the dam at Temperance Flat drowns the habitat, the threads of life that once tied the place together will be gone forever. The roots will die, the rocks and soil remaining unstable.
Pounding Stone near Hydro Project in Inundation Zone of Millerton Lake: San Joaquin River Gorge Special Management Area |
The dam will not only destroy an entire habitat. The water from the dam will bury the homeland of a Native American tribe under hundreds of feet of water, the last stage in a long, horrendous process of genocide. You cannot realistically mitigate the destruction of a Native American site, each of which is unique, each with its own cultural, historical and spiritual significance. You cannot move the pounding stones and house pits and burial sites and trails to some other place.
Despite all the discussion of mitigation in the environmental impact statement, adequate mitigation for ecocide or for the last stages of genocide is impossible.
Every stretch of trail in the San Joaquin River Gorge Special Recreation Management Area contains personal significance to the people who have hiked or biked the trail with friends or relatives or alone. You cannot tear apart the living tapestry of memory within an individual or a community and hope to piece it back together.
Baby Blue Eyes next to Trail: San Joaquin River Gorge Special Management Area |
Claiming that water for salmon is a public benefit, after Friant Dam destroyed the original run, is an insult to the intelligence. The greatest public benefit would consist of spending the billions for water conservation measures, which have already proven to be far more cost effective, far more efficient and far less damaging to the environment. Government agencies should already know about these conservation measures. If not, just a few minutes on the internet can be very enlightening.
As a final insult, the burden of ensuring that mitigation measures are effective ultimately falls on the public. Too often, government agencies make a poor attempt to implement or “bird-dog” the implementation of mitigation measures. To continue with the analogy, the public is left with the task of ensuring that a few threads of a huge tapestry are woven back together in a way that resembles the original.
Pounding Stone near Suspension Bridge: San Joaquin River Gorge Special Management Area |
Regarding the loss of the San Joaquin River Gorge Special Recreation Management Area, the only adequate mitigation would consist of replacing these public lands with habitat of equal size and natural values. Without this one-to-one mitigation the public ends up a pathetic, hoodwinked loser, paying for ecocide and the destruction of its own lands and participating in the last stages of genocide, essentially for the benefit of private interests. A dam at Temperance Flat would remain an unconscionable violation of the public trust in the broadest sense.
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