I took a detour on my way to The
San Joaquin River Gorge, driving down Blossom Trail on the east side
of Fresno, passing orchard after orchard of the dominant crop in the
San Joaquin Valley: almonds. White blossoms clouded the air, with a
snow of
melting blossoms in the furrows beneath the trees, each
almond, as just about everyone in California knows by now, taking
over a gallon of water to produce, row after row of blossoming trees
perpetuating the illusion that we can grow anything in the San
Joaquin Valley. To satiate the thirst of almond orchards and grapes and
other water-guzzling crops, influential farmers are fighting hard for
a new dam at Temperance Flat, a dam that would drown public land
above Millerton Lake known as The San Joaquin River Gorge Recreation
Management Area. Judging by comments in the media, the farmers seem
pretty sure they're going to get their dam.
Just north of Auberry, Smalley
Road winds about a thousand feet down into the river canyon to a
small parking lot. Often in early spring, fiddleneck and popcorn
bloom profusely near the trail head, with redmaids and stork's beaks
closer to the ground. About a
hundred feet from the parking lot, baby
blue eyes, like pieces of sky, often blanket the earth. After
crossing a rivulet, one often encounters blue dick, poppies and
goldfields. After passing through a gate, one finds more fiddleneck
and baby blue eyes and gets a whiff of pungent deer brush. Shooting
stars grow at the next rivulet, with fennel close to the trail, and
popcorn, like luminescent snow, dominates the slopes, crowned by blue
dick, and then one reaches the gorge. Bush lupine hovers over the
trail, with goldfields and owl's clover beneath. With a few
variations now and then, these flowers bloom every year within their
niche. As spring progresses, other flowers such as bird's eye gilia
and purple vetch and fiesta flowers join or supplant the others.
As one continues down the trail,
one encounters more blue and gold and white on the slope. For untold
millennia, these species have blossomed, long before people of
European descent settled in
California, long before humans even
migrated to North America. This is one of the few places where the
public still has access to the San Joaquin River in an almost
pristine state. These flowers and oaks and gray pines and red buds
will no doubt soon be buried under hundreds of feet of water, but
even with this knowledge as I hike into the gorge, I can't help but
immerse myself in my surroundings. Simply breathing establishes a
connection with these trees and plants, which are woven together in a
web that extends throughout the world, and I can't help but feel a
sense of oneness with all things, a feeling that I never experience
in Fresno.
Driving through the San Joaquin
Valley, one encounters one small town after another where typically
one finds a street or two with large mansions near a few streets with
middle-class houses surrounded by small, run-down houses and shacks,
representing the closest thing to a feudal system still in existence, except that money has divine rights and the
wealthy landowners do not honor a tradition of providing safety and
security for their laborers. Instead, the laborers in the
capitalistic version of the feudal system remain dependent on slave
wages. If water is not available, labor is expendable. Laborers and
their families suffer. Profits go down and farmers start demanding
more water to "keep the Valley" from suffering. We hear “People, not
fish” as farmers scramble to grab more water from rivers and the
delta. We see signs with “Dams, not Trains” all over the Valley.
We see op-ed pieces in the newspaper where powerful people accuse
activists, who are simply challenging an unsustainable system, of threatening our very way of life.
Make no mistake, this type of intimidating language is for the
activists' employers as much as for the general public, which
apparently doesn't bother the local newspaper, The Fresno Bee, one little bit.
On average, about ninety-five
percent of the water from the San Joaquin River is diverted at Friant
Dam, about eighty percent of which goes to agri-business. The San
Joaquin River, which used to
flood periodically and refresh aquifers
and wetlands and the delta, died bout seventy years ago thirty miles
below Friant Dam. Wetlands are down to about four percent of their
historical levels. Before the dam, from time immemorial, the San
Joaquin River flowed into the Delta, but now the Delta ecosystem is
collapsing due to water diversions and pollution. In a recent survey,
the state Fish and Wildlife scientists found only one delta smelt in
the wild, revealing that farmers have essentially won the “People
vs. Fish” PR war. Land in the Valley is subsiding due to
over-pumping of aquifers. Farmers continue to grow unsustainable
crops in a semi-arid region—while demanding that the public pay for
more dams on public land, at places such as Temperance Flat and
Roger's Crossing. And farmers will have to continue asking the public
for more subsidies to make the water affordable.
As long as I can remember, farmers
in the Valley have used one of the strategies of “disaster
capitalism,” claiming that the economy will suffer severely and
perhaps not even survive unless the public continues to give up land
and resources for private use with the
implied promise that
corporations and wealthy landowners will keep laborers from suffering
and associated businesses from going belly up. Politicians and
taxpayers continue to oblige farmers with a bizarre form of socialism
for the wealthy in a region that otherwise maintains the rawest form
of capitalism. The public continues to give agri-business what it
wants even though as private citizens we would never allow anyone to
take our property without compensation. Yet here we are once again,
about to provide billions of dollars to build a dam for the
farmer's private use, a dam that will destroy public land containing
priceless natural and historical resources—without anything even
close to adequate compensation. With numerous dams on the San
Joaquin River already, very little land not already submerged by a
reservoir is even available to replace the public park in the Gorge,
not that the corporations and wealthy farmers are even considering
that possibility. The public is, in other words, on the verge of giving a small group of people billions of dollars to take public land and water resources, instead of using the money for education or job creation or any of a hundred other worthy causes.
The longer I follow the path, the
more I recognize the sentience within moss and ferns and grass and
flowers and trees. The more I see the various species coexisting in
different communities, and the more I experience their splendor, the
more I sense that the physical is a dense aspect of the spiritual, and
that I am connected spiritually to all things in nature. And the more
I see humanity's place in nature, the more I realize that a small
group of people, no matter how powerful, does not have the right to
destroy these communities for their own private gain.
No comments:
Post a Comment