The Patriot Post® · Weekend Review: An Adolescent Culture

By: Victor Davis Hanson

Despite recent sporadic rain, California is still in the worst extended drought in its brief recorded history. …

Yet there are really two droughts – nature’s, and its man-made twin. In the early 1980s, when the state was not much more than half its current population, an affluent coastal corridor convinced itself that nirvana was possible, given the coastal world-class universities, the new dot.com riches of the Silicon Valley, the year-round temperate weather, and the booming entertainment, tourism and wine industries.

Apparently, Pacific corridor residents from San Diego to Berkeley had acquired the affluence not to worry so much about the old Neanderthal concerns like keeping up freeways and airports – and their parents’ brilliantly designed system of canals, reservoirs and dams that had turned their state from a natural desert into a man-made paradise. …

Then, short-sightedness soon became conceit. Green utopians went further and demanded that an ailing 3-inch bait fish in the San Francisco delta receive more fresh oxygenated water. In the last five years, they have successfully gone to court to force millions of acre-feet of contracted irrigation water to be diverted from farms to flow freely out to sea.

Others had even grander ideas of having salmon again in their central rivers, as they recalled fishing stories of their ancestors from when the state population was a fifth of its present size and farming a fraction of its present acreage. So they too sued to divert even more water to the sea in hopes of having game fish swim from the Pacific Ocean up to arid Fresno County on their way to the supposedly ancestral Sierra spawning grounds.

The wages of both nature’s drought and human folly are coming due. …

California is still an adolescent culture that believes that it has the right to live as if it were the age of the romantic 19th-century naturalist John Muir – amid a teeming 40-million-person 21st-century megalopolis. (Read the rest.)