Badlands Journal

 People who take seriously the information that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is cvurrently at 390 ppm when science has stated that the tipping point (where catastrophic sea-level rise begins) is at 350 ppm, observe the current debate about oil – from academic institutional and state and national environmental groups’ divestment of holdings in fossil fuel firms to California’s governor, the Great Reflector’s jitterbugging on fracking the Monterey Shale Formation – and could notice that political hypocrisy is also a petroleum by-product.

Badlands Journal editorial board

As this Water-War year shapes up, the lies, the slurs, the gaffes -- the "air game" as the politicos call it -- heats up with the temperature.

If only the desire of the agribusiness plutocracy that things remain the same -- i.e. get better and better for the richer and richer -- could be realized, somehow. Then we could all be happy farmworkers on the west side, enjoying the sun and dust-and-pesticide free fresh air. And for excellent wages, no doubt.

But, the facts are that things are getting worse and worse and the agribusiness utopia is a pile of artificially manufactured well known substances.

The agriculture they seek to increase is increasingly salting its own soil, returning the west side to a worse desert than it was before water was added and the ground was stirred by the largest tractors in the land. Species are going extinct at 100-1,000 times the pre-industrial rate; global climate change is already beyond the tipping point for ice melt/sea rise; and we are taking 121 million tons of nitrogen out of the atmosphere by the Haber-Bosch process "when the proposed boundary to avoid irreversible degradtion of the earth system in 35 million tons per year" (The Ecologial Rift, Foster et al, 2010, p.15).

That nitrogen extracted from the atmosphere not used for gunpowder is used for nitrogen fertilizers, like the 270 tons of ammonium nitrate that blew a 10-acre hole in the middle of West, Texas, removing the town's top employer and creating as yet unknown hazard to its drinking water supply.

Last week the eastern Merced County Integrated Regional Water Management Plan meeting (pronounced "Ear-Wimp") was edified by an hour-long report scheduled for 15 minutes by Merced Irrigation District. It was presented by the speaker as  a word-by-word repeat of MID's recitation before the state Water Quality Control Board in protest against the state's proposal to increase the flow of the Merced River to 35 percent of natural flow between the months of February and June for the benefit of certain species of salmon. The water board is proposing the same increase in flow for the Tuolumne and Stanislaus rivers, causing howls of protest in concert with Merced from the Turlock and Modesto irrigation districts.

This proposal was presented to the state and the assembled earwimpers as the worst thing since the boll weevil, brown rot and foot-and-mouth disease. The foundation of the district's argument was that it was going to destroy "thousands of small farmers in Merced County." The average size of a Merced County farm was declared by MID to be 49 acres.