Thoughts on the 2016 Election and the Regeneracy of the Fourth Turning

On June 5, 2009, I posted a blog entry here entitled: Of an Ominous Financial Crash, An Ordinary National Election, A Trivial Tea Party. That entry celebrated how I found a book I had been looking for, Strauss and Howe's The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny. I wrote:

As the strange and apparently ominous events of the past half-year have been accruing, I have wanted to re-read The Fourth Turning, but all my rooting in the accessible boxes in the garage came up wanting. So I was anxiously on the lookout for the book as I began the task of making my library as planned in the Chem Geek Princess's old room (now the Guest Room/Library). Thus I was amazed when finally, I found the book and read the page that fell open, and that last, pregnant sentence:

" . . . the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, as trivial as a Tea Party."

The context Strauss and Howe were referring to is the spark that sets off the transition into the Fourth Turning, the Crisis period of our time.

In the summer of 2014, while writing my Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam Paper, I checked in on the Fourth Turning Discussion Groups that I have been a part of since 2002. There, I saw a link to a Neil Howe blog post (blog.saeculumresearch.com) in which he stated that he and Strauss had decided that the Fourth Turning of our era, the Millennial Saeculum, had likely begun with the Global Financial Crash in the fall of 2008. I believe that this timing may well prove to be right. The ages of the generations was right, with the Millennials fully occupying young adulthood, Generation X fully in mid-life, the Boomers fully occupying elderhood, and the very elder GIs leaving the planet. The generational archetypes were also aligned: the Prophets in elderhood, the Nomads in middle-age, the Heroes in young adulthood, and the young Artists arriving as children.

Recently, I have noticed that people are beginning to talk about the dire nature of the current election. I have also heard forebodings about another economic shock to the system from people I am talking to for my dissertation research and from those involved in other projects with me. These premonitions of dire events to come are not directly a part of my research, but the Strauss and Howe theory may explain some of what I am finding. This was unexpected.

 I have also been anxious and upset about this election, and I have had to take a short break from Facebook in order to keep my focus on my dissertation work. I have been thinking about the election as part of a linear trend toward some totalitarian future, a fascist or socialist dystopia. So I pulled out The Fourth Turning and read it again, paying attention to the cyclical nature of Awakenings and Crises it describes. This gave me hope for the future despite the stresses to the current system that seem to be reaching a saecular maximum.

In the Strauss and Howe Generational Theory, a saeculum is a cycle in time that "spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years. Each cycle is comprised of four Turnings which are eras that come in the same order, saeculum after saeculum since the end of the Middle Ages. Strauss and Howe define the turnings as:

• The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
• The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.
•  The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when an old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.
• The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one. (Strauss & Howe, 1997, p. 3)

In my re-reading, I noticed that some of what I remembered from the book was not quite right. I had expected the Fourth Turning Crisis to erupt as the-end-of-the world-as-we-know-it (TEOTWAWKI). But the Strauss and Howe Generational Theory posits a Crisis as a "great gate in history" when civic order reaches its nadir and is rebuilt based on values developed during the Second Turning Awakening. The conclusion of the Crisis and the change in the social mood that follows, marks the beginning of the First Turning High of a new saeculum. Strauss and Howe state that a Crisis begins with some random event that causes a sudden change of the social mood. This happens when the generational archetypes are aligned in a certain order, as I noted above. At that point, members of a society stop drifting along and begin to take responsibility for problems they had ignored during the 3rd Turning Unraveling. The order of the generational archetypes is important, because each one has a particular character marked by their age and place in history.

In the Fourth Turning, Strauss and Howe looked at other Crises in the Anglo-American Saecular history. They identified patterns common to each Fourth Turning, even though the particulars of each were different in their timing and events. They wrote that a Crisis has an identifiable morphology. From the Fourth Turning:

Fourth Turnings have provided the great pivot points of the Anglo-American legacy. dating back to the fifteenth century, there have been six. Each produced its own Crisis and its own facsimile of the halcyon spirit today's World War II veterans remember so vividly. From the similarities of these eras, a morphology can be constructed:

• A Crisis era begins with a catalyst--a startling event (or sequence of events) that produces a sudden shift in mood.
• Once catalyzed, a society achieves a regeneracy--a new counterentropy that reunifies and reenergizes civic life.
• The regenerated society propels toward a climax--a crucial moment that confirms the death of the old order and the birth of the new.
• The climax culminates in a resolution--a triumphant or tragic conclusion that separates winners from losers, resolves the big, public questions, and establishes the new order. (Strauss & Howe, 1997, p. 256). 

According to Strauss and Howe, the regeneracy is a process. It's beginning is marked by the nadir of social order that has been decaying through the Unraveling and into the crisis. The regeneration is complete when "out of the debris of the Unraveling, a new civic ethos arises. One set of post-Awakening ideals prevails over the others" (p. 257). At this point, people use the new synergy to strengthen their communities and instruct their government officials on how to reinforce it.


Before a Crisis begins, say Strauss and Howe, people can foresee the fault lines along which a spark may ignite, but they cannot predict its regeneracy, climax or resolution. However, they say that a regeneracy can be expected 1-5 years into a Crisis. But not all Fourth Turnings are the same. If Strauss and Howe are right about the beginning of this Crisis, we are more than seven years into it, and still the fragmentation from the Unraveling continues. We can see the splintering of our politics continuing among and within the major political parties, and most of the people have not yet united around a particular vision of civic order. In his blog posts on the topic, Howe also stated that the regeneracy is bumped into being by a spark or series of sparks that are more serious than the initial catalyst for the Fourth Turning. However, from the Crash of 2008 until now, the Great Recession has continued, with no marked repair and no sudden change. Although the Obama administration calls it a "recovery," many Americans point out bitterly that it is a "jobless recovery," if a recovery it is.


But this year, people are facing a presidential election that is unique in American history. There is no incumbent candidate. Obama is term-limited out. His party controls the executive branch, but does not control the Congress. The Court is divided, and could lean toward constitutional anarchy with the appointment of the president's nominee. Garland is opposed to the Second Amendment, causing Second Amendment groups and gun-owners to consider their response should the Court try to violate their right to keep and bear arms.

One major party, the Democrats, is running a corrupt criminal who may yet be indicted for mishandling government property. She is also responsible for the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, and yet cannot remember that any people were "lost" there under her watch. Their only other declared candidate is an aging "democratic" socialist who promises to continue the trend of taxation and deficit spending that has thus far enslaved our grandchildren to unprecedented debt.

The other major party has gone against the wishes of its conservative base over the course of the last three elections. The Republican front-runner is a Boomer, an inside trader who calls himself an outsider, and he cannot articulate a single policy. But he is popular among true-believers because they think he can, with his pen and phone, make the budding executive branch tyranny stop. But he has unfavorable polls approaching 70% and he is unlikely to be able to win the election. His only serious challenger is a Gen-X outsider, a constitutionalist, who is hated by the party establishment. In fact, the Republican establishment wonks have proposed inserting their own preferred insiders into the process through a brokered convention, which is not the same as a contested convention in which the existing candidates duke it out for the nomination. This would be unique in history. Many observers think this would destroy the credibility of the Republican Party, causing its voters to stay home or vote third party in unprecedented numbers.

The largest "third party," the Libertarian Party, will likely run a popular former governor of New Mexico, who has considerable executive experience and was known for his promotion of individuals rights and liberty, and his use of veto power to keep the budget balanced and stop the state government from violating the liberty of the people. Some Republican wonks are threatening to try to take over the Libertarian Party, should an unwanted candidate be nominated in their own party. Although the threat is unlikely to be successful, because the Libertarian Party National Convention will take place in May, which is before the Republicans have finished their primaries, it is an indicator of the instability within the GOP.

When faced with such an election, many people I know personally or on social media resort to bitter humor, anger, and a sense of impending doom. That sense of doom is only increased by the predictions of further shocks to the economy that may occur as early as this summer. Some economists say that it could result in The Great Devaluation of the American dollar. This would render our money worthless and stop commerce.

These are things that I have had nightmares about.
However, if these are the things of which a regeneracy may be made, so that the old, decaying civic habits are replaced with something new--a new economy, a new political outlook, a new liberty--then the nightmares might be worth it. After the Great Depression and World War II, some people thought that the piper of the old order would still have to be paid, and that the Depression would re-establish itself. Instead, as Americans worked through the war, they developed a new economy, new industry, and a new social ethos. When the war was over, people moved on. They did not go back. They had reset their systems, remitted their debts and established the beginning of new social habits through the regeneracy of that Great Power Crisis.

I posit that this year and this election will mark the regeneracy of the Millennial Crisis. The faults in the old order that the election and the economy are revealing are similar to other saecula. They are also directly related to the values changes precipitated in the 2nd Turning Awkaening and the problems revealed in the 3rd Turning Unraveling. We still cannot foresee what great and perilous events will mark the climax of our passage through this "great gate" in history, and what future will be built out of its resolution. However, we can know that the Fourth Turning is proceeding in a familiar pattern, and that we are not stuck in some nightmare Crisis without end.

My re-reading has given me hope. A good outcome is not a sure thing. Of the ten crises that the Anglo-American generations have passed through, some have had the best possible resolution, some have had good resolutions, and some have had mixed results. However, none so far have ended the civilization that sustains these cycles, and TEOTWAWKI has not happened. It could happen. But I think it is more likely that if we stay the course, fight for our values, restore the power of the civil society and take control of our government, we will see a good resolution to this Fourth Turning. If we work for it, the generations now living can become "repairers of the breech."

OK. Now I can go back to my dissertation with some equanimity.
And yes, I am back to blogging. In late 2013, I had my own crisis, which caused me to reorder my priorities, write and defend my Comps (November 2014), form a dissertation committee, write and successfully defend my dissertation proposal (November 2015). I am now in the "valley of confusion" that is part and parcel of qualitative research. Yes, it is fun! Yes, I will tell you all about it in another post.

Rosh HaShannah: The Turning of the Year

New Mexico Sunflowers in Rock Garden

     "I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, they  shall never hold their peace, day or night."  Isaiah 62:3

This morning we awoke to a sunny and cool, early fall day, mists rising from the ground, and the sky in the south and east milky white in contrast to the deep blue New Mexico sky to the northwest. After a week of wind, clouds and rain, we were happy to see the sun. As the Catron Kid went riding on Chapo, the Engineering Geek and I started out of the front gate with three of the dogs, anticipating a Shabbat walk along the western fences of Freedom Ridge Ranch. The cool morning turned into a warm and sunny day as we climbed up the mesa to the northwest, greeting the other two horses, grazing up there in the high pasture.

We noted how the year is turning, talking about some of the things we want to do this coming year on the ranch: putting a windmill and solar combined tower up along the ridge behind the house, divide the high pasture, and divide the front pasture, get the solar completely installed, and take more walks like this one, enjoying the beauty of the place.

Early fall on the Continental Divide is different in appearance from what I grew up with and even from what we experienced in the East Mountains. Here, instead of bold oranges and browns, with the grass of soft wheat color, we see water in the stock tanks, and pooling in the draws and washes, a gift of the late days of a good Monsoon. The grass is green from the water, and the sky soft blue, like spring in more conventional parts of America. The boldest colors come from the yellow Black-Eyed Susans and New Mexico Sunflowers, the orange and pink of Globe-Mallow, and the blues and purples of various clovers, gilias and penstemons, and the rare orange-red of Indian Paintbrush on the high mesa tops and along the washes in the canyons. Fall steals into this high country on the heels of the late summer wildflowers, color dotting the gray-green of the range subtly, as the days grow shorter and sunshine replaces the late-afternoon Monsoon rainfall. The days grow shorter, the shadows deepen and the nights grow even cooler.

And with the turning of the year, we mark the New Year for Years, Rosh Hashannah, which falls on the first day of the seventh month in the Jewish Calendar. As the heat of summer fades, we welcome a new beginning just before the harvest: 5773. As we took our walk, we savored the peace around the Sabbath noontide, and we did not speak of our fears and concerns, heightened this week by the world's slide into chaos, and threatened Israel's complete isolation as it deals with the threat of annihilation.  It is easy, way out here, to move with the turn of the earth, the comings and goings of the herds and flocks, and the blowing of the wind. It is quiet, and the nature of the place and its solitude knows not of human strife, chaos and wars. New Mexicans outside the three cities we have in the state are accused of being provincial, and we are, being far removed from the goings on beyond our mesas and mountains. "The mountains are high," we say, "And the king is far away."

But even without television (we have one, but we don't get broadcast TV --or radio--in our canyon), we do hear of what is happening "out there," although it seems far away. So inevitably, when we returned from our two hour hike up the mesa and around and down, and turned to the Haftarah, the perils our country and our people face stared up at us from the printed page, the words of a prophet writing  more than two-and-a-half millennia ago. There is nothing new under the sun in the affairs of men, I thought, though that idea comes from a Megillah we will read later in the fall, at Sukkot.

Perils for Israel, deserted by the President of the United States, her Prime Minister snubbed and denied a meeting even as the her people prepare for war, and the Jewish People across the world face new threats from a very old prejudice. We fear for the safety of that tiny country where our prophets and kings once walked. And we fear for the integrity and safety of our own country and its people, and for our people everywhere.

But this Haftarah that complements Parashat Nitzavim in Torah, is the last of the seven haftarot of consolation. And in it, Isaiah--writing to a people in exile--speaks of victory and restoration. And so it speaks to us now, and to our great concern in the midst of a world sliding once again into chaos. It says to us, war and destruction are not outside out experience, and yet we are still here. We have stood on the edge of danger and peril before, and yet we are still here, able to reason in the face of our fears, to annul the plans of our enemies as necessary:

Who is it coming from Edom, with crimsoned clothing from Bazrah?  Glorious in apparel, stately in greatness of his strength? I who speaks in victory, mighty to save. . . .

. . . I have trodden the winepress alone, and there was no man with me;      Yes, I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my fury, and their lifeblood is dashed against my clothing, and I have stained all my raiment. For the day of vengeance that was in my heart, and my year of redemption have come.        And I looked and there was none to help, and I beheld in astonishment and there was none to uphold. Therefore, my own arm brought salvation to me, and my fury, it upheld me.  (Isaiah 63: 1; 3 - 5)

This year, as Rosh HaShannah approaches, and greetings come to us from Israel, we hear a message very different from earlier years. Then we heard greetings that were upbeat, anticipating the happiness and contentment to come. "It's gonna be a good year!" Now we hear echoes of Isaiah from Latma, from the IDF: "We are not afraid. We are ready, we are standing guard. The Eternal is riding with us. Others tried to destroy us, and where are they?" 

As we come again to the turning of the year, we find ourselves deeper into the Fourth Turning and closer to the crisis. The outcome of the crisis and the shape of what follows very much depends upon the decisions that we make about how we will face what is coming and what we choose to do. It is a fearful Rosh Hashannah this year, knowing that Israel stands alone, threatened with nuclear holocaust; remembering the High Holy Days of 1973 (5733) when Israel was also fighting for her life, alone, while Jews the world over spent Yom Kippur listening to clandestine radios in services, hands clenched, hoping and praying for her survival. This year, once again, we will find ourselves praying for the peace of Jerusalem, hoping against hope that Israel will be able to remove the growing threat without starting World War III.

Halvai! 

And in the coming year, may all of us find those points of light, those moments of happiness and those days of contentment in our lives, and those transcendent moments of joy and beauty in the world, that remind us of why we hope and why we work to make each moment, day and year of our lives fruitful and full of goodness and plenty.

Kayn y'hi ratzon!



And may 5773 be a good year for us.

Reality Bites: Physical Limitations and Political Magical Thinking

Science education in the United States has suffered.

I was going to talk about the problem solving that BP engineers have to deal with in order to deal with a damaged well-head in 5000 feet of salt water, but I realized that the problem that they have in being confronted by Obama-like politicians has to do with a lack of scientific understanding among the pols and the general public.
So I'll begin by restating my first sentence and continue from there.

Science education in the United States has suffered. And the main reason that it has suffered has nothing to do with the intelligence of the students or of the teachers.
Science education in the United States has suffered because of the prevailing philosophy in our schools of education and in the humanities in general. That philosophy is post-modernism, which can be crudely stated as teaching that there is no objective reality.

But working scientists and engineers deal with objective reality every time they put on their lab coats and hard hats and go confront the real world. There is no way to evade it or obviate it; the laws of physics remain the same everywhere in the known universe. This is the meaning behind the ultimate geek bumper sticker:

3.14 X 10 ee 6 meters per second: It's not just a good idea--it's the LAW!

Politicians, on the other hand, due to the prevelent philosophical sloppiness in the humanities at our colleges and universities, and due to what cannot be called anything else but magical thinking, do not feel the need to actually deal with reality; their eyes glaze over when the calculators come out, and so they believe that energy can be created by decree, and that no trade-offs are necessary to maintain the modern standard of living that is made possible by what they call "miracles" of science and technology.

And that brings us to the present oil well accident in the Gulf of Mexico, what it would take for BP engineers to "fill that hole, Daddy", and why lawsuits are not going to either fill it or prevent future accidents of this nature. (Unless we could plug the line with lawyers, which could kill two problem birds with one stone).

Although we do not yet know the proximate causes of the well breach a mile under the ocean in the Gulf, we do know the ultimate problem. It is that BP was drilling for oil with a well head in the continental shelf under the Gulf that was one mile under water down to a reservoir whose surface was 13,000 feet under the surface rock below that. This kind of deep water drilling is currently at the very edge of our current technological development, mainly because of the pressures involved. When people are operating on the thin edge of technology, one small problem can become one huge nightmare; and in this case, an explosion that breaches the line at the top of the rock formation can rapidly spin out of control, because the technology developed to fix it operates much less efficiently at the high pressures involved.

The question then becomes, so why was BP drilling at a location that places the well at the laser-edge of technology? And the answer is not because they are irresponsible; the answer is because politicians and environmentalists, neither of whom appear to have any clue about risk/benefit calculations will not permit drilling in shallower water, where our technology is much more robust for solving the inevitable problems that develop when moving parts and entropy collide. (Entropy--the tendency of any system to go to maximum disorder unless energy is brought into it--is another physical constant that politicians tend to ignore and evade. This is why much of the infrastructure of this country is in such poor shape).

I will give the answer to the problem here, before I detail the problem: For the nonce, DRILL ON LAND OR IN SHALLOW WATER. There, it's in capitals so the Pols in Washington can read it without putting on their spectacles.

So what, in reality, would it take for Obama to answer in the affirmative to the question, "Daddy, did you plug that hole yet?"

I once worked for a very short time in the oil industry as a geologist. My husband is a mechanical engineer who has worked in the Geotechnical Engineeering Department at Sandia National Laboratory for 28 years. He has extensive experience with underground oil storage, and the associated fluid mechanics and materials required to get oil out of the ground or into it. Between us, we came up with the following calculations of what it would take to plug the hole using extant technology. All numbers are reasonable approximations. Data was obtained from information received from BP. NOTE: BP is not able to "plug the hole" because of the enormous pressures and the material constraints involved.

The current well head is broken at the surface of the rock formation, under 5,000 feet of water, which has a specific gravity of 1, and which is exerting an absolute pressure of 2,300 PSI(A) on the wellhead. The top of the oil reservior is ~ 13,000 feet below that, under a continental shelf formation that has various layers catalogued by mudloggers, each of which has a density somewhere between that of concrete and that of granite, and the average density of the whole formation exerts an absolute pressure of 13,000 PSI(A) on the reservior. Together then, the total absolute pressure on the top of reservior is that of the mile of water and the more than two miles of rock sitting on top of it, which is approximately 15,300 PSI(A). (The pressure exerted by the atmosphere above the ocean, which is approximately 15 PSI(A) at sea level, is negligible in comparison). The line from the wellhead to the reservior is likely a 20" line, extending 13,000 feet down. And since the wellhead is broken, the oil is flowing with a pressure difference of 8500 PSI(D),and the gauge pressure at the top is ~ 3,000 PSI(A).

Given that living on the surface of the earth, we are used to a pressure of 15 PSI(A), and can withstand a maximum of a bit more than that, the pressures calculated here are truly impressive. And given these impressive pressures, here is what it would take to "plug the hole". To place a plug near the reservoir surface, which would be necessary, because at the wellhead the pressure would increase to 15,300 PSI(A) once the flow is stopped, BP would need to lower a packer that weighs in at ~3 million pounds. Oil mixed with mud injected earlier, would flow past the packer and back up the well. When the packer is in place, it would be expanded to make a seal, but even so, at those depths and pressures, some oil would continue to flow past it. Once the packer is sealed, the line would then need to be backfilled with about 4 million pounds of concrete. BP will most likely not be doing this because solutions that have already been tried have made it nigh unto impossible to do it this way.

FYI: BP had a plan in place for dealing with this accident, and had possible solutions ranked from first to last according to increasing difficulty and likelyhood of failure. There is some evidence that the Obama administration dictated a different order, most likely for political reasons or worse. If so, the hubris of these men--who have no real world experience doing much of anything other than community organizing--is absolutely astounding.

Ideally, when this accident occured, the Obama adminstration should have followed an EPA plan already in place to use the Coast Guard and various state agencies belonging to the states the border the gulf to contain the oil and mitigate the damage to the coastal waters. In the meantime, BP would be working to stop the flow or oil at the well. But the administration did not follow the plan that was in place, choosing instead to "study the problem" at the behest of environmental groups concerned that burning the oil at the surface would cause air pollution. It is certain that there would have been smoke, but all in all, the damage from that would have been much less severe than the damage caused by oil drifting to the Gulf Coast. At the same time the administration was dithering about whether to follow the EPA plan, it was also engaging in empty rhetoric about "pushing BP out of the way" and having a "foot on the neck" of BP, presumably to point fingers elsewhere and try to mitigate the political damage to the president. Because this kind of political behavior is an evasion of the real situation, it only succeeded in making the admininstration look more and more foolish.

Case in point: As Barack "Emperor Hadrian" Obama was commanding the tides to stop by magical insults hurled at BP, Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana sought permits to construct artificial barrier islands to stop the oil. The EPA dithered and Obama, indecisive as ever, promised to "study the problem" and get back to Jindal, after his Memorial Weekend vacation and Paul McCartney concert. Jindal waited in vain, and thus missed the opportunity to prevent coastal damage.

This failure of leadership seems to result from the fact that Washington D.C. sits inside a magic beltway, where the laws of physics, and the trade-offs made necessary by the needs of a technologically complex society that must deal with entropy, are less important than fingerpointing and blame games intended to obviate political damage. I have no illusions that any other politician would have done much better; however, Obama, whose real-world experience is negligible, and whose socialist political philosophy has already been demonstrated to be a total failure during the last century, seems to personify the absolute nadir of leadership.

Good leadership in a crisis requires that one first focus on solving the immediate problem, and only after that problem is dealt with, doing a thorough investigation that considers both the technological failures and any decision-making errors that exacerbated them. As the immediate problem is dealt with, evidence of what actually went wrong is often uncovered, but the general procedure is to get rid of the alligators before determining what went wrong with draining the swamp.

Further, human error is always part of the equation of any accident, but human error does not automatically translate into moral culpability. In general, there is a good body of law that deals with accidents like this, and BP--knowing its fiduciary responsibility--has already exceeded the legal cap on the amount of damages recoverable and has already volunteered to pay all costs related to the mitigation and clean-up effort. They have done so, even though the damage has been substantially multiplied by federal inaction over six weeks now, caused directly by the failure of leadership coming from the President of the United States himself.

Ideally then, a good leader deals with the immediate problem, and then considers the why's and wheretofores of an accident rationally and without immediately assigning blame. What has our president done? Filed a lawsuit.
Because that's really going to "plug the hole, Daddy."

Environmentalists, because they refuse to face the reality of entropy, and because they discount the place of human beings on the earth, refuse also to acknowledge that all life alters the environment, and that every technology involves trade-offs and hard choices. There is no magic bullet that lets any species function without changes on the earth. This magical thinking is exacerbated inside the beltway due to the unreality of the political game--which is not about taking responsibility--a key leadership trait--but rather obviating blame and political fallout. The combination has turned an accident into a crisis.

One that will undoubtedly not be wasted in Obama's march to fascism.

Talk about fiddling while Rome burns!

California's Central Valley: Don't Let That Desert Bloom!

Hang onto your hats, folks, this story could be right out of Atlas Shrugged!

Today as I was shelving books in my Guest Room/Library, I heard a short news item on a local AM station from Albuquerque about a protest along I-5 in California's Central Valley. Evidently, some farmers had driven their tractors onto the the freeway near Fresno, and although they were in the slow lane only, it caused an accident. This is what the Fresno Fox station is reporting, but the real story is not about the accident, it's about why the farmers were driving their tractors onto the freeway at all. It was a water protest.
To understand it all, indulge me with a digression about the Great Central Valley itself, and its current problems.

I will start with a paragraph from my August 2007 Travelogue about the Central Valley:

"California's Central Valley is a geological wonder of the world. The Central Valley is a great sliver of oceanic crust that got stuck in the Sierran Subduction Zone, stopping the conveyor of ocean crust under the continent in that place, and causing subduction to begin further west, at the Franciscan Subduction Zone. On that stuck piece of oceanic bedrock, alluvium from the Sierras and river sediments have formed an amazing flat, fertile valley that stretches several hundred miles from the Tehachipi mountains in the south, to the rise of the Klamath north of Redding, California. It is incredible in it's flatness, it's immensity and fertility. Although there is not much to see geologically speaking, just alluvial fans here and there, and some stray volcanoes near Colusa, it is still impressive in a way that words cannot describe."

But the Central Valley, running between the Sierras, and fault blocks to the east and the Coast Range to the west, has no large natural rivers that run through it south of Sacramento. The Sacramento River enters the Central Valley near Redding, but flows west of Sacramento, joining the waters of the San Joaquin River to create a great delta at Suisun Bay, which is a northern extension of San Francisco Bay.


In order to make the Central Valley fertile south of Sacramento, water is pumped across the hills south of Sacramento, and then flows or is pumped through a series of canals and irrigation ditches down to Tehachipi, nearly 300 miles south. The picture to the left shows a pumping station south of Stockton.

This is an amazing feat of engineering that has made the Central Valley one of the great food producing places in the west, supplying the United States with much of its vegetables, fruit and nuts.







During the past three years, there has been a great drought in the Central Valley, making the farmers and the farm workers there more dependent than ever on the flow of water coming out of the north.

In the summer of 2007, when we drove through, the drought was in it's second summer, and dust storms like this one we drove through near between I-5 and Bakersfield, had become increasingly common. A desert dweller myself, I had still never seen a sight quite like this, because instead of sand, the dust-storm was made up of the fine soil fractions, coming from the silts and topsoils of the Central Valley.




In what some are calling an agricultural disaster on par with that of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, unemployment has grown to 20 - 50% in the Central Valley. People there are experiencing true misery and hardship.

But the final blow to the business of the fields and orchards is not the drought. They were hanging on and making do. And it was not the economic crisis, though that hurt.

The final blow is something that has so rarely made the national news that most Americans are not aware of it.

The final blow to agriculture in the Central Valley is the federal government. First, the pumps were shut down in 2007 for the Delta Smelt, a minnow that has been listed as endangered or threatened. It is endemic to the San Joaquin - Sacramento River Delta, and Federal Judge ruled that the water for agriculture in the Central Valley had to be released in Suisun Bay instead. However, there are differences of opinion about whether the threat to the fish has been overstated, and whether or not it is the water taken for agriculture that is responsible. There has also been some question about whether the Delta Smelt continues to have a unique genome, or if the population has interbred with other common minnows.

In February of this year, the people of the Central Valley were informed that they would receive zero water allocation for the season and that pumping would remain closed down. This means that there is no water to grow the crops, a loss of 60,000 jobs. The people of the Central Valley understand this to mean that in the eyes of federal government, they are not as important as a tiny minnow that looks exactly like the minnows they use for bait.

As a biologist, I believe that biological diversity is important. However, I have never thought it should be or even could be protected by laws, however well meaning, that pit the economies of whole states and countries against a single species. I also wonder whether or not the earth is losing biological diversity at the high rate that is bandied about. Where did the number come from? Does it take into account the fact that there are a myriad of species never identified? Or that species do adapt to changing environments? In fact, this last is the hallmark of evolution.

And as I have spent this evening looking into this story, I can't help but remember Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In it she describes the destruction of whole regional economies due to the political considerations of a few self-righteous individuals. One segment tells of the food insecurity that burdened the whole nation brought on by a manufactured famine. It was different in the particulars than this one about to take place in California, but the results will be the same:

"The wads of worthless paper money were growing heavier in the pockets of the nation, but there was less and less for that money to buy. In September, a bushel of wheat had cost eleven dollars; it had cost thirty dollars in November; it had cost one hundred in December . . . while the printing presses of the government treasury were running a race with starvation and losing. " (Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Centennial Edition, p. 1082).

This is exactly what will happen to food prices in this nation as a result of the insane farm and environmental policies of this government.

Ms. Rand's novel was prescient not because the author was a fortune teller, but because she could see clearly what happens to people when they place no value on their own lives. What is happening in California now is the result of a federal government out of control; one that exists not to " . . . establish justice, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty . . .", but rather exists to aggrandize its own power through political gamesmanship that can only end in tragedy for the productive people who are forced to give up their livelihoods at the behest of a looting politician.

A few things to ponder from an evolutionary biologist:

1. In the natural world, it makes no evolutionary sense for an individual to do anything for "the good of the species." What benefits the species is for individuals to maximize their individual fitness (differential reproduction), thus increasing diversity in the gene pool. However, individuals do not consciously choose this, rather they live their lives using the tools provided by their own natures, equisitely adapted and adapting to the niches the species fills, in order to benefit themselves and their offspring, who will propel their genes into the future.

2. It makes even less sense--if that is logically possible--for individual members of a species to decrease their own fitness for the supposed benefit of another, as the federal government is forcing the farming people of California's Central Valley to do.

There are good evolutionary reasons why human beings ought to value their own lives highest, then the lives of their close genetic relatives, and then lives other humans, above those of other species.

And human beings are unique in that our large and complex brains, which betray a unique evolutionary heritage, stand us alone among all the species on the earth. We are capable of reason, and we understand our own mortality. This is our gift, taken from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, to cite metaphor. This makes us uniquely responsible for our choices.

I have had a very difficult time understanding the real agenda behind political environmentalism, just as I have had a hard time understanding that there are people within our government who do not value human existence. But now I understand that both of them have the same agenda. Neither value their own lives so much as they value temporary power, unearned adulation, and total control over others. It is becoming clear to me that they'd rather die than give that up. And they'll die happy if they take the rest of us with them.

In the meantime, brace yourselves. California is about to be hit with the perfect storm. A man-made agricultural disaster and financial default. If the adage is true that as goes California, so goes the nation, then there are rough waters ahead.

NOTE: Below is a You-Tube Video from the California Farm Bureau Federation. If you go to the You-Tube site you will find all of the information you have probably not heard on the news. These farmers are not asking for a bail-out. They only want to use the water from one of the most ingeneous engineering projects of all time to feed the rest of us the food to which we have become accustomed to buying at decent prices.