By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Something that you aren’t seeing in the news is a whacked side-effect of California’s financial and environmental incompetence – the Central Valley Dust Bowl… A great article was written on this at Beetle Blogger: Dead and Dying–California’s Central Valley Dust Bowl.

The entire length of the 5 freeway between Sacramento and Los Angeles is lined with orchards and farms – just beautiful to behold and about 8% of the fruit produce for the nation comes from these orchards. Orchards which are now dead and being destroyed because water has been cut off to the orchards and farms in the Central Valley. Yes, there is a drought in California, but the reservoirs are full – the water is just not getting to the farms and orchards, it is going to the fish.

Farmers throughout this region echo the sentiment that politics, not the drought, is the problem. Most of California gets its water from a huge estuary called the Delta, where two big rivers join in the center of the valley. But so much water was being pumped out of the Delta that a tiny smelt there, an endangered species, is disappearing. So late last year, a federal judge ruled that the amount of water being delivered to the south had to be sharply cut back.

The politicians in California are sooo out of touch, they have committed state financial suicide. It takes 30 years to build those orchards, and minutes to destroy them. Well done elitists! Not only have you sold your state down the proverbial river (pun intended) for environmental and liberal issues, you are causing all sizes of businesses to go belly-up and you will be causing the entire nation to suffer food-wise. Pure insanity evidently reigns in Sacramento these days, it certainly isn’t common sense.

My heart just aches for the family businesses that are being taken under through no fault of their own. And a state that was arguably one of the most beautiful and bountiful in the nation is now nothing more than a financial joke. As goes California, so goes the nation…

Update: Don Surber – California: Cash for pols, IOUs for the blind

Brutally Hones – Environmental idiocy in California

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