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[Peace Patriot]

74. I recced this OP. Now I wish I could unrec it. It's bullshit.

I recced it too fast, thinking it was a Bechtel/Bolivia situation come home to haunt us. I failed to notice that it was "natural news" (which is very unnatural, corporate-friendly disinformation).

Very clever of the poster to dress this disinformation up as leftist/progressive by mentioning, um, Betel/in Mexico?, and even getting that all wrong, as if it was just a casual remark.

I don't think it was.

Looking at this guy's LAKES ("ponds," my ass) and also at the clearcuts on that property, I would guess that he's already in violation of dozens of state and federal environmental laws, and, what is even more important, environmental principles. The land is already very stressed, which means that fish, bird and other extinctions are already well under way. The land is degraded, which also means that the watersheds and the creeks and rivers that feed them are already degraded--already too warm for some fish and aquatic life, already too few trees, already possibly polluted, at least with sediment, during the rainy season. To add further stresses to this environment--reducing the water available downstream, landscaping lakes into this environment where trees and other plants, and wildlife, once lived, boating in it (possibly polluting it), and other such impacts violate vital environmental principles, not just the rights of the public to downstream water itself, but the rights of the public to biodiversity (to fish, birds, etc.) and ultimately to a viable planet, everywhere.

It's possible that this man did not clearcut this property (in the checkerboard fashion we see in the photo). Some corporation likely did that, significantly degraded the property and thus sold it. This has happened time and again in California, Oregon and Washington. It is endemic to the region. Corporations degrade the forest, the rivers and the wildlife to a horrible degree, for quick profit, then sell out to some kind of development or other. Maybe he's not responsible for all that, but he is NOW responsible for those past impacts. Maybe his is a better use than, say, tract houses, but he is STILL responsible to and for the CURRENT conditions of the land and its resources--including fish, birds and other wildlife that know no boundaries, and the trees, shrubs, insects, microbes and everything upon which the wildlife depends, and on which both local communities and the entire planet depend.

There is no such thing as "a king in his castle." A "king" dies--withers away--alone in his castle, without the surrounding community to support him. It is completely irresponsible to think otherwise, to think that whatever you do on your "property"--an artificial creation of government, in the first place--is "nobody else's business." Sorry, but healthy fish, bird and other wildlife populations, healthy watersheds and a viable planet ARE my business and the business of all of us and that of our government when it is acting in our interest and the good all.

You cannot parcel these things up. Nature simply doesn't work that way. And you cannot separate the concept of "rainwater" from the lands over which clouds collect and move and into which rainwater falls. The clouds and all of their properties, the water in all of its forms, and the life that springs up from the ground, in response to sunlight, rain and fog, and soil nutrients, evolving over millions of years, are all one complex ecology, related to every other micro-climate in the vicinity, AND to wildlife populations that may migrate from thousands of miles away, from complex ecologies and micro-climates at the other end of their travels.

If you come in and damn up lakes, you are profoundly impacting that ecology. If you do it to an already stressed environment, your impacts multiply exponentially.

This is what public water commissions have learned over the last half century. To protect the water that they are obliged to provide for the public good, they MUST protect the environment in which the water accumulate and flows--the watersheds, the drainage systems--or the consequences can be dire, in dried up watersheds, droughts and other disasters. And the fish, birds and other wildlife are INDICATORS of the health of the watershed. The wildlife is (supposedly) protected by other, related laws--for its own sake, as a value to human life and to our society (and, as a matter of constitutional fact, in Bolivia and Ecuador nowadays, for its own sake alone--for Mother Nature's right to exist and prosper). But water commissions in particular don't idly count fish, for instance, for something to do, or because they like meddling in someone else's business. They MUST look at the gages of watershed health and viability.

To sum up, this man is NOT just using rainwater. He is vacuuming up GROUNDWATER--rain in the ground, rain that filters down through the watersheds and their greenery and that flows under the ground in aquifers. He doesn't have a tunnel in the sky that just captures rain within his lakes' boundaries.

This is far, far different from peasants in Bolivia collecting rainwater in a barrel--and Bechtel trying to collect money from the poorest of the poor for doing so. And in purpose and scale, it is far different even from directing rainwater, via aqueducts or natural channels, into peasant gardens or farmlands. Peasants don't farm on the scale of Chevron or Monsanto or Chiquita. And they furthermore tend to have respect--based on thousand year old knowledge and traditions--for the resources they use. Even if they do something on a fairly large scale, for them, they don't disrupt natural cycles and ecosystems, the way transglobal corporations do.

There is simply no comparison between this man's situation and the poor people in Bolivia who got charged for collecting rainwater. Bechtel was not trying to save watersheds. It was merely profiteering. The authorities who came down on this man's lakes are charged with protecting watersheds. This is not to say that corporations don't interfere--by way of privatization and profiteering--in the process of public water protection. They do! But that is no reason to end public water protection. It is a reason to end Corporate Rule.

This post supports Corporate Rule, by trying to equate public water protection with oppression. It is aimed at ending such public good activity and privatizing everything. And it represents one of the unholiest alliances in the world, and one that is KILLING OUR PLANET--the alliance between wealthy private landowners and transglobal corporations that promotes this myth of "the king in his castle" in order to hoodwink very small landowners and homeowners, and non-wealthy people, into supporting their actually insane polices of deregulation. This unholy alliance is, of course, sucking at the public tit, all the while, as they preach "rugged individualism" and puny-minded selfishness and "small government" (read: no government!). Sucking in your tax dollars and mine, in all manner of subsidies and tax breaks, sucking off the infrastructure that we as a people created as a public good, and robbing us blind in numerous ways.

I was glad when DU got rid of the unrec function. It really wasn't very useful and I wouldn't want it back--but I hereby take back my rec of this post. It is Corporate propaganda, sneakily parading as something else.