by Victor Davis Hanson // Eureka It is September in California, year four of a scorching drought. Forest fires are blackening the arid state, from Napa Valley to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Fly over the High Sierra and about every tenth evergreen below appears dead. Even the high mountain lakes and reservoirs are about empty… Continue reading The Underbelly Of The California Drought
We Are All Californians Now
California Drought — Bad Policy, Poor Infrastructure By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online California is in the midst of a crippling four-year-old drought. Yet the state has built almost no major northern or central mountain reservoirs since the New Melones Dam of 1979. That added nearly 3 million acre-feet to the state’s storage reserves – a… Continue reading We Are All Californians Now
California: Running On Empty
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media The air in the San Joaquin Valley this late-June is, of course, hot and dry, but also dustier and more full of particulates than usual. This year a strange flu reached epidemic proportions. I say strange, because after the initial viral symptoms subsided, one’s cough still lingered for… Continue reading California: Running On Empty
Goodnight, California
I offer another chronicle, a 14-hour tour of the skeleton I once knew as California. 8:00 AM I finally got around to retrieving the car seat that someone threw out in front of the vineyard near my mailbox. (Don’t try waiting dumpers out — as if it is not your responsibility to clean up California… Continue reading Goodnight, California
Why California’s Drought Was Completely Preventable
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The present four-year California drought is not novel — even if President Barack Obama and California governor Jerry Brown have blamed it on man-made climate change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California droughts are both age-old and common. Predictable California dry spells — like those… Continue reading Why California’s Drought Was Completely Preventable
The Drought: California Apocalypto
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media The proverbial thin veneer of civilization has never been thinner in California, as if nature has conspired to create even greater chaos than what man here has already wrought. What follows below was a fairly typical seven-day period in the land of the highest sales, fuel, and income… Continue reading The Drought: California Apocalypto
A Tale of Four Droughts
The Scorching of California
How Green extremists made a bad drought worse by Victor Davis Hanson // City Journal In mid-December, the first large storms in three years drenched California. No one knows whether the rain and snow will continue—only that it must last for weeks if a record three-year drought, both natural and man-made, is to end. In… Continue reading The Scorching of California
Mythologies and Pathologies of the California Drought
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia The third year of California drought has exposed all sorts of water fantasies. If in wet years they were implicit, now without rain or snow for nearly three years, they are all too explicit. Add them up. Take the Bay Area, Ground Zero of water environmentalism. From Mill Valley… Continue reading Mythologies and Pathologies of the California Drought
California’s Hydromania
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Two events now characterize the California agrarian heartland, the richest and most productive farm belt in the world. One, of course, is the third year of drought. I refer here to nature’s lack of rain and snow. But also factor in the state’s additional man-made drought, through diversions… Continue reading California’s Hydromania