The federal government is draining Folsom Lake, one of California’s larger reservoirs-in the midst of a historic drought. We had a good Sierra snowpack this year, so the lake was almost full at the end of May. In the past when the lake was full, we could leave our boat in its berth at the marina until December, when the Bureau of Reclamation drains the lake to make room for the winter rains. But this year the Bureau is already draining the lake-to benefit the salmon in the Sacramento River, so we must pull our boat out in July.
One good snowpack is not enough to make up for four years of bad ones. Last summer faucets ran dry in some communities in the Central Valley, irrigation water to farmers was cut off, and thousands of farm workers were put out of work. You can see dead or dying orchards up and down Interstate 5. This summer the State-imposed restrictions on water use remain in place. Dead lawns and dying trees abound in our neighborhood. But still the feds are draining the lake. And they expect the rest of us dutifully to abide by the restrictions they have imposed on us.
The standard response to this sort of madness, among those able to recognize it as madness, is to blame it on radical environmentalists. But this is not the work of ideologues operating on the fringes of the environmental movement. This is standard-issue, mainstream environmentalism as practiced by the green establishment in Washington and Sacramento. This is not to deny that draining a major reservoir in the midst of a drought is a radical act. The point, rather, is that mainstream environmentalism is itself a radical ideology, and the current water shortage in California is Exhibit A.
From its beginnings in the 1960s, as I argue in my book Radical by Nature, environmentalism has been about preserving natural landscape where it exists, and restoring it where it does not. In California, this has meant, among other things, halting economic growth and development as much as possible. And what better way to halt growth than to restrict the supply of new water?