The Original Sin of Environmentalism

A headline on the front page of my local paper caught my eye yesterday: SAN FRANCISCO’S ORIGINAL SIN. What’s it about? The Hetch Hetchy resevoir, which provides water to much of the San Francisco Bay Area and was built in the Yosemite Valley. Because in case you didn’t know, dams are evil, at least, they are if you’re an environmentalist.

The headline seemed to perfectly encapsulate what’s wrong with today’s environmental movement – its weird, quasi-religious overtones and its anti-people bias. According to the article…

…a ballot initiative called the Water Sustainability and Environmental Restoration Planning Act of 2012 would ask San Franciscans to consider what restoring Hetch Hetchy might take, and whether the sacrifice would be worth the cost.

Questions:

What the heck do these anti-dam advocates think people are supposed to drink if their water supply goes away? Oh, I know, they believe we can all build catchment systems and cut back on our consumption, and conserve and suffer, beating our clothing on dry rocks and only flushing our toilets once a day. To which I say, if you like the primitive lifestyle so much, then go live it and stop bothering the rest of us.
The dam was built roughly a hundred years ago, and a new ecosystem has grown around it. If you destroy the dam, what happens to that ecosystem? Why is the ecosystem of the past more valuable than today’s ecosystem? Utah used to be underwater – should we try to restore that?
San Francisco isn’t the only population that drinks from the Hetch Hetchy – do they really get to decide what happens to it?

About Mystic Cowgirl

I worked overseas in the aid game for longer than I'd like to admit and learned several important things: 1) Third World countries aren't poor because America is rich. They're impoverished due to socialist governments that provide neither rule of law nor basic infrastructures; 2) These socialist governments redistribute wealth from taxpayers to the government workers. There's no benefit to the poor or downtrodden, and certainly not to the general welfare in terms of infrastructure improvements. 3) America is moving toward the Third World model. Rule of law has been subverted because equality under the law is disappearing as special interests carve out exemptions to regulations and special favors under the law. The redistribution of wealth to government began decades ago -- total compensation for government employees now outpaces salaries in the private sector.

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