Endangering the Habitats for Humanity

Right about now the snow is finally beginning to melt over Kaiser Pass on the western slopes of the Sierra. So, across the state, families, campers, hikers, backpackers and fishing enthusiasts are rummaging through winter storage to retrieve gear for their return to one of the most majestic sites in California--Lake Thomas A. Edison.

Whether at campsites beside the eight-mile lake or along Mono Creek, folks can listen to the chatter of marmots, watch baby quail flutter out of waterside bushes, fend off invading chipmunks and try to trick a cunning trout into believing a gyrating lure is really a native source of food.

Surrounded by massive peaks laden with El Nino snows, Edison Lake will soon be brimming with icy water pushing onto the sunlit warmth of its banks.

But 45 years ago, this lake didn’t exist. In its place was the Vermillion Valley--a lush and inaccessible stream-fed basin. But as California and its appetite for electricity grew, the Vermillion Valley was cleared of timber and inundated by water.

One cannot help listening to the braying moralists, who have hijacked the word “environmentalist,” without thinking that Edison Lake could not have been created in the post-Earth Day era. Attempting to build such a reservoir today would open up a deluge of lawsuits, angry protests, invocations of the Endangered Species Act and pious sermonizing by the haughty elitists who exemplify the misbegotten nihilism of decades past.

Yes, an historic habitat was terminated, but in its place was created a new and different one, one that nonetheless has exploded in beauty to allow for countless additional species.

Who’s to say which habitat is better? Well, I can. Because the new habitat includes a place for that most maligned of species--humans. It provided--for people--surcease from the stress, chaos and routine of their lives. Down from the mountains into the San Joaquin Valley, it allowed for safe, nonpolluting, efficient electricity to give comfort and security to a new culture and lifestyle for families. Today this energy supplies schools, homes, hospitals and even the word processors that spew out the lawsuits and accompanying nonsense of the enviro-nihilists.

What nonsense, you ask?

Listen to the executive director of the Sierra Club as he recently attacked efforts to restore reason to environmental laws. He accused the leadership in the U.S. Congress of “working covertly to undermine both our heritage and our health,” to “cripple the federal agencies that enforce our environmental laws.” He charges that Congress wishes to “advance the interests of habitual corporate polluters and dismantle 25 years of legal safeguards” (emphasis added).

This is more than hyperbole; it is the standard apocalyptic cant of those who refuse to apply balance to the way we interact with the physical world around us. They have gone far beyond the laudable and necessary concerns we have for clean air and safe drinking water to the embrace, nay, worship of the fringes.

And, in the wake of their effective propagandizing, society has bought into much of their extremism. So, for example, when a federal court recently ruled that water must be cut off to thousands of California farmers in favor of the winter-run Chinook salmon, a major newspaper described it as providing a resource for “embattled fish.” Never mind that this fish is indistinguishable from plentiful Chinooks in a different season.

Is this what we’ve come to? We deprive productive human beings of critical water which supplies fresh fruit, vegetables and meats to feed, and fiber to clothe, an entire world--and it’s a fish that’s “embattled”?

Meanwhile, in the Inland Empire, the Clinton administration continues to pull out all the stops to provide a “home” for an insect--the Delhi sands flower-loving fly--so that these flies can “make contact with their neighbors,” as one account put it.

With all these lawyers and special interest pleaders agitating for abstruse critters, we often lose sight of our real crises. Here’s one that should shame us all: Last week the Commonwealth Fund reported from an extensive survey it commissioned that more than one in eight high school-age boys said they had been physically or sexually abused, accompanied by deep depression, a higher rate of bulimia and deep emotional scarring. The highest rates were among Latino and Asian American boys.

Sorry, boys. Get in line behind the flies and the embattled fish.