Study the Dust

 “Alas, it’s very hard to pass a prodemocratic measure in an antidemocratic system.” Jeet Heer, The Nation

The obstructionist GOP has done it again, this time blocking passage of significant election reforms pushed by Democrats. That these reforms are very popular with the voting public matters not at all. Nor does it matter that reforms are desperately needed to prevent a coup by a well-organized political minority. Democrats Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi vow to continue the fight, but the institutional barriers standing in their way are formidable. Where’s Biden? He didn’t throw much of his weight behind the legislation, despite telling Congress in April that American democracy is suffering an existential crisis. 

Mitch McConnell remains the most powerful and unaccountable politician in the nation. By sheer numbers, McConnell and his GOP represent fewer Americans than Democrats, but this doesn’t hinder their ability to block any legislation they dislike, which is almost everything the Democrats put forward. The GOP obstructs, period. Long gone are the days when politics was a method for mediating our differences and finding compromise. Now it’s just about amassing and wielding power. How is a two-party representative democracy supposed to work when one of the parties refuses to compromise? It can’t, which is why I think America is headed for authoritarian rule. 

Meanwhile, the western US is in the grips of a heatwave. I read more and more reports of falling water levels, at Lake Mead in Nevada which provides water to three states and parts of Mexico, and in California, where more than forty of the state’s fifty-eight counties are in severe drought; the Edward Hyatt Power Plant at Lake Oroville may be forced to shut down for the first time in a half a century. The lake is at 38 percent capacity. Farmers in southern Oregon skirmish with state and federal agencies over diminishing water supplies. We’re only at the summer solstice. The warnings climatologists have been issuing for decades are happening. Hotter and drier weather, bigger storms, massive wildfires, the consequence of human hubris and greed.  Like the California farmers and cattle ranchers and citrus growers I’ve been reading about in a brilliant book by Mark Arax called The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, greed is baked into our society and the imperative is to get bigger, richer, more powerful. In California water and land have made or cost fortunes from the beginning. The ability of people to build massive dams, aqueducts, reservoirs, levees and canals, to divert rivers and use hydraulic power to mine for gold, irrigate some of the best farmland in the world, and allow the building of millions of homes is an awesome feat of vision, sweat, money, labor, and political influence. It’s why the State Water Project and the California Aqueduct were built: to capture water where it was abundant and transport it to where it was scarce. Tremendous public expense, huge private profits. Once that water started flowing, fortunes were made in cotton and cattle, grapes, mandarins, raisins, almonds, pistachios. Sole owners like Henry Miller and J.G. Boswell controlled hundreds of thousands of acres of land, some of it with water rights, some without. They and others ran company towns. As it always does, size matters, makes a difference in influence with bankers and politicians. Californians have always fought over water, north versus south, east versus west. Rivers were essentially stolen, bent to private use or controlled by the state or the Feds to the consternation of the locals. For decades, Central Valley farmers have dug deeper and deeper wells, in more and more places, and pumped the aquifer dry. In some places the land has sunk, the result of a falling water table. 

Our country should be having a serious conversation about climate change, but we are too self-absorbed and short-sighted to see the storm bearing down. If we cared to, we could learn a few things from the Covid pandemic, primarily that it makes sense to have adequately funded public agencies equipped and prepared to provide services when necessary. Our goal should be to reduce or alleviate human suffering, but our policies are created to protect property and the possessors of wealth. As in many places in the world, the poor pay the highest price, live the hardest lives, and die the earliest deaths. We could learn, as well, a few handy lessons from history, yet many influential people in positions of power would have us stop when the reality of who we are and what we have done grows darker, and crueler. 

We should ask ourselves if a political system as frail as ours can deliver the things millions of us will need to survive when the next disaster strikes. I’m not confident. The problem with our species is that we see ourselves as masters rather than caretakers.