Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Delta Blues & Breaking Through

1) The wrangling over the Delta continues and still, the elephant in the room remains the simple fact that the state of California—most populated in the country and still growing—needs more water and more conveyance systems for moving it; something the environmentalist community is dead-set against while promoting the solution to our water problems as one of conservation and placing the health and well-being of animals over the health and well-being of humans.

This topsy turvy method of analysis continues to get us nowhere fast, but as more members of the environmentalist community see the results of the decades long—and rather restrictive—way of dealing with the natural community growth of areas, like California, that are highly hospitable to human habitation, will change their ideas and become supporters of community growth rather than continue a doomed-to-failure fight against it.

2) This has been happening already and the important book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, which is commented on in the overview of it from the website of its authors:

“What the new ecological crises demand is not that we constrain human power but unleash it. Overcoming global warming demands not pollution control but rather a new kind of economic development. We cannot tear down the old energy economy before building the new one. The invention of the Internet and microchips, the creation of the space program, the birth of the European Union - those breakthroughs were only made possible by big and bold investments in the future.”

You can read the essay online which began the discussion leading to the book: The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World, and it is a keeper.