Back in the day, the Central California Valley was a fertile, productive agricultural area. Fruits, nuts, veggies abounded, people worked and made a living and provided food far and wide - lots of good things Michelle Obama would recommend eating instead of the French Fries she loves to help her combat obesity. Then some environmental fruitcake decided a little fish called the Delta Smelt was more important than feeding the world and people working and eating something besides government cheese.

This is the dust bowl congress created:

http://media.hotair.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ca-valley-dustbowl.jpg
http://beetlebabee.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/congress_created_dust_bowl.jpg?w=477&h=357

Finally, someone is trying to rectify this situation. Rep. Devin Nunes has sponsored a bill to restore the water flow back to the farmers who paid for it.


Is sanity finally coming to California's Central Valley? (http://news.investors.com/article/602480/201202271921/rep-nunes-visalia-brings-water-to-california-.htm) America's breadbasket has long been victim of capricious water cutoffs to "save" the environment. A bill in Congress puts an end to this man-made drought. It should pass.

Rep. Devin Nunes of Visalia, Calif. has come forward with a legislative remedy for the policies that have turned fertile fields into hollowed-out dust bowls in the name of "being green."

Nunes' Sacramento-San Joaquin Water Reliability Act goes to a vote in the House Wednesday and if it passes, it will guarantee that water the farmers paid for finally gets to the parched Central Valley. It will put an end to the sorry stream of shriveled vineyards, blackened almond groves and unemployed farm workers standing in alms lines for bagged carrots from China.

The insanity of the current policies against some of America's most productive farmers in one of the world's richest farm belts is largely the work leftist politicians from the wealthy enclaves of the San Francisco Bay Area. This group has exerted its political muscle on the less politically powerful region that produces more than half the fruits and vegetables consumed in the U.S. — with $26 billion in annual sales.

"The bill restores the flow of water and establishes a framework for meaningful environmental improvements. It is a repudiation of the left's assault on rural communities, which began with the decimation of the West's timber industry and now is focused on Central Valley agriculture," Nunes told IBD.

The stand-alone bill, H.R. 1837, marks the first time Central Valley water shortages and the federal role in creating them will be considered directly in Congress.

Naturally, Obama plans a veto if it passes. I don't know about you but I could give a you know what about the Delta Smelt, I'd like to see people working again and reasonably priced, plentiful produce in the grocery store again.

Hello Steve:

The following is from the Los Angeles Times, (http://articles.latimes.com/2007/oct/21/opinion/op-slack21/2)October 21, 2007. It's pretty clear why those evil San Francsco leftists did what they did, and WHY they're going to do it again.


California is a thirsty state. You don't mess with its water, even in a good year, unless you have an excellent reason. Which is why many Californians are shaking their heads in dismay over a federal judge's recent decision to cut by as much as 30% the water sent south from the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta this winter. The judge's reason: to save a French-fry-sized fish called the delta smelt.

The delta smelt makes no heroic journey across the ocean or up river rapids to reproduce. Once superabundant, Chinese fishermen used to harvest the fish by net, but the little thing, a weak swimmer, wouldn't put up any fight at the end of a line. And a smelt would not even make a decent snack. Frankly, on first glance, the fish just isn't much to look at either.

So why should millions of Californians who rely on water pumped south from the delta make economic and social sacrifices -- including the possibility of rationing -- for a basically unremarkable fish?

There are at least four good reasons.

First, it is the law. The Endangered Species Act prohibits the government from doing anything that jeopardizes the continued existence of endangered or threatened species, and it forbids any government agency, corporation or citizen from harming, harassing or killing endangered animals without a permit. It is a sound law, put in place by the Nixon administration in 1973 to protect imperiled plants and animals "from the consequences of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation."

By drawing a bright legal line this side of annihilating whole kinds of creatures, the law is to thank for saving the bald eagle, the gray whale, the California condor and the Pacific green sea turtle, among other animals. And it's a law that will be especially important in California and beyond as climate change, human population growth, habitat conversion and invasive species increasingly degrade the natural world.

But obeying even a good law may seem unjustified when it comes time to make sacrifices for a ghostlike fish that conveys no clear benefits to mankind. That common perception brings us to the second reason to save the smelt: The goal of the Endangered Species Act is not just to protect single species but also the ecosystems on which they depend. The delta smelt is what Peter Moyle, a fisheries biologist at UC Davis, calls an indicator species: Its condition reflects the overall health of an ecosystem.

In the case of the delta, we're talking about a once-magnificent place that is in serious trouble. It is 16,000 square miles of wetland and open water -- the West Coast's largest estuary -- and the end point of about 40% of California's precipitation. When the Spanish arrived centuries ago, it was teeming with fish, crawling with bears and beavers, its skies periodically darkened with migrating birds.

Twenty-nine known fish species once called the delta home. Twelve of those are either gone altogether or are threatened with extinction. The Sacramento perch, once one of the most abundant fish in the system, was last seen in the 1970s, Moyle says. The thicktail chub disappeared in the 1950s. Many other fish are in rapid decline too, victims of pollution, overfishing and habitat destruction as big portions of the delta were diked and drained for agriculture, and the natural exchange of fresh and salt water was altered by the huge, sucking pumps that send water south. As for the delta smelt, Moyle has been charting its decline for decades. But that decline turned into a nose-dive a couple of years ago because of increased water diversions from the delta. This year's spring survey found 90% fewer fish than in 2006, the previous record low.

Reducing the amount of water sucked from the delta, increasing the release of fresh water upriver and controlling pollutants would help save the delta smelt and help protect spring- and winter-run Chinook, striped bass, steelhead trout, green sturgeon and the entire delta ecosystem. If we don't take these steps, and if we let the delta smelt go down, the longfin smelt, the next most endangered species in the delta, will follow. Then maybe the striped bass and the Sacramento splittail.

Why care? The species in an ecosystem are woven together like characters in a Shakespeare play. Start pulling them out, and the play's integrity is lost. Removing the delta smelt would be like pulling the ghost from "Macbeth." Forever. You'd still have a play, but it wouldn't work. Then pull, say, Banquo and the three witches and replace them with characters who don't belong there. You'd have some kind of absurdist sitcom where you once had a masterpiece. Without the native fish and other species that populate the delta, it won't work either.

A slightly closer look at the delta smelt shows us a third reason to rescue the fish from oblivion -- it's actually pretty impressive. While most fish are hard-wired either for salt or fresh water, the delta smelt tolerates both, a talent that allows it to exploit the brackish zone where the waters meet. Before there were giant aquatic vacuum cleaners in its midst to send water south, it could afford to be a weak swimmer because it mastered the cyclical ebbs and flows of the estuary, exploiting the system's inhalations and exhalations to get where it needed to go.

During the dry season, when the salt water moves up the estuary toward the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers that feed it, the smelt would ride the tidal currents up into the delta's river channels, where it laid its eggs. With the winter rains and consequent outflows, the fish would be carried out to what is called the entrapment zone, where fresh and salt water meet, a place where the zooplankton they feed on is most abundant. The delta smelt's ghostly blue color makes it nearly invisible to predators. It is a triumph of evolution and, believers might say, of creation, as well adapted to the old delta as the bald eagle and the gray whale are to their natural habitats.

Finally, the Torah says that if you save an individual, you save an entire universe. How much truer that is for a whole kind of creature. Nothing else on Earth lives the way the delta smelt does, senses the world the way it does, looks like it, moves like it, fits into an ecosystem the way it does. If we drive it from existence, we will have obliterated an entire world, willingly, in order for a while longer to grow cotton, rice and alfalfa in the desert, to keep our swimming pools topped off and open, to keep the price of water cheap.

If we can face our growing need for water, and our diminishing supply of it, without driving whole species to extinction, it might be more expensive and inconvenient in the short term. But if it saves the fish, saves the delta and saves a world, it would be well worth the price.

Excon

I think you're going to be hard pressed to prove how the Delta Smelt balances the ecosystem. Either way, I think feeding people is worth far more than that little fish. Funny how you guys can jump to protect a minnow but don't give a damn about protecting innocent children.

I wonder if the EPA will move to protect all that algae that the President wants to turn into fuel .

I'm pretty sure that water rights were a part of the deal that came with the property rights on the land. I'm also sure that more reasonable measures could both protect the delta ecosystem and the rights of the farmers to work their fields.

Obama won't need to veto. Harry Reid will make sure on behalf of Boxer and FrankenFeinstein that the bill never makes it out of committee .

So people cannot be an endangered species and so ridiculous environmental laws triumph once again. In my own nation we had a campaign to restore environmental flows, I wonder what they are going to do now the river systems are in flood, a natural phenomenon. What you need is some good ole rain, should we send you an El Nino we have sure had enough of La Nina. Let Obama veto that

Sen FrankenFeinstein and her ivory tower crowd get their water supplied from Yosemite... they pay little rent for their use of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir... and their veggies are imported . They pay a set fee of $30,000 that was set by federal law in 1913 and has not been changed since. For the price of a rental in San Fran you could get the equivalent of 8 miles of the Hetch Hetchy Valley at that rate .

So cheap water is delivered to the city via National Parkland ;and denied to the most fertile valley in the country .
The funny thing is that the farm owners of the San Joaquin Valley are the desendents of the Oakies who escaped the dust bowls of the '30s . They are also the immigrant population that the Dems claim to champion.