In this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler discuss how California bureaucrats and environmental lawyers are threatening to blow up dams and deny water to 600,000 residents, “a symbolic act to punish civilization and hurt people.”
Editor’s note: This content was recorded by Victor Davis Hanson prior to his Dec. 30 medical operation.
This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Jack Fowler: There’s a disturbing article on this website UNWON. We’ve talked once or twice in the past about some articles they’ve done, but they’ve been covering things that happened to rural America. And there is this story.
We’ve talked about water and dams in the past, but I think this is worth knowing because even if you don’t live there, Victor, there are people who rely on rural California dams and the water it produces that goes to farms that we eat the product of all across America and all across the world.
So, there’s this story. I suggest people check it out. It’s titled “Round Valley. Indian Tribes Attorney Says ‘Two-Basin Solution’ Water Diversions to Sonoma and Mendocino Will Stop.” What does that mean? That’s a mouthful of a headline, but it comes down to the continuing desire and not only desire, but the actuality of California bureaucrats blowing up dams.
The PG&E, the power company out there, which has some rights with these dams, wanting them blown up because they’re tired of being sued by “Trouts are people too” nonprofits and other kinds of wacko Left entities.
So, folks still need the water, and there’s some talk, “Well, we’re going to blow up these dams. They’ll still be able to get this water source that goes through this Round Valley Indian tribe land.” Now, at a recent hearing, the Round Valley Indian tribe lawyer says, that’s not going to happen.
So, at some point, if all these things go forward, Victor, 600,000 people, a huge amount of people, 600,000 people are going to be without water because of bureaucrats in California who get a thrill out of sticking it to rural America. That’s my take.
Anyway, Victor, I think this is worth your commentary on before we get to some questions.
Victor Davis Hanson: I didn’t vote for him. Nobody voted for these people.
The larger picture is that California has been so rich naturally and so rich with its legacy of very brilliant people that were here that built Los Angeles, built the California water project, built the dams, built the infrastructure, the aqueduct, that it had a margin of error
And so, our generation—I’m a baby boomer born in 1950—we haven’t contributed very much. We’re parasitical. So we sue, we take land out of production, we do all of this, and then we don’t ever ask ourselves, “Well, who’s going to pay for all this?”
So, the actual diversions from the Eel River, except in the winter, are only about 2% or 3%. So, it’s not like they’re taking water from indigenous people. They’re honoring pretty old water contracts.
And so, the environmentalist lawyers are saying that existing contracts—and California does not have a very long lineage. It’s not Massachusetts. Basically, people didn’t come here until about 1840s. Jedidiah Smith, people before that, and then the Gold Rush in 1849 started that, and then there was statehood early in ’51, I think.
And then you had a whole corpus of water law. And they’re saying that they can vitiate that, invalidate it, because of ancestral hunting grounds. They did that with the Klamath [River]. Four dams they blew up and said that they obstructed salmon runs.
And I understand that we want to have social justice, but the whole indigenous land is such a volatile issue. Anybody who challenges this idea that this land belongs to Indigenous people is called a racist or a white racist.
It’s hard to talk about, but the fact of the matter is land changes all the time. The Americans came. They fought indigenous people. Indigenous people before they came had fought the Mexican government in California. The Mexican government came after fighting the Spanish government. The Spanish government came after fighting Indigenous people. The Indigenous people fought with other constantly.
If you want to talk about an imperialist project, look at the history of the Comanches or the Lakota Sioux or the Blackfoot, I mean, they were merciless to other Indigenous people and they created empires by taking lands and hunting grounds.
So, that’s the human side of things.
The other thing is that these reservations and everything, these lawyers, they don’t live in a vacuum. So, when they’re saying we have rights to go back to pre-civilization and have our ancestral land free of the so-called settlers who came in and made these dams and water diversions and made the Napa Valley …
Napa Valley is very dry. Anybody who goes up in drives from Healdsburg to Napa or Santa Rosa or any of those, it’s a paradise.
It looks like a valley in Italy, or Provence or something in France. It’s just beautiful and they did that by their own skill, and they created the world’s most lucrative, successful and best wine place in the world. And they came after there had been cattle ranchers, apple growers in the 19th century.
That’s why everybody wants to go there. Everybody in California, if you wake up on a Saturday morning or Sunday morning and you happen to, unfortunately, be on 101 going north from San Francisco, it’s a bottleneck.
And I’ve done that and that’s because all of these San Francisco and South Bay people, their idea of a beautiful Saturday afternoon, or Sunday, is “Let’s go drive up to the wine country.” And they drive up, and they drive around, and they see these beautiful terraced hills, there’s Lombardi poplars, there’s cypress tree driveways. It’s just sculpted. It looks like a picture of Tuscany.
And then you see these beautiful wineries, these beautiful restaurants. All of that came from water. Not very much. They were very good about water, but the Eel River was one, Russian River’s another. They had some diversions and further north to cattle and stuff.
But my point is this: No Indigenous people—and it’s very hard to find somebody who is entirely indigenous. My former mother-in-law had a name Tawana, and they were from Oklahoma. They had Cherokee, and I once asked her, and she said almost everybody that they knew had Cherokee heritage.
But we ended up with the 116th rule in the United States, so that if you wanted to go to a reservation you were 116th or one-eighth or something.
But it was very hard to find people that you could define someone with a Cherokee name or an indigenous name that had not been assimilated.
And then we tried to make up for that with the reservation system—fraught with corruption, yes—but still the reservations in total are larger than many states—their land. And then, more importantly, we went into the gaming, and some of these tribes are fabulously wealthy.
But the point I’m making is this: This environmental law firm says we’re going to stop the diversions of 2% or 3%. It’s not going to hurt. It’s not going to get a lot of water back to the Indigenous. It’s a symbolic act to punish civilization and hurt people, 600,000 people in this case.
Editor’s Note: In response to the UNWON article discussed by Hanson and Fowler, the Eel-Russia Project Authority (ERPA) accuses UNWON of “misinformation” and “inaccurate” reporting.
According to ERPA: “UNWON published statements without the full context of a presentation given to the Round Valley Indian Tribes and relied on selected excerpts that resulted in misinformation. This response corrects the blog post’s inaccuracies and offers clarifying information.” You can read the full follow-up UNWON article here.
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