Wild & Scenic in its Environmental Context

I recently appeared before the Board of Supervisors and made the following statement reproduced here with a few minor revisions: “I am speaking today against any wild & scenic designation for any part of the Mokelumne River and to protest this total waste of tax payer money for this absolutely unnecessary study by GEI Consultants.

Firstly, the very term wild & scenic is a misnomer. These are controlled dam release flows which are “coincidently” ideal for rafting.

The very idea of what we are doing today, examining Wild & Scenic in isolation, is absurd. Place all the Wild & Scenic designations, conservation easements, land banks, carbon capture forests, etc, on a map and you have the land tenure system of medieval Europe. Probably almost everyone in this room is descended from people who voted with their feet to leave that behind and join the American dream instead.

This proposed designation fits directly into the evil globalist plan to depopulate rural areas and house us in stack and pack big city apartments. Our job is to change the bed linen for the Bay Area liberal elite high tech tourists. Our way of life and prosperity are as important to them as was the life of the last housefly we killed. The importance GEI Consultants give the global warming fraud, the corrupted scientific reason for much of this, certainly substantiates this point of view.

Page 2-10 of the study states, “Using projected future water supply and demand under three climate change scenarios, the study concluded that Amador’s future water needs would ultimately exceed its current water rights if existing land use designations under the County General Plan are built out.” So why further restrict water use? Also plans are plans, not the reality of an unknown future with assuredly unexpected events.  I find it easy to envision a future, given the increasing Federal debt, where we are under some sort of martial law to mine our gold and sent it to China to maintain our sovereignty.

This state designation is simply a prelude to the even more restrictive federal designation, which is probably an illegal inverse condemnation under the 5^th amendment.  Even if some existing uses are grandfathered in, this precludes the activity of future generations of entrepreneurs and flushes the American dream down the toilet.

Furthermore, this designation doesn’t change anything in the present. Nothing will change and rafting, dam releases, etc will continue. The argument of protecting the river is fallacious. If anyone were to propose anything of significance along the river the environmental litigation would probably last longer than my lifetime.

The Mokelumne River Canyon/Devil’s Nose Dam maybe one of two outstanding water storage sites left in all of California.  What I assume this means is the most water stored for the least capital expenditure.  This is an obvious trade off decision since there are countless other rivers in California for tourism and recreation.  I have heard differing opinions on this and would have researched this further, but without funding from the George Soros Tides and Rose Foundations like the Foothill Conservancy has, my time is limited.

All the water that Amador County loses goes to East Bay MUD. And while assuredly within the law, the Foothill Conservancy and EBMUD have been in cahoots for years. They have a shared interest despite an occasional lawsuit. Also the Foothill Conservancy has a potential conflict of interest with O.A.R.S, a rafting company, whose proprietor sits on the Foothill Conservancy board. Is it possible that the county council look into this situation?

I came of age in the 1960’s and since then have adopted a saying of that time: Tell it like it is baby, tell it like it is.”

Katherine Evatt of the Foothill Conservancy took issue with my statements and posted the rebuttal that follows: “Mark, you asserted that an FC director may have a conflict of interest because he is among the owners of a rafting company. There is no commercial rafting on the Mokelumne today. His company, which has for years provided raft trips to the Calaveras Youth Mentoring Program, the Stewardship Through Education (youth education) Program, and yes, the Foothill Conservancy, does all those trips w/o receiving any compensation for them. His company was not engaged in negotiating the PG&E project's federal Mokelumne license and he joined the board 16 years after the license was put in place.

Shame on you for defaming good people, your continued personal attacks and defamation, and after all of these years, failing to actually learn what the heck you are talking about when it comes to river, hydropower, water projects, water law, etc. 

You also asserted that the FC works with EBMUD because directors and staff sometimes attend their meetings. FC reps also attend local water agency and city and county government meetings (I went to two today). Sometimes we agree, sometimes we don't. Same with EBMUD. The FC was the only entity in Amador County who took on the risk, expense, and stress of suing EBMUD to stop their proposed expansion of Pardee Reservoir, which was opposed by nearly everyone in Amador and Calaveras. The FC forced EBMUD to open the Middle Bar reach of the Mokelumne to public access. 

The FC works with any number of interests when interests align. One example - many years ago, the FC worked with Amador County and Georgia-Pacific to support more federal funds for fuel reduction in national forests. Several years ago, the FC helped secure more than $16 million dollars (plus equal U.S. Forest Service match) for restoration and fuel reduction projects in our local projects. 
See https://www.fs.fed.us/.../ACCGCornerstoneCFLRAproposalfor...”

The Foothill Conservancy does have an “interlocking directorship” with O.A.R.S. They have a significant operation as any visit to their website (https://www.oars.com/) will testify. As Katherine states, it is legally constituted, the Conservancy is clever and can afford legal advice. And, of course, services or revenue to the “public charity” of the Foothill Conservancy does not constitute “commercial rafting”. But all this still doesn’t pass the smell test. If a board member of the Red Cross ran a company selling blood donation kits, eyebrows would raise. She further states O.A.R.S admirable record of public service. But every enterprise from the corner store to the multinational corporation does the same, often reaping more benefit from the PR exposure that their actual expense.  In O.A.R.S’s case it also represents a free sample of their product for future paying customers.

As a child at our neighborhood theater I once saw a newsreel about crazy daredevils rafting down wild rivers in the West. It was perceived in the same vain as skydiving and other extreme sports. Years later I lived in Colorado and observed the controversy regarding the building of I-70 in the Colorado River canyon. Those opposing the highway cited the need for rafting on the river. Rafting became a political ploy.  Its publicity morphed an obscure pastime into a desired sport. During a somewhat recent trip to Colorado which crisscrossed several mountain rivers west of the Front Range cities I witnessed the enormity that the rafting industry has developed into.  The roads were congested with trucks hauling rafts. Storefront after storefront supplied goods or services to rafters. And while there is certainly nothing inherently wrong with the sport of rafting, an awareness of how it became a promoted sport is instructive and should be seen within its actual historic context.

So rafting has developed into a new sport with the clever intent of being used to freeze river usage and deny other economic possibilities. Its importance in the environmental /globalist agenda is rather evident on this website of one of the Foothill Conservancy’s funders, the Soros affiliated Rose Foundation:  https://rosefdn.org/tag/wild-scenic-film-festival-on-tour/ https://rosefdn.org/tag/wild-scenic-film-festival-on-tour/

In addition to having regulated water flows most advantageous to rafting, many costly improvements are necessary for the rafter’s convenience. Since having those paid for from government funds for a privileged few could have created an outcry it was done quietly. (Does anyone remember media coverage?) These connivers were clever and got PG&E’s continued use of the river dependent upon their paying. So we all pay through increased PG&E bills in a way far less noticeable than a tax increase or public controversy. We are the charitable givers, not the non-profit Foothill Conservancy or the always generous O.A.R.S enterprise.  The Mokelumne Relicensing Settlement Agreement, Mokelumne River Project, FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) Project No. 137, November 27, 2000 documents all on a year 2000 cost basis these expenses:  the Electra Run Take-out Facilities, $200,000 to the BLM for the specific facility plus $25,000 for site studies; the Devil’s Nose Run Put-in facilities up to $25,000 for site studies and up to $30,000 for facilities and the Electra Afterbay Dam Portage for $5,000. This agreement also requires, without a stated monetary amount:  Tiger Creek Run Put- in Facilities, Tiger Creek Run Take-out Facilities, Devils Nose Run Take-out Facilities, Ponderosa Way Run Put-in Facilities, Ponderosa Way Run Take-out Facilities and Electra Run Put-in Facilities. These facilities often include parking, signage, trails and portable toilets. Obviously all these facilities require maintenance and supervision plus needed assistance to now privileged rafters. So PG&E, meaning again us ratepayers, must fork over on an annual basis (again in 2000 dollars) additional sums. These go to the BLM for two River Rangers during rafting season $25,000 and $5,000 for maintenance plus $10,000 to the Forest Service for maintenance. Additionally, the overhead administrative expenses to all those involved in this complex arrangement is not calculated or considered. 

               

The alleged beneficence of O.A.R.S and the charitable nature of the Foothill Conservancy need be examined in the light of day which shines clearly from this river use agreement. Our PG&E ratepayers’ subsidy along with tax dollars provided the rafting ready river that then became exhibit number one in the wild & scenic crusade.  We outfitted an amenity that now must be saved.

East Bay MUD and the Foothill Conservancy share a common interest in not impounding Amador County’s water and sending it downstream to Bay Area consumers whatever their relationship at a given moment. I agree with the Conservancy and many others in our community the Pardee Dam expansion was a bad project.  It was obviously a second rate proposal since the far better dam location at Devil’s Nose was defeated. East Bay MUD was only attempting to fulfill their legal obligations.

The Foothill Conservancy claims pride for their very real efforts in obtaining Federal dollars for forest fuel reduction.  But Federal dollars is a cynical euphemism for money we borrow from the Chinese and Saudis without any way to pay it back except through inflation or other economic hardships. Furthermore this is akin to administering first aid to someone you just assaulted given the environmental movement’s record on forest management. And the smoke generated by fuel reduction burning is hardly an environmental plus.

Katherine Evatt likes to assault me with minute details trying to trip me up as uniformed. While the Foothill Conservancy is but a small part, it’s the big picture of the larger environmental movement with their stark reality that affects us all and demands our attention.  The fire danger frightens us all and has already devastated far too many. While droughts will come and go, logged forests minimize or prevent this risk. An unlogged forest is not a “natural state”. Native Americans have logged and maintained our forests for untold millennium.  The “natural environment” has developed in symbiosis with humans; any other notion is a godless intellectual fiction.

This ungrounded attitude is evident: “"The northern spotted owl is the wildlife species of choice to act as a surrogate for old-growth forest protection. Thank goodness the spotted owl evolved in the Pacific Northwest, for if it hadn't, we'd have to genetically engineer it," joked Andy Stahl, staff forester for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund at a 1988 law clinic for other environmentalists.

Along with fire danger the costs of this travesty we are all enduring are innumerable.  County revenue is vastly reduced by our diminished share of Federal logging funds along with the huge reduction in tax revenue from the mills and related economic activity.  Not surprisingly our roads have deteriorated (and our vehicle suspensions, struts, etc as well). Also not surprising, but rather sad, is that various local spokespeople and candidates for office who appear to have supported these policies now blame the conditions of our roads on the leadership that has fought all these restrictive policies. Isn’t this what Orwell called doublethink?

But it wasn’t doublethink or doubletalk to the unemployed mill workers.  A few dozen of them in Amador and surrounding counties committed suicide in the years following the mill closures. The death certificates don’t say the mill closures, but family and friends do.  I wonder what brand of hand wipes the Sierra Club and their fellow travelers use? That may be the only good recommendation they have.

Sierra Pacific has been blamed for ending the supply of cedar logs to the former Pioneer mill. Both Ms. Evatt and I have agreed in prior discussions that Sierra Pacific is not always the best corporate citizen. They have a monopoly, or near monopoly, that controls of much of our local forests which they exploit to their advantage. But this situation only came about through the restrictions and over regulation caused by the environmental lobby that drove out the smaller companies. Again, as with our reduced local revenue and roads, this prevailing attitude is duplicitous.

I have discussed the hardships endured by our county government and the death toll of those disfranchised.  And while we all suffer from the reduced and transformed local economy, our personal balance sheets probably reflect the greatest damage. When I bought my home here I envisioned future logging of my property as a source of retirement income and once had a reasonable estimate of that assumed future revenue.  But what was then an asset is now a liability that consumes time and money to maintain as fire safe. That loss, however, pales in comparison to the huge increases in fire insurance rates. Of course, droughts will come and go, but forestry policies need not.  I have spent (wasted) over ten thousand dollars on unnecessary fire insurance premiums not counting the potential logging loss. Multiply that by all the Amador homes in forested areas plus the adjacent counties and you have tens of millions of dollars. This is environmental extortion. Along with the personal costs of this travesty our ability to finance opposition and fight back is reduced.

But lumber from primarily from Oregon and British Columbia is readily available at a probable higher price than local lumber. To add to our misery and over burdened budgets the State of California in their inimitable charming fashion has imposed a 1 % lumber tax upon us to help the perpetrators cope with their created crisis. But destroying our communities (those without closeness to big cities and without tourist attractions such as Amador County have become hellholes such as Josephine County, Oregon) and devastating the forest products industry, is only the start. With our forests now under environmental control, wild & scenic is just an opening salvo for water control.

Firstly we have negotiated impounded water releases to make an otherwise dry river “wild & scenic” which then becomes an excuse for preservation with likely future water rights reductions. Drought regulations substitute for water storage or desalination projects.  Our wells are next with metering and other proposals in the works.  The environmentalists/globalists want us out of the countryside and squeezed into the overcrowded cities. And while that is certainly the agenda of most of them some are even more diabolical. "The AIDS epidemic, rather than being a scourge, is a welcome development in the inevitable reduction of human population... If it didn't exist, radical environmentalists would have to invent it,” said Dave Foreman, Earth First! & Sierra Club director, 1995-1997.

This is the new reality unfolding in a blatantly apparent pattern. All actions have consequences; some are intended, some are unintended and some seem conspiratorial. If you care about our future, or if you more precisely care that we have a future, action is required. But many don’t have the time or inclination for activism. However, we can all vote. A turning point election is upon us. Brian Oneto must be reelected. Jeff Brown must unseat Lynn Morgan. Travis Allen should be our next governor. This is not a question of whose hands our future is in, but rather if we have a future that does not discard American tradition and make the land of the free and the home of the brave a footnote to history.

End notes: While I don’t want my remarks to be misconstrued as painting the Foothill Conservancy responsible for all of the environmental movement’s destructiveness, it is essential  that we see them clearly within the unfolding big picture.

Copyright 2018, Mark L. Bennett