Water or How We Survive

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Hello and welcome to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is the Saturday edition where we look at something different, usually historical.

And today we're going to look at water.

I think everybody knows in California we have a drought going on right now, but also just a water crisis with the state and its managing of water in the state itself.

So we're going to look at that and then we'll look also at historical water situations in ancient Greece and Rome.

I know we all know that there were aqueducts, but maybe we'll look at how the Romans managed those aqueducts and the Greeks too, who didn't just have aqueducts, but I understand cisterns.

But we'll let Victor explain that to us after these messages.

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Welcome back.

And Victor, how are you doing spiritually today?

You always ask that.

I'm doing well.

It's almost mid-March now, and it's going to be, it's been dry and cold in the mornings and warm in the afternoons.

And those are the ideal conditions for a late frost for vine blooms, unfortunately, and tree blossoms, but no rain.

Every day I scan the California radar map and I see these huge, beautiful, magnificent storms that arise off the Australian or Asian or Japanese coast and they start to barrel through and you sort of map them out and they look like they're going to hit somewhere between Bakersfield,

you know, San Diego on the coast and San Francisco.

And then bam, they hit that invisible high pressure somewhere around the Hawaiian Islands and they start to drift drift drift drift drift and if oregon and Washington are lucky they kind of tip in there but more usually they go into British Columbia and up to Alaska yeah so

it's once you get a little opening they're kind of like mice they they go in a hole but so if we would get one storm like we had a week ago that had been followed up once that little wall was crashed, they seem to go in there.

At least I always thought that when I was farming and didn't want it to hail or rain or something at harvest.

Yeah, so water is a big issue for us in California.

So I thought this Saturday we would look at, or this weekend, we would look at the water project in California, the state's managing of it, but also look at how they managed and organized or created systems for water in ancient Greece and in Rome, maybe the Byzantine.

I always found that very interesting in now Istanbul, but what used to be Constantinople, that huge underground water cavern.

And maybe we can talk a little bit about that.

But I was hoping we could start with history because I know that the California Water Project is

a long story and I would rather start back in history and just discuss how did the Greeks manage water, either as small farmers or as the larger cities of Athens?

Well, you were right, Sammy, to concentrate on the Greeks and Romans because they were Mediterranean peoples.

And we're not going to talk about the Vikings or somebody or the northern tribes of Germania because they had water.

So agriculture,

before we start, everybody remember that the best agriculture has the longest growing season.

The longest growing season means the highest temperatures

and mild winters, but not too mild, just sort of 500 hours

under 50 degrees to to give the trees, the deciduous trees, the fruit trees, the

vines a dormancy necessary, but then to have a long growing season.

You can even double crop, you know, certain species of wheat or vegetables, et cetera, two crops.

But you need water, and the

long growing season is antithetical to water because usually you want flat land and heat, and that's not where a lot of rain and snow accumulate.

So, what you look around the world is these civilizations that have mountains, high mountains, like the 20, 15,000 to 20,000 feet and the Atlas Mountains that have that watershed that go down to Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

And that's why the French were so successful, their colonial viticulturists, for example, or the Andes Mountains.

I think they're the highest mountains outside of Asia.

And you look at those watershed basins in Chile or Peru,

or you look at the Sierra Nevada.

I mean, in the summer, it will be 105 degrees in Fresno, and you can go up 7,000 feet in an hour and a half, and it's 70, and the water is gushing down.

But that's rare.

It's rare.

And so.

The Romans and Greeks had to do something if they wanted to do more than dry crop.

Dry crop just means you plant barley and wheat in November when it's kind of raining in a Mediterranean climate, and then it comes, it dries out and is harvested in May, and then you're done.

You can't irrigate the land.

But they had what they called kipois, the Greeks' small gardens.

And we know that going back to Mycenaean times, they had aqueduct types and dams.

But because Greece is such a mountainous country and it has the valleys of Thessaly and Boeotia, but not large ones, it was not a natio.

It was not a unified political organization in Greece.

1,500 independent autonomous city-states.

So we should not expect that the Greeks, even though they had the engineering skill, would have massive central, I could use the term, federal projects like the Romans.

And they didn't.

But when you go to Greece, and you start to read about irrigation, you can see it in Plato's laws about roles governing who gets water and who doesn't.

You can look at Mycenaean archaeology and see dams and tiny aqueducts.

I should say aqueducts in the sense of on the ground rather than above the ground.

And then in Greek times, you can see efforts to tap water, say, in the mountains above Attica.

And there's a lot of farms along the foothills of Mount Hymetas, Mount Pentelikos, Mount Penti,

and

other mountain ranges outside of Attica.

In the Peloponnese, Mount Tyegitis explains why Messenia was so fertile below, but there were efforts in antiquity to bring that water down through rivulets.

When you turn to Rome, it's a whole different story because once Rome was federated,

then you see those Pont de Garde.

Anybody's seen that?

The remains of those aqueducts near Nîmes

in France?

They're just spectacular.

And if you want to read about it, I think it's Vitruvius's...

treatise on architecture where he has a whole passage on the sophisticated surveying surveying methods and engineering skill of the Romans to get a slight, you know, I don't know what it was, one or two inches per thousand feet and get that incline from mountain reservoirs and get the water or lakes and get the water, you know, high off the ground so it wouldn't be polluted, you wouldn't have animals in it, and then it would just go into Roman.

And they had seven or eight of these huge aqueduct projects, many of which were used in the medieval Renaissance until recently, modern times but they're quite impressive and again keep in mind that most people want to live and work and farm where there's not a lot of rainfall and most where there's a lot of rainfall and snow most people don't want to live which would lead us into california where two-thirds of the population lives south of San Francisco, but two-thirds, unfortunately, the precipitation, both rain and snow, is north of California.

Yeah, you know, I was just thinking too, I remember being on Delos, and it seemed to me that the guide that we had said that the island itself lost water, and that that's what led to the population leaving it.

Is that common in ancient Greece?

Like, were those islands without water?

None of them had water.

None of the Kiklides, which is one of the, is Delos, the Kiklides,

is in the Klikades or the Circle Islands.

Oh, okay.

Kuklos.

And none of them have, very few of them, Tinos, Andros, have natural springs.

There's an exception.

Naxos, I think, does.

It's a very well-watered.

And then the big ones off the coast, the Dodecanese islands like Rhodes or Samos, they have water, but they're very large islands.

But the windswept, barren, beautiful islands like, as I said, Tinos or Delos or Mikonos, they don't have water.

So they rely today on pumped in water or they have huge cisterns, but there's no natural water.

Santorini, which is the biggest, I think it's the largest tourist hub of all of the Greek islands.

It's got enormous problems.

It has to have water.

It has, I think, a few wells that go way down, but it has cisterns, but most of the water is brought in by ship.

So in antiquity, they were very lightly settled, unlike.

You know, when you hear about tyrants in the 8th century, 7th century, 6th century, they're all in places like Samo or Rhodes or Lesbos.

And those are right off the Turkish Ionian, what is now the Turkish, but then the Ionian coast.

Yeah.

And didn't they build cisterns?

They must have had an idea of how big a cistern they needed to actually survive and irrigate their

crops.

Especially when you have a walled city.

And so the most famous in Mycenaean times is called the Secret Cistern at Mycenae.

Any of you been there?

Now they don't let you go in it.

When I was young in the early 70s, you could get a little flashlight or candle and walk down in it and it had water in it.

And it's from the mountains behind the argolid that fed it.

And it was, there's been calibrations on the cubic meter capacity of it.

It was well enough to keep a city of 10,000 in water.

It doesn't rival, of course, and you mentioned in your introduction, the cisterns of Constantinople, Istanbul.

I think I first went there in 1973, about 50 years ago.

And at that time, they were smelly and dirty, and you you could pay a guy.

It was kind of quasi-run by the military government, but you could go out and there was a guy there with a boat, and he would ferry you around.

And you could even rent a boat.

You had to have a guide with you, but you could paddle.

We paddled all around those cisterns, and there was all sorts of stuff in it.

But that was designed to keep a city of 500,000 people.

well supplied with water during a time of siege.

And the walls of Constantine were probably the most impressive in the ancient world all and for a thousand years from say 400 after he passed away i mean that legacy from 400 a.d all the way to 1453 were pretty stout and they were only really breached once during the fourth crusade they must have known that that water supply source was there constantine must have before he said his system

it's fed by an aqueduct from the mountains around yeah it is

oh wow.

That's interesting.

They have a natural cistern.

Well, most of them were in Athens.

If you go to

so-called Kolonaki district and you go up Dinocratus Street, you'll see the original waterworks of that part of Athens.

And it was based on water coming from Mount Pentelikos, as I think.

the water then came down, it was dammed up there, brought down, and then it was harnessed in a cistern and pumped through the city.

I'm trying to remember when that went out of use, but now Athens is supplied by not just the 1920s, 30s, 40s marathon lake.

Everybody should go see it.

It's an artificial lake.

It's got a little copy of the treasury of the Athenians at Delphi there.

It's above a 15-minute drive from the battlefield up in the mountains.

But most of it comes, if you go to Delphi in a way, you can see this huge aqueduct that the Boeotian mountain ranges, they really are well engineered.

That happened under the Colonels, I think, in the 1960s, where they brought enormous amounts of water to Athens.

Yeah.

Did they ever have trouble in ancient Greece or ancient Rome with water disappearing and its whole civilizations disappearing?

Because I'm thinking myself of they always talk about the Pueblo Indians in the late 16th century losing their water source and having to to migrate down into Texas.

That's a guess of our historians, or even the Mayans going from the lower Yucatan and migrating to the upper Yucatan in the 9th or 10th century, I think it was.

Their theories are that the water sources dried up.

Do we know of those things in Greece or Rome?

There's a big topic in Greece called depopulated cities in the classical period, but most of them

If we just accept what the mystery of why the Mycenaean citadels imploded, there's people who have talked about climate change, but more likely they were so centrally organized and so dependent on such a small cadre of redistribution of scribes and bureaucrats that when they were decapitated and so-called on-surge of the sea peoples, who I guess in mythological terms were the Dorian,

they lost the surrounding administration of farmland and then they were depopulated, but they were on sites.

Remember that about a city or a state that vanishes, usually whether it's the area around Carthage or Thebes or any state or city that's wiped out or Tenochtitlan that Cortel's wiped out, they were there for a purpose.

So usually there's what they call a continuity of culture.

Something takes its place because of the natural advantages originally envisioned.

by the now vanquished.

Jared Diamond, whom I debated, I think twice, he wrote, I guess, you know, Guns, Germs, and Steel.

And then he wrote something, I think it was Collapse.

He's got another book.

And it's a three-volume envisioned project to explain why nature or resource exhaustion or human folly destroys civilization.

But if you look at the examples in that book, I think it was called Collapse.

He picks things like the arid Montana farming project of the late 19th century, where it was very cold, there wasn't a lot of waters.

A lot of people were promised kind of in false advertising style by the railroads, go to Montana and be a rich farmer.

When, you know, that was the background of the Johnson County wars in Wyoming, Montana, and also a lot of the background of movies like Shane, et cetera.

It was not a conducive environment ever for farming.

And the same was true.

say Easter Island that was depopulated or I think I'm talking from memory, but I think Diamond talked about Pit Caron Island, you know, the survivors of the so-called mutiny in the bounty, the mutineers, and Easter Island, and even

Roaneck Island.

But I don't think you could really seriously say that there was a resource problem or a drought or changing climate that caused those new populations that are still mysteries.

Yeah, well, I was thinking also not just so much about a climate disaster, but things like the Indus River changing its course over the hundreds of years and whole cities of course no longer absolutely on its course so they just disappear without water

crisis is yeah we're on a modern example here in California because as I said we had some brilliant brilliant engineers and visionaries in the 1930s all the way up to the 1970s you might as well start talking about is that okay we just take yeah we can go turn to California but let's take a moment for some messages here yeah and we'll be right back.

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Okay, we're back and Victor, yeah, let's talk about California.

Every time we talk about California water, I think the movie by Roman Polanski comes to mind, the Chinatown, and maybe not necessarily in some cases for water, but the mother-sister-mother-sister scene with Faye Dunaway.

But yeah, the conflict over the water rights from Owen Valley, I think, looms large in that movie, well, from that movie.

And then onward and onward in California, other...

problems with getting water to this valley that produces so much agricultural goods.

But go ahead, let's hear about it.

Well, in the case of Los Angeles, the megapolis is, what, 10 million people, and it's got essentially a very limited water table.

So by the 1910s, and people saw that beautiful climate, the mountains around it, but they understood that Wilson or Mount Ball, all of those mountains, they have a limited watershed.

and they were not going to be able to supply the needs of a growing metropolis, megapolis.

I think you're referring to Chinatown when Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway.

It came out in the early 70s, 73, 74.

The subtext was that there were a lot of crooked corporations and government officials who needed water for this real estate transportation empire.

And there was limited places to get it given the restricted watershed.

There's mountains around Los Angeles, but there's surely not enough to support a population of even a million.

And they have a long way to go.

So they had to go up to the Owens Valley, a beautiful valley, and basically pump it dry.

That wasn't enough.

They went to the Colorado River, which is on the border of California, and California asserted its rights, riparian rights.

So they got a lot of water.

And by the way, a rupture in that delivery system created the Salton Sea, which is now shrinking.

And then

that still wasn't enough.

So now they are the ultimate recipients, ultimate in a sense of the final people on the straw that suck out the California Water Project.

You can see those pipelines that go up aqueducts, go over the grapevine into Pyramid Lake and Los Angeles.

I think those are the

greatest climb of any water project.

I don't know what it is, 2,500 feet straight up of any project in existence.

And so when we had these visionaries, in California in the 1930s and 40s and 50s, they understood something that there was no better climate, there was no better farmland and people wanted to live where there was the ocean or there was farmland but there was no water

there was limited water along the sierra nevada the natural watershed from bakersfield all the way up to say red bluff but the problem with that is it was riparian it had about a 30

mile tributary system off the major rivers Sacramento or San Joaquin and their tributaries, but they didn't have enough water to farm all of the availables.

So when you took at the 99 freeway that goes right down the center of the central valley, everything to the east, and I live a mile from it, everything into the east has good water table, always did from eons of snowmelt.

And then everything to the west, much larger area, and in some cases the soil is even richer.

all the way down, let's say, to Kalinga, all the way up past Los Bama, all the way to Patterson, that doesn't have water.

And San Francisco doesn't have water after, and so that was after the fire of 1906.

They had the Hetchachee Project, I think came into being 1911 to 12.

And that tapped what environmentalists now claim was a nicer valley than Yosemite Valley, a Hetchechi Valley.

But the point is that they had to have these long-term transference projects.

And then they hit about something called the Central Valley Project.

That was a federal government, and that was for agriculture.

And they said, you know what?

Half of the valley is not being utilized.

So they went up

and they tapped elements.

All of these were tributaries of the Sacramento basins, but they went way up on the Feather River and things where the Orville and they got the Shasta Dam and I think it was 15 other dams.

And they brought that water down in the California aqueduct and they built the San Luis Project.

When you're on 152, you see that huge san luis lake 3 million acres or so of water 3 million acres feet with the o'neal for bay right below it and that when i was growing up was mostly agricultural and the west side blossomed land that was worth eight or nine dollars an acre became worth a thousand now it's worth thirty thousand

but

it was soon joined by a even more ambitious, not in terms of actual water movement.

The Central Valley Project is huge, but they went up to the Orville Orville area, dammed another tributary of the Sacramento, and they brought more water and joined it with more dams and called that the state, the State California Water Project.

That was largely for municipal use.

And so by about 1970, all the municipal water districts did not have enough water.

Hetchechi was not enough for Silicon Valley in the Bay Area or San Jose.

And then there were communities on the coast, starting with San Luis Obispo, all the way down to Santa Barbara that didn't need it, didn't have enough water.

So what happened when they merged that federal and state projects, the federal government ceded the agricultural initiative to municipal because the population went from 20 million people to 40 million people at a time when they stopped the California Water Project.

So I think the federal project had moved 12 million acre feet and the state maybe four or five five million acre feet.

But when you look at what they were going to do, I mean, gosh, they were going to go up to the Kalamath River and make this Del Rios project.

I think it was 10 million acre feet.

That would probably be the largest artificial lake in the United States.

And so they had projects that would have, right now we'd be flushed with water, but there were environmentalists, Native Americans.

So they stopped essentially half of the project.

And now we don't have 20 million, we have 40 million.

And when almond prices got very high and nut prices, a lot of the west side growers planted permanent crops in that 5 million acres along the coast ranges.

And then the water was cut off from them and transferred to, as I said, San Jose and San Los Obispo and Ventura and Oxnord and all of these laterals off the and then into LA needed more and more.

And today everybody thought it would vanish.

And then they found an aquifer about 10, 15 years ago, way down, not 300 and 400 feet, but maybe 1,500 feet.

And remember, in California, the closer you are to the Sierras, the better the water table.

So where I'm speaking today, it's about 90 feet.

It was 50 feet just three years ago, but because of this drought, it's dropping.

But over there, it can be 1,000 to 1,500 feet.

So they found an aquifer way down there, but it wasn't good water, and they have to mix it.

What I'm getting at, Sammy, is that I think that the entire half of the California almond industry is in big trouble because it depends on west side acreage.

It cannot be supplied with aqueduct water anymore, and it cannot be pumped.

It can't be supplied by wells that are dropping and the water quality is eroding.

Yeah, could I interrupt for a second?

You're talking about a 1500 feet aquifer on the west side of the valley, right?

Because it sounded like you're talking about a 1500 or somewhere down around LA, but I think you mentioned that.

No, no, no, no, the west side.

Yeah, yeah, you can get water, but it's not sufficient for the acreage that's farmed, and it's not of a quality that's sustainable.

It has to be mixed with aqueduct water from Northern California, and that's not

viable.

So these farmers have long-term contracts, but they're not being honored because the water in these reservoirs are being diverted

to municipal districts and B, B, B, B,

the Sacramento and San Joaquin, which are the two great rivers, they have no tributaries like the Feather River up north or the Kings River in these parts.

A lot of the water is being let go, i.e.

it's going all, it's not being tapped fully, and it's going out to San Francisco Bay and the estuaries around it for reasons of water quality, which I don't think were caused by too little deliveries, but by 30 plus municipal districts that were dumping nitrogen-rich treated water into the bay, and they want to flush that out.

And there's a lot of romantic people that want salmon again going up to the Sierras, which I don't think they did very often in antiquity.

They say they did, but these rivers naturally will dry up in the summer unless there are reservoirs.

Starting in 1912, they started tapping the San Joaquin River up at Huntington Lake, Henry Huntington.

Everybody remembers Huntington Library.

That was the nephew, Henry Huntington, of the great Collis Huntington, great in the sense of very wealthy.

And so they started to build these irrigation, and they were recreation, and they were flood control, and they were hydroelectric.

That was created for hydroelectric to transfer 200 miles worth of electricity to Los Angeles and create the trolley system that at one time at Huntington Lake and Big Creek Project supplied half the electricity of Los Angeles.

But my point is that if you want the state to have 40 million people

and you want them to be accustomed to the lifestyle that they've grown up with or they imagine Californians deserve, but you decapitated the natural evolution of the Central Valley Project and the California Water Project, by that I mean you didn't build the third stage of it.

If you look at the plan, the idea was every three or four years, there's gargantuan flooding in California, huge rainstorms as a quirk of nature.

And that water can't be handled just by the higher elevation reservoirs.

So the San Joaquin and Sacramento, and it's mostly Sacramento, it has three times the watershed of the San Joaquin.

They flood.

And Vegley, California, right 10 miles from here, used to have a horrendous flooding about every 10 years.

So there was an idea.

So San Luis Reservoir was going to have something right next to it about 10 or 15 miles south called Los Manas Grand Base, but it was going to be the same size, almost 3 million acres.

And then above Millerton Lake, there was going to be another lake, Temperance Flat.

And at the Sacramento River, they were going to have a side diversion in a wet year called the Sites Reservoir.

If you had built just those three, we're not talking about the huge ones up north at the source of all the precipitation near the Oregon border, but down here, and we're talking mostly about Sierra Nevada water in the case of Temperance Flat,

you wouldn't have a problem now.

You would have right now, three years after a wet year, you would still have enough water to get through this drought this year.

But, boy, you do the worst of both worlds.

I shouldn't say both worlds.

You do the worst imaginable.

You A, up the population to 40 million.

You B, you cut all the reservoirs and you abandon the final tertiary stage of these water projects.

And then C, you begin letting water out of the lakes for salmon.

I think it's $50,000 of salmon to truck them in and stuff, and to restore a 19th century romantic vision of what the Sacramento River or the San Joaquin River should look like.

And then you have real problems.

And so what are those real problems?

People.

start spending an inordinate amount of money to get a longer straw than their neighbor.

So look at California rural communities

and isolated houses in the rural areas or big farmers and imagine each with a straw in their mouth and they're going to go down to this aquifer and suck, suck, suck.

And the guys with the biggest pumps and the deepest wells will suck the most.

And you can already see systems collapse in the sense of driving out across California, let's say from east to west, and you start to see homes and farms that are not, that are empty as you get near the west side as a water table essentially from the 99 it starts to drop about oh 10 feet every mile and by the time you get out to 41 highway 41 or it's down to i don't know two or 300 feet when you get out to highway 33 it's probably down to 800 feet and when you get out to i-5 you're down to a thousand fifteen hundred feet And so that's the problem.

And

you've got to do one or two things.

You got got to tell half the Californians to leave, or you have to say, you know what, we can eat Facebook and drink Twitter and we can have a nice Google sandwich so we don't need farmers.

And we can put another 40 million people here, but no agriculture.

We could do that.

Or we could finish these water projects.

Yeah.

You know, Victor, let's take a moment for some messages and come right back and then talk about California politics to complete this show today.

So we'll be right back.

Welcome back.

And when you talk about water in the valley, since I live here, I often drive by all these ponds.

And I always think, and maybe I'm crazy, but I always think, why don't they just keep these ponds full of water so that it's constantly replenishing at least the aquifer in the area along the 99?

I guess that's where we see most of them.

But they just leave them dry the whole time.

And maybe you can explain that to me and talk to us about the California government's management of its water systems.

Well, when the first ancestor, my ancestors were among the first people to come on the east side of the valley in 1871.

But when they got here, it was advertised as Artesian.

This land that I'm on has a pond.

It did have it.

Some of my siblings sold it, but it had a two-acre Artesian pond.

And as late as 1980,

even in a drought, there'd be two feet of water that would seep up because the water table then was about 30 feet and the pond was down 30 feet.

But what you're getting at is all through this area from primordial times, you would have this huge runoff from the Sierra Nevada.

Nobody was farming or anything.

And the water would flood out the San Joaquin and it would go out the Kings tributaries, the Kern River, the Cahuilla River, etc.

And then they had tributaries that ended in little ponds.

So there were natural depressions all through this area.

So when farming started, they went up to the Sierra and they began damming some of the tributaries of the Kings River and making irrigation districts.

It really took off with a Pine Flat, huge dam on the Kings River.

And as I said, the Big Creek Water Project in Millerton Lake in the 1940s.

At that point,

there wasn't a west side.

So this

area from Bakersfield, as I said, to Sacramento, within 40 miles of the Sierra was like a Garden of Eden.

There was so much water.

There were very little people.

I can remember growing up here in this house.

And although we had huge electric turbine pumps, we never turned them on because you paid a certain amount of money per acre.

We were in the Consolidated Irrigation District.

We had a little farm.

It was in the Alta district.

And these regional districts then had claims on so many acre feet of water coming from the Sierra stored behind Pine Flat Dam.

And you had a ditch tender and he came out to your ranch, kind of a crusty old retired farmer.

And you'd say, I'm just making up a name, but it was the actual name actually.

I'd say, Harold, I got a farm 100 acres, and my turn is coming up.

and I want to turn that water on at two in the morning.

Then there were underground ditches and concrete pipelines.

And then he would take a big lever and open up your little lateral and flood it in.

And then you had to scurry like crazy for like seven days because that was your water.

And then you went in and you opened all your valves and your laterals and you watered.

You got up all night and got it all done.

We're not talking about drip now, surface irrigation down the middle of the row.

And then your neighbor came and he took his turn.

Of course, there were fights where guys would sneak out at night and close your lateral and open theirs.

And my grandfather would tell me of running gun battles in Selma with people who were shooting each other over theft.

I had a neighbor, I won't mention him, who every morning I'd get up and my beautiful furrow irrigation would go halfway down the vine row and I'd, when I went to bed at midnight and I'd come back at six and it was dry.

And then I'd see this guy in the standpipe.

and I'd run over and I'd say, well, you SOB, oh, I don't have heavy soil.

I have sandy, so I have to do this.

Don't get angry.

And he'd do it every time.

And I'd get a lock.

And then the other neighbor would do it you almost got in fights with him but that's what it was about

and then then about every other year wasn't necessarily a deluge but you had a good irrigation year and you each little farm had what they called an overflow pond so if you couldn't everybody on your lateral couldn't farm then you threw it into the ditch we were lucky enough that that lateral pond for our neighborhood was on our property.

So that thing was about an acre and a half and it was about 30 feet deep and it just saturated the water table in this area.

And that was the idea that these irrigation districts were very ecologically sound because for all the waste of surface irrigation, a lot of that water percolated into the water table and what you couldn't use was directed to these ponds.

Now we don't have these ponds or they're there, but they're rarely full, maybe every eight years.

And the reason is twofold.

One, there's more people farming and there's more more residential claims on water.

So a lot of the water, the municipal districts want these ponding bases.

You can see it in Fresno, there's big ponding bases where a large allotment of their canal water is now diverted to cities to recharge their aquifers for pumping.

But more importantly, we're using drip irrigation.

So all of these farms that are now not vineyards anymore, but almond orchards or pistachio orchards.

They're just using just enough

It's so efficient just for the tree, not even for the,

you know, the weeds in the 12-foot row, or in the case of trees, 18-foot row.

So they have these huge orchards, but they have these little micro-sprinklers or drip emitters, and there's no water whatsoever going into the aquifer.

Some guys will build their own ponds and get their water lot and put it in the pond and then pump out of it.

But mostly we're not recharging the aquifer anymore anymore for all of these reasons and we're i don't know what the ultimate future is unless there's a change of government in sacramento but i have a feeling from my interactions and my other schizophrenic personality dr jekyll mr hyde i don't know which is which but

four days of the week i'm mr hyde i guess that i'm over at Stanford.

And among the people I run into who talk about agriculture and water, I found they know nothing, nothing about it.

And they care even less to know anything about it.

And they don't like agriculture and they hate almonds, even though you tell them that you get butter and milk and oil and nuts and bread, all this stuff from it.

They don't care.

They've been told it's a corporate ripoff of their precious water that they could be having a nice rye glass

yard, you know, in Woodside or something.

So they don't like it and they don't think they need it.

And with Facebook, Google, and Apple, and the $5 trillion in market capitalization, they look at agriculture and they say, We don't need you.

But,

you know, California is the wealthiest agricultural state in the Union by value of its crops.

Fresno County is the wealthiest county in the United States.

It's the most efficient agricultural producer in the world.

And it's run not by your caricatured white people.

It never was, in the sense that it was always a magnet for people all over the world who had grown up in Mediterranean climates and had expertise in vines and trees and row crops, but because of social or political conditions, they were denied access to land.

So you've got these brilliant Basque farmers.

You've got these brilliant Greek farmers.

You've got...

thousands of brilliant Armenian farmers.

You've got a lot of these German dairy farmers and Dutch dairy farmers.

You've got a lot of really bright people from Mexico that were farming, but not on the scale they are now.

So when you look at these huge conglomerations, you start to see that they're ethnic people in the sense of non-Anglo-Saxon.

They're Portuguese, Armenian, Greek, Arabic, Basque, etc.

And they had so much work ethic and expertise that they took, you know, they made this into, I'm I'm just looking right out my window, Sammy, and I look over to the south and I see a Japanese family that grew up.

I look to the east,

there was an Armenian family.

I looked to the northeast, there was a Mexican-American family.

I looked due north, there were two Armenian families.

I looked to the northwest, there was a Dutch family.

Dutch-German, and then I looked due west, and there was a Sikh family from the Punjab.

So there was a natural diversity and in a capitalist, very competitive environment, it was amazing to watch people work.

Some of these people, I don't think, ever slept more than four hours a day.

Yeah.

Well, can I maybe try to end this on an inspirational moment?

I'm not sure this is going to do that, but what do you think can be done in California politics to change this?

It seems like the school system and the government are against these new water projects that are so necessary for a doubling of the population from 20 million to 40 million.

I just spoke to a group of dairy people in UC Davis about this.

I think it was the day before yesterday.

And you can't have an active political culture when you have a monopoly of one party.

So right now in California, you have super majorities.

in the legislature.

You have no statewide conservative or Republican office holders, governor, lieutenant, governor, tenant general, control, none.

53 congressional seats, you only have 11, 11, and that's up from seven, Republican.

And you have the most left-wing court in the world in the 9th District Federal Court of Appeal.

Okay.

And most of the money and the population, three-quarters of the population and 80% of the capital is in that left-wing enclave from La Hoya on the coast to Berkeley.

And it's a very strange culture because it's a formation of the following three things.

When the Silicon Valley exploded and the university system was created, it was a coastal enterprise.

So out of the top 20 universities in the world, as Japanese or the English, British have rated them, the Times Educational Supplement, five of them are in California.

Got more top unit research universities than any other nation except the U.S.

Caltech one, then Stanford, and then Berkeley, and then USC and UCLA.

And then you add to that Facebook, as I said, and Twitter and Google and Apple and Oracle, and you've got five,

maybe six trillion dollars of market capitalization.

So that income is so huge that the state just doesn't need to appeal to its entire 40 million population.

And so those people are mostly migrants that came in here in the last 50 years as a result of being between Berkeley and Stanford's research, emphasis on electrical engineering, computers, the carefree, idiosyncratic style of the Bay Area, all of them played a role into sparking what was originally kind of a counterculture, Apple culture.

Brilliant.

and brought in people from all over the world.

At the same time, we had over 20 million illegal aliens come into California.

Half of all the people who came illegally into the United States in the last 50 years came to California.

There were huge battles in the 80s, Prop 187, but that was not like the earlier migrations from northern Mexico, where people came largely in smaller numbers.

They came with some knowledge of English, high school diploma.

This was a different type of migration south of Mexico City from the Yucatan Chiapas, but especially Oaxaca State.

And people were more indigenous.

A lot of them were not fluent in Spanish.

They were much more impoverished.

And they at least initially drew on the California entitlement industry for health subsidies, legal subsidies, educational subsidies, food subsidies, etc.

Okay, so that was the second thing.

At the same time, the proverbial Ronald Reagan, George DeMasian, Pete Wilson, Arnold Schwarzenegger voter that had always made California a red state, said, you know what?

The wealthy people have taken over the bureaucracy and that's the only thing the government listens to.

And they are medieval.

They have these crazy environmental, they're canceling water projects, they're canceling freeways, they're dreaming up all these crazy things in the schools, and then they have a bunch of poor people.

that they subsidize and then they demonize everybody in between, whether they want three strikes in or out or more damn.

So I am leaving.

That was the collective voice of about 8 million people the last 40 years.

This Republican constituency that had voted for those four governors, and they left.

They said, if I am going to pay 10 to 13% income tax, I want the top schools, not 46.

I don't want one-third of all welfare recipients in my state.

I don't want 22% of the population below the poverty line.

I don't want to be rated 49th or 48th like Alabama or Mississippi in infrastructure.

Not when I'm paying that type of money.

So they split to no tax Nevada, no tax Texas, no tax Florida, low tax Montana, Utah, Wyoming, and they left.

And so now we're sort of a medieval society of a coastal elite that's never subject to the ramifications of their own ideology, whether it's on gasoline development, shutting down fracking, shutting down water.

They have enough money from other resources.

They don't care about taxes.

And we have a very poor interior, Inland Empire, Northern California, foothills of the Sierra Nevada, but especially the San Joaquin Valley.

But they have bought a Tesla and they have

converted their gardens to drought-resistant gardens.

Yes.

You can drive.

I just, Mr.

Schizophrenia again, speaking, I drove all around Fresno on errands last week, and I didn't see one Tesla.

So

I went on errands in Atherton, Menlo Park, and Powell.

I'd say a third of the cars were Tesla, $70,000, $80,000, $90,000 of POP.

So, yeah, I mean, if you're making anywhere from $200,000 to $1 million as a mid-level techie or administrator or something to do with Silicon Valley that has global wealth, you can afford to, you know, say that all the people in Fresno shouldn't have charter schools, but they should have teachers unions, but you're not going to.

That's going to be a lavatory that you don't want to participate in.

You want to send your kids to Harker or Menlo School or Sacred Heart or Castleia, or you can say, you know what?

We use too much damn electricity.

And

I don't have an air conditioner or a heater where my office is at Stanford, but I see poor people in Walmart and Selma at 110 in August that go there for the air conditioning.

Or you can say, I don't believe in water transference, but I have my Hetch Echi and California Aqueduct water, but I don't want anybody else to tap into that.

And that's how they are.

I think the high-speed rail is the answer where we put everybody together and

cram them into mass transit and we get union operators and

we advertise to them on the and this is way it's very efficient.

However, I do not want those terminals to be built in San Jose or Talo Alto or San Francisco, not yet at least.

So those yokels down there between Bakersfield and Merced,

why don't you guys, we'll give you the money to practice out, you know, and $15 billion later, we have Stonehenge disaster.

We have these monoliths that are bridges so everybody can see there's something, but not one foot of track has been laid.

And it's destroyed dozens of, I shouldn't say hundreds of farms, businesses.

And meanwhile, the money that went into high-speed rail could have given us a six-lane I-5, a six-lane 101,

and a six-lane 99 and saved thousands of deaths on those decrepit, dangerous highways.

I don't say freeways.

And they don't want that.

They don't, they think, well, you know what?

I don't drive much in Palo Alto.

I kind of drive maybe to, I know people drive from, you know, Hollister in here, but that's not that long.

So,

yeah, give them some nice freeways around the Bay Area, but we don't really care about those other people.

They just drive, you know, gas guzzlers and they're illiterates.

And we don't really like them.

So we'll do high-speed rail.

We'll experiment on them down there.

And if it works, we'll consider it up here.

That's That's how they work.

They always craft these ideas, the utopian fantasy ideas that if they go bad, they'll never hurt them.

It hurts other people.

And that's the same thing about the masking and the shutdowns.

You know, I'd go, I'd be at Home Depot in Selma.

Nobody has a mask on.

And I'd go up there in Stanford and I was, did you get your test today?

And, you know, if you say to somebody in that area,

well, I had COVID and I had two shots, it doesn't matter.

You know,

it was a regimentation.

It was almost like the left was, in this state, goes from crisis to crisis.

When I go to the coast, it's, oh my God, the theft of the 2020 election or the January 6th revolution or the dossier.

or Mueller.

And then it was COVID lockdown.

They have to have a crisis.

And now it's, you know,

nobody's stronger to get Putin out of Ukraine, but my God, they've gone from collusion hating every Russian to hating every Russian who had nothing to do with Putin.

I mean, he's a dictatorship.

But now that's the, Joe Biden is on the, you know, the barricades of freedom.

This is a guy who appeased Putin from A to Z and enabled him.

And the oil policies enabled him.

And every type of deterrence that was destroyed enabled him.

And yet, somehow, this is the latest crisis that we all have to rally around and get all upset about.

And that type of mentality that permeates the United States starts in this state for some reason.

I talked to a guy in Washington once, a very bright guy, I won't mention his name, and he said, You know, I've been thinking and I read a lot of literature and theory.

I can say about every boneheaded idea that ever occurred in the modern United States, it used to be found, its origins, its genesis between Harvard University and Princeton University.

But now I think it's somewhere between,

you know, Berkeley and Stanford in that little 50-mile corridor.

I think you might be right.

Yeah.

You know, you're leaving me with an image of a feudal California with some really wonderful castle-like enclaves on the coast and

Mad Max world here in the inner inner california

california but i was hoping you would leave me with something like that movie big country with gregory peck and gene simmons where at the end everybody's going to share the water from the river but i i have a feeling i'm going to be a little disappointed in that yeah i think you're going to be a little disappointed i am a little optimistic because

Put it this way, if I were to reduce my weekly experiences with coastal people versus the interior people.

The coastal response to every challenge is, oh, oh no, we can't be done.

We've got to consult this person.

Have you talked to him?

We've got to get the lawyers in it.

Oh, I just don't want to hurt the.

And when you talk to people here, okay, let's do it.

And that's what is refreshing.

And that let's do it now.

has been passed on to the immigrant from immigrants that were mostly as i said basque and

poor Europeans and Armenians and Greeks in this area to now the dominant population, Mexican-American.

So when my roof is caving in and it's 40 feet off the ground, I get a licensed contractor and the next thing I know, there's a guy up there way up on the top.

He's a US citizen and he's tiptoeing around with 80 pounds of shingles on his back.

And I said, I don't think you can do that.

Well, I have a scaffold.

Why not?

I do it all the time.

I have a safety belt.

No problem.

If you start talking to somebody like in Palo Alto, oh my God.

And it permeates everything from the teachers here to the teachers there, to truck, everybody.

And so this attitude that we reached Nirvana.

and now we are the chosen few and we can nitpick and adjudicate and regulate and censor and audit everything to the point of fossilization and ossification and calcification

is really demoralizing.

And you really saw it, as I said, with all these crises like COVID or something.

But when you get out in the out, maybe it's, you know, the Romans had this motif that was happening to them and they started to romanticize Germania.

If you read Tacitus' Germania, it was the noble freedom.

Freeheit is a word, you know, for freedom.

It has no Latin or Greek.

cognate.

It's a Germanic word to mean that the natural ease of an open space that inculcates freedom, whereas libertas is the hard work of carving out freedom within a bureaucratic urban society, liberty.

But my gosh, out here, they're still for a while, these free souls that are very can-do, optimistic, and I really admire them.

And,

you know, my decrepit house is falling apart.

and I'm too old to do the repairs myself, wiring or plumbing, which I dabbled in.

And so when I'm hiring all these people,

the roof, the wiring, the insulation, the plumbing, the septic, the painting, the gutters, it's never, oh my God, I just don't know how.

Uh-uh, not me.

It's okay,

this is the job, and here's what it's going to cost you.

And

you come to an agreement, we'll do it.

Get it done.

It's a really, really, I like that audacity, you know, Danton,

La Audacity,

tour journey, La Audas.

Yep.

La Das, Tourjour.

Encore, Encore.

Is it Encore, La Daz?

I think it's more.

Tourjour, Adas, Encore, La En Doss.

Audacity, Audacity, Audacity.

I only mentioned that because George Patton picked that up.

Audacity, more audacity, always Audacity as sort of his motto of the Third Army.

And that was the American trademark that we were so good in that respect.

And you see that in the immigrants that come here that are.

Boy, if you can,

if you have a legal immigrant, if you have a legal immigration system with a secure border and people come in in large numbers, 200,000 a year, and they're diverse and it's merucratic and they come in legally, you got no finer infusion of American citizenry.

But when you open that border to 2 million people and the opposite is true, That's hit or miss.

All right, Victor, we're at the end of our hour here.

So I would like to thank our listeners, and I hope all Californians are listening to this, and that the message is we need our politics to change if we're to survive here in the state, I think.

Absolutely.

Yep.

All right.

Thank you very much, Victor.

Thank you.

And thank everybody for listening.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.