California Tries The Idiocracy

[From article]
Apparently, Pacific-corridor residents from San Diego to Berkeley had acquired the affluence not to worry so much about the old Neanderthal concerns like keeping up freeways and airports — and their parents’ brilliantly designed system of canals, reservoirs, and dams that had turned their state from a natural desert into a man-made paradise. They have become similar to the rarified Eloi of science-fiction writer H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, who live dreamy existences without any clue how to supply their own daily necessities.
[. . .]
In the last five years, they have successfully gone to court to force millions of acre-feet of contracted irrigation water to be diverted from farms to flow freely out to sea.
[. . .]
Unless it rains or snows in biblical fashion in the next 60 days, we could see surreal things in California — towns without water, farms reverting to scrub, majestic parks with dead landscaping — fit for Hollywood’s disaster movies.
Instead of an adult state with millions of acre-feet stored in new reservoirs, California is still an adolescent culture that believes that it has the right to live as if this were the age of the romantic 19th-century naturalist John Muir — amid a teeming 40-million-person 21st-century megalopolis.
[. . .]
In 2014, nature yet again reminded California just how fragile — and often pretentious — a place it has become.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370425/californias-two-droughts-victor-davis-hanson

FEBRUARY 6, 2014 12:00 AM

California’s Two Droughts
An affluent society didn’t bother to add to the inherited system of canals and reservoirs that made it thrive.
By Victor Davis Hanson