A rural revolt is brewing (Warning: Teaper nonsense)

[XemaSab]

The nearly five-hour drive from the Sacramento area to Yreka was a reminder not just of the immense size and beauty of California, but of the vast regional and cultural differences one finds within our state.

Sacramento is Government Central, a land of overly pensioned bureaucrats and restaurant discounts for state workers. But way up in the north state, one finds a small but hard-edged rural populace that views state and federal officials as the main obstacles to their quality of life.

Their latest battle is to stop the destruction of four hydroelectric dams along the Klamath River — an action driven by environmentalists and the Obama administration. Most locals say the dam-busting will undermine their property rights and ruin the local farming and ranch economy, which is all that's left since environmental regulators destroyed the logging and mining industries.

These used to be wealthy resource-based economies, but now many of the towns are drying up, with revenue to local governments evaporating. Unemployment rates are in the 20 percent-and-higher range. Nearly 79 percent of Siskiyou County's voters in a recent advisory initiative opposed the dam removal, but that isn't stopping the authorities from blasting the dams anyway.

http://www.redding.com/news/2011/nov/01/steven-greenhut-a-rural-revolt-is-brewing/?comments_id=918536

[TwilightGardener]

1. "Overly pensioned"--no slant there.

[hatrack]

2. "These used to be wealthy resource-based economies, but we dug up/cut down everything . . .

. . . and now we want the government we publicly despise to help us with money - lots and lots of money."

[RaleighNCDUer]

3. What is really 'amusing' is that the rural populations in the past

were the ones who opposed building the dams in the first place, because they flooded out fertile floodplain farm lands just to provide electricity to urban areas.

Irrigation technology is improved so much over the past 75 years that they can probably irrigate nearly as well without the dams as they could with them. What they'll have to do is go back to using many tributary dams, as they used before the big river dams were built.

Small dams have always been natural to the environment - only difference is where beavers once built them, now people do. Big dams have never been natural and are extremely destructive to the environment and if there is anyone who should have an affinity for the environment it should be the local ranchers and farmers. (Of course, how many of those 'local' ranchers and farmers are actually Big Agriculture corporate entities?)

[Viking12]

4. Author is a libertarian asshat.

A 'scholar' at the ALEC controlled, Exxon funded "free-market" Pacific Research Institute where the motto is privatize everything, including water resources.

[tularetom]

5. Those counties are the CA equivalent of red states

They consume far more in revenues than they contribute in tax dollars, and they have a disproportional role in the legislature.

Without the federal and state dollars spent on Shasta and Oroville Dams, I-5, Sacramento River flood protection, timber sales in national forests etc., all of California from Sacramento to the Oregon border would basically be nothing more than a bazillion acres of dry grazing land - 1 cow per square mile. The economy in these counties does suck but it would suck a lot worse if it weren't for the piles of money paid in the form of crop supports and other subsidies.

The only people who have the right to remove dams on the Klamath River are the people who paid for them - the taxpayers of the United States of America.

[hunter]

6. A large population of Native Americans lived there without dams...

... for a long, long time.