California: Huge new water deal based on Nature Con-Schwarzenegger influence peddling

What works in forest / environmental protection & restoration is when
the campaign is born of a specific place on the landscape. Yet, that spirit
of place too often gets silenced before even being heard. And what’s
worse is when those who don’t know those places act as though they can be
trusted to represent their ecologic interests. And when heavily
leveraged eco-protection groups get larger and larger their campaigns
ability to generalize / squander that sense of the value of that
specific place increases.

So when it comes to international operations as big as the Forest
Stewardship Council and the Nature conservancy the dilemma extends so
far to an extreme that the business agenda of mega-size eco-group
appears to be just as conflicting, exploitive and manipulative as the
politician and corporations they “negotiate” with. More to the point
it’s start to look more like simply the dividing up of the loot.

Such is the case in this huge new water deal the Nature Conservancy’s
doing with Schwarzeneger. This plan may submerge and destroy many
trees, many specific places, many vital ecologic functions. What this
article is about is Nature Conservancy permanently integrating
themselves into state bureaucracy for greater funding and greater
sense of empire. And what will Nature Con be willing to give up for
this privilege? http://forestpolicyresearch.com

Nature Conservancy, a group infamous in conservation circles for
trading environmental principles for the acquisition of land
throughout the world, on Wednesday joined Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s campaign to build a peripheral canal to divert water
from the Sacramento River around the California Delta to subsidized
corporate agribusiness in the San Joaquin Valley. The organization’s
announcement came five days after the Governor’s hand picked Delta
Vision Committee released its plan to break ground on a peripheral
canal by 2011 – without the approval of the Legislature or voters.
Bill Jennings, executive director of the California Sportfishing
Protection Alliance, also blasted the Conservancy for its support of
the peripheral canal – and depicted the group as the Judas of the
environmental community. “Judas only got 40 pieces of silver for his
betrayal,” said Jennings. “In contrast, the Conservancy will reap
millions from their support of the canal.”

Arnnie's Changed

He quipped, “There is so
much interchange between the personnel of the Nature Conservancy and
the Department of Water Resources (DWR) that they are a defacto
subsidiary of DWR.” Jennings emphasized that the canal would do
nothing to solve the California Water Resources Control Board’s over
allocation of “paper water.” While the total outflow of water from
Central Valley watersheds into the Delta is an average of 29,000,000
acre feet of water annually, the Board has allocated “water rights” of
245,000,000 acre feet of water to subsidized agricultural diverters
and other users! The Nature Conservancy’s dark, unholy alliance with
Schwarzenegger occurs at a time when California’s fisheries are in the
greatest crisis ever.

Arnnie's fat lip

The Governor has presided over the collapse of
the Delta’s pelagic species, including Delta smelt, longfin smelt,
threadfin shad and juvenile striped bass, and Central Valley chinook
populations. Massive water exports out of the Delta, combined with
declining water quality, toxic chemicals and invasive species, are the
key factors behind these unprecedented fisheries disasters. The
peripheral canal, in spite of all of the Conservancy’s eco-babble,
will exacerbate the deplorable state of California and West Coast fish
populations and the group must be exposed for being a willing partner
in the estuary’s destruction. A series of articles in the Washington
Post, “Big Green: Inside the Nature Conservancy,” document the
organization’s history of paying exorbitant salaries to its top staff,
conflict of interest in its “restoration” programs, and collaboration
with global corporations in one green washing scheme after another.
http://www.counterpunch.org/bacher01092009.html

— Posted to http://forestpolicyresearch.com via gmail to posterous and
also to forestpolicyresearch@yahoogroups.com

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