Fraudulent Federal Environmental Protection Hurts Humanity

By Douglas Arthur Tuma

"Environmental disaster" at Kesterson "National Wildlife Refuge" is actually property rights disaster at Washington DC

Environmental protection political activists (EPPAs), both inside and outside of government, subvert public sentiment for nature into blind support for communist congressional reallocation of federal water supply and drainage dedications from San Joaquin Valley west-side farm owners to wildlife managers for mitigation of alleged adverse environmental impacts caused by federal Central Valley Project (CVP) water development.

Lurid images of horribly deformed waterfowl embryos, thousands ­ some report tens of thousands ‹ of migratory waterfowl, deprived of 95 percent of their native California wetlands by water project development, poisoned in a "National Wildlife Refuge", shock, scare, and outrage nature lovers. EPPAs pronounce their verdict: "environmental disaster", "toxic agricultural wastes". They mutter about huge, rich, subsidized, greedy corporate agribusiness. Mesmerized minds of California voters get imprinted with this sensational story and elect politicians to save us from capitalist exploitation.

Congressmen raid dedications of federal water to California farms and cut off natural drainage without just compensation, sending a message that they can break prior dedications at will, reallocate resources at will, and command and control industry at will. In effect, congress practices communist central planning decision-making. Raising a battle cry of "making the world safe for democracy" current national leadership exalts democracy and its majority rule decision-making. Property rights and free markets are ridiculed.

Consequently, the market value of affected farms and associated loan collateral and investments have vanished like capital in a fallen stock market, depressing business and employment opportunities. Less crop production for the Central Valley's export market reduces efficiency of existing infrastructure and raises consumer prices. This depression of California crop production occurs while global market demand grows, increasing incentives for more crops to be harvested from new farms cleared from tropical rain forests ­ out of sight for Californians, out of mind.

True environmental disaster: species extinction

The extinction of species by tropical rain forest clearing is a true environmental disaster. Extinct species are gone. Their populations don't recover, don't come back. Extinction is irreversible. Geologic records indicate that perhaps 95 percent of all species that have ever lived on earth are extinct. A lot of them I don't miss. I can do without flying dinosaurs. But we should learn from the evidence. The evidence indicates that as much as three-quarters of all species living 65 million years ago were wiped out at one time. A true cataclysm. Are we prepared to face a repeat of that event or worse?

No. People giggle rather than think about species protection priorities. If the world burns tomorrow in nuclear fire or freezes under a blanket of atmospheric debris and soot kicked up by a major extraterrestrial impact, we will cross that bridge when we get to it. We haven't been concerned before, why start now?

Eventual extinction for all species, including humans, is ­ for all we know ­ inevitable. But why rush the process? The joy of living includes the satisfaction of survival. Longer survival, longer satisfaction. Humans could learn from the survival of other species. Their loss is our loss.

Many ecologists find that tropical rain forests support more species diversity and abundance than any other ecosystem on earth. Estimates of deforestation rates indicate that half of the tropical rain forests have been cleared, and the remaining could be lost in the next five decades.

Immediate dangers: filtered news

Tropical rain forests are not in California's back yard. We don't care. The alarm raised by ecological cataclysmists advocating terrestrial salvation from human induced species extinction seems overwrought. It is out of context of "The Sacramento Bee" (Bee) news about more immediate and recurring dangers: miscreants, terrorists, drug dealers, Republicans, etc.

Bee readers are led to focus their concerns on issues dealing with under-funded public schools, welfare, health care, prisoner care, environment care, etc. Obviously, the Bee cares. No wonder its readership cares. So we vote to raise taxes to pay for all of this caring. Obviously, the rich are not being charitable enough or we wouldn't read about all this human suffering in the Bee. So tax the rich. By that criteria, all of us who pay taxes are rich. If we complain we must be greedy. Greed is politically incorrect.

Bee readers get regular doses of hate for inanimate objects: people-killing guns, river-killing dams, Delta-killing peripheral canals, smolt-killing export pumps, wetland-killing farms, and waterfowl-killing agricultural drainage.

Since a lot of California's state and federal offices are in Sacramento, the Bee influences government staff, subliminally hypnotizing government decision-makers. Accordingly, government policy is made by the Bee. I've known a few government employees during my federal career and for the most part found them pleasant company. They hold a diversity of ideas. Just like conscientious workers anywhere. And usually they are discreet about their individual political and religious beliefs.

And like us, government employees become true believers in common popular political and religious movements, including the currently dominant environmental movement. And there are a lot of EPPAs, including the Bee, that push intolerance against those who resist the EPPA agenda. Any anti-government idea is categorically extremist. Any anti-EPPA idea is categorically anti-environmentalist and, presumably, anti-environment. Which makes no more sense than presuming an anti-creationist idea to be anti-religion. But it is this lack of sense that treats anti-EPPA ideas like political leprosy, discouraging anyone bearing such ideas from coming out of their ideological closet.

Government policy is guided by political leadership which is guided by focus groups which are guided by news media and a host of EPPAs. The voters are called upon to elect representatives based on what they hear in the news. The issues and choices are rigged by a media­government complex. Government schools mold individual minds into conformity. Alternative ideas are ridiculed without reason. Government takes care of everything and everybody. We must be living in utopia. Not.

Pernicious and dehumanizing: fascism and communism

Yes, I believe there are immediate, pernicious, and dehumanizing dangers. And they are not identified in the Bee by their old names: fascism (violent national socialism) and communism. But these ideologies live on in the environmental movement, nourished by EPPA propaganda. The damage done by EPPAs is extensive and escalating. It is not just exacerbation of mass extinctions; it is programmed stupidity. We are not rich enough to be chronically stupid. Stupidity is the ultimate terminal disease for humanity. EPPA's planet-centric myopia can get our own species killed.

Certainly, if we saw a repeat of the disaster of 65 million years ago, or even a repeat of the last ice age (only 10 thousand years ago), we would be scrambling for our own survival. Maybe even leaving the planet. And saving a few other, otherwise earth-bound, species that we choose to take with us.

But learning how to survive safely and efficiently so we will be prosperous enough to overcome unexpected risks is a task we will always carry with us. It is a task that can be easier if we learn how other species survive. It is a task that is made easier by learning to recognize truth and suspect deception.

Easier tasks allow more liberty, more choice of options in an individual's life ­ more freedom. Tasks made more difficult by a dominating master, ruler, king, communist, or federal bureaucrat deprive liberty, deprive voluntary choices ­ deprive freedom.

Driving species to extinction through negligence is not just a disaster for the vanquished, it bodes ill fortune for those who fail to learn survival lessons from the lives of others. Anytime the capacity of human understanding is denied appreciation of a unique species of wildlife due to negligent extinction, a potential opportunity for survival is missed ­ a human tragedy.

The negligent extinction of a lot of species in our own lifetime is not just an environmental disaster. It is a human failing. When I see this human failing made worse by fraudulent federal environmental protection policy, I see a crime against humanity.

False environmental disaster: infant mortality

Infant mortality, unless it causes species extinction, is not an environmental disaster. It may be a personal disaster to human parents who have few children. But wildfowl, like most species, use a shot gun approach to species survival ­ lay as many eggs as possible to increase the chance that two might survive to carry on the instinct and genetic code of the parents. To maintain a stable population ­ to defuse a population explosion and consequent mass starvation when available food fails to feed ­ premature mortality is naturally necessary.

Species survival depends on a rate of recruitment of intelligent adults not less than the mortality rate of reproducing adults. Other biological and social details are optional: how the intelligence is passed on, instinct or education; how the breeding is accomplished, monogamous pairs, promiscuity, a few drones and fewer queens, or asexual cloning; how the recruitment of young adults is achieved, small to large percentages of surviving fertilized eggs, small to large percentages of surviving infants, or small to large percentages of surviving juveniles.

Options for survival are increased when tasks are made easier. The effort invested in the task of reproduction increases as more effort is invested in nursing and educating immature offspring. Any loss of wanted offspring is a parent's personal tragedy. But the loss of a parent's effort to have offspring becomes more tragic to both parents and species as more of the parents' life is consumed without reproductive success.

Parental investment in a child's development and education for eighteen years, only to be lost to government conscription for slaughter in foreign wars, is a true tragedy. A greater tragedy than a loss of a less mature offspring. A far greater tragedy than a loss of an infant. The loss of an embryo or hatchling hardly impedes parents from more successful future attempts in raising offspring.

Humanity: individual liberty

But reproductive success does not define humanity. At least not for those committed to preserving the best qualities of mankind ­ humane virtues: kindness, benevolence, tenderness, mercy, etc. And for those who understand that such altruistic, unselfish concern for the welfare of others, is more effective in a society with more to give. Getting more to give involves learning how to make tasks easier. Learning how to use resources more efficiently and safely. Learning how to separate truth from deception.

All the human investment in peaceful, civil, social development for thousands of years only to be lost to fraudulent government programs based on deception seems to me to be the ultimate human tragedy. The struggle for individual liberty, freedom of choice in a just society, has fought for millennia against tyranny with the persuasion of reason ­ the unique gift to decide what is true and what is not. A gift to each human. A gift of equal opportunity to reason, decide, and act upon one's own choice. A gift of management authority. A gift of property ownership.

Right to life without liberty: individual will

I say there is no right to life without liberty for fertilized eggs, infants, juveniles, or even adult wildlife in nature. Right to life is a human social contract. It is dependent on individual will to decide the protection of liberty. I will not indiscriminately defend right to life for all humans from conception to artificial life support without considering rights to liberty among relevant individuals. An individualıs right to liberty is conditioned by justice that restrains forceful interference with the equal rights of others. I have no desire to protect predatory, parasitic humans or non-humans. I reserve to myself the right to choose which non-humans to support. I object to government usurpation of my right to choose which wildlife I wish to save.

Ugly deformaties and death: not disaster

Most hatchlings perish before maturity. Whether they look good or ugly before death is no consequence to the surviving population. Whether they die of predation, disease, parasites, weather, starvation, abandonment, or selenium toxicosis makes no difference to the surviving population as long as normal net mortality rates are not exceeded. Normal net mortality rates were not exceeded for total populations of every bird species that nested at Kesterson. There was no disaster to the populations of any of the bird species that had reproductive failures at Kesterson.

Ugly deformities that do not increase mortality rates are not an "environmental disaster". To claim otherwise would be wrong. Government wildlife refuge managers, environmental assessment analysts, and EPPAs who claim otherwise should know better. We should suspect such expert opinions to be fraudulent and motivated by some human will to deceive. We should understand and embrace the human spirit that compels such deception if we hope to remain free from its harm. We should learn to recognize deception and fraud. We should look for evidence of a larger hoax that compels people to commit fraud.

Kesterson hoax: retrospection

The essence of what I regard to be the Kesterson hoax was neatly captured in the lead paragraphs of a report in the December 4, 1995 issue of "Capitol Weekly" by June Gin.

"In the early 1980's, a major national environmental disaster occurred at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge. Toxic agricultural wastes were dumped into storage ponds in the refuge. Selenium concentrations in the refuge became accumulated and killed and deformed thousands of resident and migrating waterfowl and other wildlife in the San Joaquin Valley.

In response to a public enraged over the issues, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation closed the San Luis Drain in 1986 to contain the movement of the agricultural wastes. The Drain, built from 1968 to 1975, was originally planned to run 188 miles to the San Francisco Bay/Delta. The only portion of the Drain that was completed ran from Kettleman City to Merced County, covering 85 miles. Because of the selenium pollution problems in the area, known as the Westlands Water District, the drain was closed."

Tom Harris, former staff writer to the Bee, offered the following observations in the summer 1993 issue of "The Amicus Journal", regarding a "Sixty Minutes" report on or about March 10, 1985 and the subsequent drain closure.

"Kesterson made national headlines. It was featured on the popular television news program '60 Minutes,' with co-anchor Ed Bradley standing over eerily silent ponds and demanding of a flustered federal Bureau of Reclamation spokesman, 'Who's responsible for this?' The high-level attention raised fears that even then-Interior Secretary Donald Hodel might face criminal charges for allowing the carnage to continue.

The fear of personal prosecution and a continuing barrage of bad press forced Hodel's hand. He ordered the federal reclamation agency to plug the farm drains leading to Kesterson, to de-water its evaporation ponds, and backfill them with dirt from surround-ing levees."

Russell Clemings, on leave from "The Fresno Bee", gave the following account in the Vol. 13, No. 1, 1990, issue of the "APF Reporter" (published by the Alicia Patterson Foundation) of Hodel's closure order.

"Eventually, a neighboring landowner, Jim Claus, decided he'd had enough. Claus petitioned the state Water Resources Control Board to order the flow of drain water stopped. On Feb. 5, 1985, the board did just that, ordering the Bureau to stop the flow of the drainage into Kesterson and purge it of selenium within three years.

By that time, Kesterson had become the biggest news in the valley. On March 15, George Miller, a Contra Costa congressman who had just become chairman of the House subcommittee on water and power resources ­ the Bureau's overseer ­ called a field hearing on Kesterson at the Los Banos fairgrounds. It was there that the other shoe dropped.

Carol Hallett, a special assistant to Interior secretary Donald Hodel, was the first major witness. Eleven sentences into her testimony, she dropped a bombshell: 'Policy-level officials in Washington have concluded that because the hazing program at Kesterson has not proven to be as effective as was hoped, and because of the prohibitions of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, immediate action must be taken ...' she said. 'Therefore, the secretary has instructed the Bureau of Reclamation and the Fish and Wildlife Service to begin the process of shutting down the Kesterson reservoir. This process will result in plugging the San Luis Drain and stopping the delivery of irrigation water to the lands which drain into the reservoir.'"

Self-help: value-laden words

The reason why I am running for congress is because I think it gives me an opportunity to share my experience in detecting government fraud. I feel that my civil service career is incomplete if people continue to believe what I think is a federal government hoax. Especially if I think I can explain why it is a hoax.

Belief in a hoax depends on an individual's willingness to believe. Let me use this opportunity to suggest three criteria that a person could use to help decide what to believe. A short self-help guide.

1. verifiable claims

2. consistent reasoning

3. inclusion of relevant natural context

Based on what we believe to be true, we can be more confident in determining our access to available resources, our analysis of how best to use those resources, and our action to achieve what we want. I also have recommendations for those three activities, but first we have to decide what is true.

Unverifiable claims: intangibles

What claims in the above reports can be verified? Anything that can be located in time and space. What can not? Anything intangible: thoughts, opinions, values, etc. Such intangibles can be sampled. Which is what we do when we vote. Then we get a polling of opinion. And the opinion may change in time. Sacramento residents may eventually change their mind about which political party would give them the best candidate for their congressional representation. Opinions require repeated sampling to be verified.

Let me suggest that Gin's use of the words "major", "disaster", "toxic", and "dumped" carry value judgments. I recognize these values to be those of the current majority. Which is why I'm running for congress. I believe these value judgments are wrong. Others who agree with my view now have an opportunity to show their agreement by their vote. Eventually, my minority opinion may spread and become a majority opinion. Until then we can watch its progress at each election and direct our persuasion efforts as we think will be most effective to gain and maintain majority opinion. Sharing ideas on how to recognize possible fraudulent influence in value-laden words ought to be beneficial to everyone.

Faulty reasoning: jumping to conclusions

Consider these words by Harris: "eerily silent", "raised fears", "might face criminal charges", and "carnage". In the opinion of the writer, these words may be truly appropriate. Or perhaps out of self interest, out of promotion for his writing career, he tries to raise readership attention by raising alarm. To make his report sensational, he stretches the potential for disaster, obscuring and excluding countervailing evidence, jumping to conclusions, and relying on unverifiable claims. His special interest might be to influence his readers to believe these words carry appropriate value judgments. By distorting truth, he perpetrates a hoax.

Relevant context: consistency: belief

Consider the words by Clemings. Which are value-laden? I don't see any. I might trust Clemings to give a report more truthfully than Harris. I might believe Clemings makes more of an effort to report without political or religious bias.

Are these three excerpts sufficient to believe any of these writers are either promoting or not promoting a political or social agenda with their choice of value-laden words? Not for me. I might suspect. But before I believe, I want to read more of their writings to be assured that their bias, if any, is consistent. I want the benefit of familiarity with their work and understanding of their reasoning, faulty or not, before I believe what I see. I want more relevant context.

What I see may well be more than what they see if I manage to evaluate the opinions of others on related topics. All of this reading to find context of consistency and diversity among opinions takes time. Which is why I have more respect for those who have spent their lives in pursuit of truth rather than fantasy. And for those who have lived longer. Because by virtue of living longer they have seen more context by which to compare relative values and better judge priorities.

As we live our lives we perform actions based on what we believe. Our accomplishments record our actions. And I believe action speaks louder than words to those looking for what truly works and what doesn't.

I believe what truly works is based on consistent reasoning. Consistent reasoning seems to tie every value into a coherent pattern. It explains why things behave the way they do. It is our view of reality. It is our philosophy.

Based on my understanding of how our world works and my review of several other items Harris has written ­ articles, a book, and a speech ­ on Kesterson, I see Harris as an EPPA. I presume his writing in the Bee has influenced many of the residents of Sacramento. I presume they have been influenced by his promotion of an environmental political agenda. I presume that influence has helped elect Democrats for many years. I believe that influence has been reinforced by the value-laden rhetoric of so many other EPPAs for so long it has become a fundamental religion.

I see Gin as a reporter who has let any latent objectivity fall under the influence of writers for the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), an obvious EPPA organization. The numerous references Gin has made to EDF as the source for her material is consistent with that observation.

Now that I've explained what I mean by EPPAs and the value-laden words they use to promote their political agenda to get government to force others to pay for what they want, I hope such value-laden words will be more noticeable.

EDF's story: value-laden rhetoric

The following account of Kesterson events is taken from EDF's 1994 document "Plowing New Ground, Using Economic Incentives to Control Water Pollution from Agriculture".

"In California's Central Valley alone, over 500 river miles are polluted by farm runoff, and irrigation drainage adversely impacts nearly all of the wetland acreage. Indeed, the nation's attention was riveted on the Grasslands region of the Central Valley in 1983, when farm drainage caused extensive deformities and deaths of several species of birds in the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge.

Yet for all the concern such environmental damage has focused on agricultural pollution, meaningful cleanup has been elusive. Here too, the Grasslands region of California is a microcosm of the nation. Following the disaster at Kesterson, a series of in-depth studies demonstrated that drainage reduction at the individual farm level (achieved via improvements in irrigation efficiency and selective land fallowing) can largely solve the problem. However, despite a broad consensus that this solution is the right one, and despite ample authority under state law to implement it, formal mechanisms to require pollution reduction have not yet been adopted, and the nearby wetlands and river are still at risk."

"In the 1960s, farmers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley began to install subsurface drains and drainage canals to collect, transport, and dispose of saline drainage water. The long-term plan, conceived as a partnership among state, federal, and farming interests, was to construct a 188-mile concrete drain in the trough of the San Joaquin Valley to carry drain water to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Construction of a segment of this San Luis Drain began in 1968 and included a regulating reservoir in the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge. When construction of the San Luis Drain was halted in the mid-1970s because of financial and political problems, Kesterson Reservoir became its terminus.

By 1983, approximately 7,000 acre-feet(25) of drainage, primarily from subsurface drains in Westlands Water District, was being delivered to Kesterson each year. Shortly thereafter, biologists from the FWS discovered unusually high rates of embryonic deaths and deformities among birds in the area. Of the nests under study at Kesterson, almost 20 percent contained deformed baby birds, and over 40 percent contained at least one dead embryo.(26) Only one species of fish, the hardy gambusia (mosquito fish), could be found.

The biologists attributed these shocking findings to elevated concentrations of selenium(27) present in subsurface agricultural drain water in the San Luis Drain. Selenium had accumulated in invertebrates and plants in the food chain, leading to severe effects on the birds that fed on them.

The discovery of the impacts of selenium in agricultural drainage at Kesterson was serendipitous. Several factors converged to allow researchers to detect its adverse effects. Kesterson is a federally protected national wildlife refuge, and biologists were frequently working in the field; the documentation of actual deaths and deformities might not have occurred in an unprotected area. Moreover, the impacts of selenium toxicity were clearly observable in young birds; sublethal effects in adult birds would have been more difficult to observe. In addition, Kesterson is a closed basin with no other water source, which accelerated the rate of accumulation of selenium and other elements to harmful levels. Where drainage is disposed of in open, flowing water bodies, this type of impact would have been far more difficult to detect.

The order to close Kesterson Reservoir came in 1985, but the problems of managing and disposing of contaminated agricultural drainage are far from solved and pose a continuing threat to biological resources in the San Joaquin Valley. Next door to Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, private wetlands in the Grassland Water District, as well as other public wetlands, also had been contaminated.(28) For many years, the Grasslands region had been receiving up to 29,000 acre-feet of similarly contaminated drain water as a supply for duck habitat.(29) Because the drain water was mixed with clean water in the Grasslands wetlands, contamination was not as severe as at Kesterson.

In 1985, following the discoveries at Kesterson Reservoir, the Grasslands wetlands stopped using drain water and, through a series of temporary conveyances, it was routed to the San Joaquin River. Since that time, the river has consistently exceeded selenium standards. However, resulting damage to fish populations has been difficult to detect due to a lack of baseline information, especially on sensitive species.(30)"

"(25)An acre-foot of water, approximately 326,000 gallons, is enough water to cover one acre of land one foot deep and to meet the average annual (domestic) water needs of a family of five.

(26) Ohlendorf et al. 1986. For additional information, see Ohlendorf et al. 1988; Hoffman and Heinz 1988; Skorupa and Ohlendorf in Dinar et al. 1991.

(27) Selenium is essential to human and animal health in small quantities, but it can be toxic when it is ingested in large quantities, leading to reduced reproduction, reduced survival, reduced growth and deformities in fish and wildlife species.

(28) The biological impacts of agricultural drainage are not limited to the Grasslands Region. Elsewhere in the San Joaquin Valley, evaporation ponds are still widely used for drainage disposal. The ponds are known to attract migratory waterfowl and other aquatic birds, posing a significant risk to these populations (CH2M Hill et al. 1993). Currently, there are approximately 7,000 acres of evaporation ponds in the San Joaquin Valley; plans have been made to build between 10,000 and 20,000 additional acres of ponds (San Joaquin Valley Drainage Program 1990b).

(29) During the 1970s and 1980s until the disaster at Kesterson Reservoir, up to 50% of the water used in wildlife areas in the Grasslands region consisted of agricultural drainage and other 'surplus' waters (San Joaquin Valley Drainage Program 1990b).

30) Saiki et al. 1991. For additional information on elevated concentrations of trace elements in fish tissues from the area, see Saiki 1985; Saiki and May 1988."

(continued after Position Paper 2)