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Cadiz Water Grab Gets Weird


What would you think if someone came up with a plan to get rich but told you to your face that it would entail the death of pretty much most life in a vast swath of the Mojave Desert? Would you think it's fine because there's not much of anything out there anyway, and I could use the cash? Or would you stop and think for a moment of all the life that really does exist out in the Mojave - at least, for now?

Well, that's what's going on out near our new (and endangered, thank you Rep. Paul Cook and President Trump - jerks) Mojave Trails National Monument. There, Cadiz Inc. a company founded in 1983 that used to grow grapes that turn into raisins, lemons, and stuff like that out near Amboy, has figured out that if they have water rights, they should have the rights to ALL the water they can steal, errrr.... pump, damn the consequences.

They have proved that they are every bit as skilled in the art of bullshit manipulation as they are in growing crops. They have aptly named their depraved attempt to mine water from the aquifer below their raisins The Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project. This is utter horseshit. They want to steal as much water as they can get their hands on and sell it to places like Rancho Santa Margarita, where, instead of keeping desert wildlife alive instead of wilddead, they can use it for crucial services such as washing cars, watering lawns, and even filling fake lakes with water so southern Californians can forget they live in a land that is, pretty much, desert.

Environmental journalist and sometime contributor to The Sun Runner, Chris Clarke has a great introductory story about this greedy yet stupid project, HERE. And yes, it involves fake lakes for people with more money than brains.

We could argue the scientific points of why the Cadiz plan to get rich from this plan are a really, truly, enormously bad idea, but to sum it up, it comes down to this: Cadiz says the amount of water they intend to pump and sell, some 50,000 acre-feet per year (in a long term average), won't have any impact on the springs and seeps across that rather vast area of the Mojave. They're just "recovering groundwater" that would have just evaporated anyway, right?

Well, maybe. Maybe Cadiz is right. But here's the gamble. The really big, pile it on red and let it ride kind of gamble, where if they win, they win big, but if they lose, so does every animal and insect and plant that depends on the water from that aquifer. It's not like the Desert Bighorn can go buy a bottle of water down in Amboy every time they're thirsty. They'll just die. Quickly.

And Cadiz, to their credit, says they'll monitor the situation. But for those of us who like our desert wildlife alive, that's not likely to be quite good enough. By the time a trend shows up demonstrating there is a drop in water levels, those seeps and springs are probably already dry, and the animals don't have a long time for the trends to be studied before they just drop dead.

Not to say all wildlife would perish. Perhaps ants, and ravens, and turkey vultures might even thrive, chowing down on the rotting carcasses of all the dead wildlife, picking the bones clean and obtaining moisture for themselves in the process. If it doesn't sound like a sustainable ecosystem, that's because it's probably not.

We're not going to even address the facets of this plan that involve imported water storage, as we have very serious doubts about water storage projects in the desert. You know, where someone along the lines of the Metropolitan Water District dumps an unmonitored amount of polluted Colorado River water into the aquifer, along with a healthy dose of perchlorate and other contaminants, and then pulls out an equally unmonitored amount of pristine, perfect water from the aquifer, and calls it even.

The Cadiz plan is bad. Real bad. One of the baddest plans out there. Sad! Oh wait. We're starting to sound like Donald Trump who likes the idea (and knows diddly squat about the environment, and cares even less, having never tread in a national park or monument - at least none that didn't have a golf course).

Now, there is legislation in Sacramento, introduced by Assemblywoman Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), that would prohibit groundwater pumping near protected lands that could harm natural or cultural resources, or wildlife habitat. Assembly Bill 1000, which we wholeheartedly support, could prevent water thefts, errrr..... projects, such as Cadiz, from draining valuable groundwater from the Mojave Trails National Monument and Mojave National Preserve, as well as nearby wilderness areas.

Never mind that San Bernardino County supervisors approved the project despite the fact it violates their own groundwater ordinance. Never mind it could help push the threatened desert tortoise toward eventual extinction, and destroy habitat and water sources for everything from bighorn sheep to those cute (and really fast) Mojave fringe-toed lizards, and even kit foxes.

“The Drumpf administration has put the Cadiz money-making scheme at the top of its infrastructure priority list. California legislators can stop it,” said Ileene Anderson, senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “We know California lawmakers have the courage and foresight to stand up for the state's residents, wildlife, public lands and precious water.

“It's mind-boggling that any elected official would approve unsustainable groundwater mining to fuel further urban sprawl,” Anderson said. “Kudos to Assemblywoman Friedman for not kowtowing to the Drumpf administration and corporate lobbyists. Hopefully this legislation will be adopted quickly and sent to Governor Brown for his signature.”

OK, well in our experience, it's not even surprising, let alone "mind-boggling" that elected officials would do this. Heck, half of them would sell their own grandma if it got them a bigger campaign contribution, or earned them brownie points from the people they brown-nose (or brown neck if they get real enthusiastic). But we get Anderson's point.,

And it's not even all that surprising that David Bernhard, Trump's new appointee as deputy secretary of the interior, is a partner and shareholder in the law firm of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck LLP, which in turn, owns shares in Cadiz and will be handsomely rewarded should the project go through.

Still, opposition to Cadiz continues to rise from the unlikeliest of places, such as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power - the very same LADWP that our readers became intimately familiar with during our Green Path North battle. Yes, an agency that lied directly to the public and said that they were not preparing to build a high voltage power corridor through the hi-desert, including locations like the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve, while their own helicopters were landing surveying teams near our readers' homes finds something like Cadiz to be unsupportable. (We ran our readers' photos of the helicopters and their registration numbers through the FAA database and asked LADWP if someone had stolen their helicopters and flown impostor LADWP survey teams around the desert and they said they'd get back to us. We're still waiting.)

But, and this is where things are getting weird (right now, as opposed to all the prior weirdness). Clarke (you remember Chris, he was introduced about a dozen paragraphs above), evidently spends waaaay too much time on Twitter. In any event, he has found that on August 4, between the hours of 8 to 8:30 a.m. (PST), 27 identical tweets appeared with a link to a story supporting the Cadiz water project. We checked some of the accounts and found them to be rather odd, and quite possibly fake. For instance, one, a "Cynthia Nestor" (there appear to be two Cynthia Nestors with different photos in this list of 27 Twitter accounts, but we're certain it's just a coincidence), is following 19 Twitter accounts, is followed by 30, and has tweeted an astounding 26,214 times since joining in January, 2016. Uh, talk about needing to get a life.

The other Cynthia Nestor who is out tweeting links to the pro-Cadiz story is only following 17 accounts, but is followed by 33. And she's cranked out 27,695 tweets since she joined, also in January, 2016. Her profile states, "I can't go back to yesterday - because I was a different person then." Yeah, we bet you were. Are. Something like that.

Meanwhile, Cynthia Nestor #1, appears to have stolen her/its profile photo from actress Camilla Belle, though the alternative theory here could be that Camilla Belle decided to create a phony identity - Cynthia Nestor - and use it to tweet tens of thousands of utterly useless and ignored tweets over the past 18 months or so. But that seems somewhat unlikely.

It's far more likely that these are Twitterbots, not real people at all. Maybe they're freelancers on Fiverr charging gullible rubes to tweet out their stories to their vast following for $5 per tweet? Whomever/whatever they are, they all got busy that morning urging people to read one particular story supporting Cadiz.

That story was a guest opinion piece written for the Orange County Register (you know, the county that's likely going to benefit from its residents stealing water from the mouths of bighorn sheep and adorable kit fox babies), written by John Hakel, executive director for Southern California Partnership for Jobs.

You can find John's erudite editorial HERE. We strongly disagree with his clearly biased, and environmentally careless, analysis. But at least John appears to be a real person.

Now, we're all for jobs, and we like seeing the people in the communities we serve able to obtain meaningful employment. We just don't like pitting a relatively few permanent jobs vs. a pile of dead wildlife. We don't think it's a good bargain for anyone. Other than the folks getting rich from the slaughter, that is.

Members of the Southern California Partnership for Jobs include the Associated General Contractors of California, the Building Industry Association of Southern California, the Engineering Contractors' Association, the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 12, the Southern California Contractors Association, and LiUNA!, Southern California District Council of Laborers, a chartered district council of the Laborers' International Union of North America.

It's sadly disappointing that organized labor, which frequently supports a healthy environment for their families and others, has decided to throw its lot in with a plan that could rob their grandchildren of the chance to experience a relatively healthy desert ecosystem, with the wildlife and beauty that entails.

It may very well be that taking the side of wildlife, indeed the entire concept of life itself for a large portion of the Mojave Desert, is jumping in on the losing side of the battle. After all, on the other side are the enormous urban power of southern California's more coastal communities with their fake lakes and green lawns, a federal government that, outside of Senator Dianne Feinstein, seems inclined to obliterate our deserts, grifters running the Department of the Interior, a president who has virtually no understanding of the value of wild lands and the life they support, and greed - vast and powerful reserves of it being artfully employed.

For what it's worth, we, and a good number of our readers (if not all of them), will stand on the side with the bighorn, the desert tortoise, the kit fox, and those cute little lizards we love so much. Screw Cadiz and their greed. Screw the OC's fake lakes and verdant green lawns. Screw a DOI with officials who clearly have a conflict of interest. Screw our president who is passionate about golf courses with his name on them, but could care less about our national parks and monuments - the most valuable treasures of our nation. Screw the phony Twitterbots that spread fake support for the project. Screw our Congressman Paul Cook for not standing up for the non-human residents of the district he purportedly represents. And screw the Southern California Partnership for Jobs and its executive director who doesn't either understand what's at stake, or care, as he probably lives in one of those $2.5 million homes on the shores of some damned fake lake.

View a screenshot of Chris Clarke's Twitter discovery HERE.

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