Carly

“The health of our water is the principal measure of how we live on the land.”  Luna Leopold While Texans brace for Emperor Obama’s military invasion, Californians continue to pray for rain. With 93.4% of the state in its fourth year of “severe drought," a beautiful sunny day is an oxymoron and the clouds have no rain.

Carly Fiorina knows why. The latest contestant in the Republican presidential sweepstakes, Fiorina’s main claim is that she ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground, the difficulty of which should not be underestimated. Her analysis of the drought is equally unsettling. “Droughts are nothing new,” she wrote recently. The problem this time is not nature. It’s people, specifically “overzealous liberal environmentalists” whose policies “allow much of California’s rainfall to wash out to sea” instead of being diverted to Central Valley cantaloupe farmers. “It comes down to this: Which do we think is more important, families or fish?”

This is nonsense. Anyone who thinks that a drop of water making it to the ocean is wasted should visit the once-mighty Colorado, which has been so thoroughly dammed and diverted (4.4-million acre feet a year to California alone) that it hasn’t flowed regularly to the sea since 1960. Its estuary has become a poisoned trickle. We’re the problem all right: we’re killing the river.

A river is not a pipe. It’s an ecosystem that, if we care for it, will return huge benefits – including fish. Our health depends on its health. The answer, Ms. Fiorina, is “families and fish.”