Satire, if well done, has the potential to be not only entertaining but also to illustrate a point, namely, pointing out absurdity by being absurd. Throughout history, satirists from Alexander Pope to Mark Twain to George Carlin have used biting satire to point out the silliness of the human species, and they've drawn a lot of readers and viewers by doing so.
More recently, on the virtual pages of American Greatness, commentator Edward Ring has made an interesting (and satirical) proposition: Drain California's reservoirs and give the land back to its original owners. Be careful what you wish for, climate activists, lest someone give it to you, good and hard!
Not only is demolishing California’s dams, draining all of its reservoirs, and returning the restored riverfront property to their rightful claimants an appropriate reparatory gesture, but it will also set the rivers themselves free. Unshackled, they will again be welcoming habitats for salmon and other aquatic life, able to send torrents of nurturing fresh water into California’s Central Valley and ultimately into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
The first target in this noble effort should be to blow up the O’Shaughnessy Dam and drain the Hetch Hetch Reservoir, which supplies water to the City of San Francisco. Surely the enlightened voters and elected officials in San Francisco will eagerly support this long overdue demolition. Once Hetch Hetchy Reservoir is empty, a beautiful valley, twin to Yosemite, will be exposed in all its granite grandeur once again, and the valley can be reoccupied by the Miwok, Yokuts, Washoe, Mono, and Paiute tribes, where they can recreate their ancient villages and recover their ancient ways. And why stop there?
Why, indeed?
Look, many of California's coastal elites have agitated for this kind of nutballery for years now. California is a notoriously water-poor place over much of its landscape, and much of the once and former Golden State's agriculture relies on these reservoirs as well as flow from outside the state. But if shutting off the water to places like San Francisco and Los Angeles can help address historical wrongs suffered by people who are all dead now, then why not?
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The serious answer, of course, is that every hectare of land owned, rented, or in any way inhabited by humans today was once inhabited by someone else. What is now France once belonged to the Gauls until they were invaded by the Germanic Franks, from which that country now draws its name; as for the British Isles, those islands have been invaded so many times by so many people from Picts to Celts to Romans to Saxons to Vikings to Normans, that, not surprisingly, the people of those islands are a little schizophrenic. Around here In Alaska, things have been a tad more stable; the land I set on as I write this once belonged to the Denaʼina people, part of the Athabascan Indian group, but none of them are around bugging me to give the land back, and besides, I bought this land, I paid for it, and I pay taxes on it, and it's mine, dammit, and I don't give a tinker's damn about who lived on it a hundred years ago. A hundred years from now, whoever sits here won't give a tinker's damn about me, nor should they.
That, dear readers, is the proper response to this "original owners" nitwittery.
As for the climate angle, is anyone seriously claiming that returning to some hunter-gatherer lifestyle is preferable to our modern ways in the name of addressing the ever-changing climate? Because if anyone wants a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, they have to be willing to take all that goes with it, from a life expectancy in the 30s to double-digit infant mortality, with some prolonged periods of starvation thrown in.
Here's where Mr. Ring takes off the satirical mask:
The destruction of the Klamath River farming and ranching economy is part of a broader assault, coming from a technology-driven elite that masquerades as virtuous proponents of environmentalism and racial equity. They are confident they shall suppress the protestations of those who recognize how these virtues have devolved into nihilism, and confident they shall sustain the masquerade until they dominate the world.
It is an entertaining notion indeed: Give them what they want. The problem is the climate nutters won't be the ones that suffer from all this. Too many of them are, as Mr. Ring points out, part of the wealthy coastal elites who won't be much affected by water and food shortages, or if they are, it will be after such a catastrophic meltdown that spares no one.
Satire is great at illustrating an absurd argument, and here Edward Ring has done just that - illustrating absurdity by embracing it and taking it to the next level. But while the proponents of this kind of nitwittery don't generally understand the implications of taking their agendas to that next level, neither do they care, thinking themselves somehow above the consequences.
And there lies the danger.
Speaking of Alexander Pope, in "An Essay on Man," Pope wrote:
Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul, proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk, or milky way;
Yet simple nature to his hope has giv'n.
Too many of these climate criers/original landowner nuts are like Pope's "Lo! the poor Indian," whose "untutor'd minds" are prone to flights of fancy.
Our lands are well enough off in the hands they're in. The environment is cleaner today, as a result of our increasingly efficient, high-tech society, than it has been for hundreds of years. The doom cultists should know when to leave well enough alone.
