California's a beautiful place. Objectively, by any standard. I prefer Alaska, but I can see the appeal in California. Back in my corporate days, I did a lot of work in California, twice for extended periods; one an 18-month gig in the Santa Clarita Valley on the north side of the Los Angeles area, and then a year in Silicon Valley. California's got beautiful scenery, a comfortable climate, except inland when the Santa Anas are blowing; then it's like a blast furnace. There's a lot of natural beauty in the once-Golden State.
Unfortunately, that natural beauty is being trashed, and it's Democrat policies that are tacitly allowing the trashing.
Case in point: when I was working in Silicon Valley, I used to love to take Sunday drives into the mountains outside the metro area. It was lovely country, if a bit warm and dry for my taste. There was one road in particular that I enjoyed, as it passed through several lovely valleys populated by small farms and a few homesteads. One Sunday, though, on that lovely road, my wife and I came around a corner where there was a pull-off so people could stop and admire the view. Someone had dumped what looked like an entire house full of old furniture in the pull-off and left it there.
We never drove that road again. This isn't a problem unique to California, mind you; it happened from time to time in the Iowa of my youth, and it happens from time to time here in Alaska. But then and now, in those places, it was an aberration that people despised. In California, it's becoming routine. The Pacific Research Institute has some interesting insights on why this is happening.
Oakland has become one of America’s most visible symbols of illegal dumping.
Discarded mattresses line neighborhood streets. Sofas, refrigerators, tires, construction debris and bags of household garbage accumulate beneath freeway overpasses, in vacant lots and along roadsides. The consequences extend well beyond appearance. Illegal dumping attracts rodents, creates fire hazards, pollutes waterways, lowers property values and erodes confidence in local government.
Oakland is hardly alone. Illegal dumping has become a persistent quality-of-life problem throughout California. Yet while Governor Gavin Newsom’s Clean California initiative celebrates millions of cubic yards of litter removed and hundreds of community beautification projects, neighborhoods across the state continue to struggle with abandoned mattresses, debris along rural roads and illegally dumped household waste.
There's another problem. This isn't a waste removal problem. It's a cultural problem. California has the largest homeless population in the country, as well as the largest population of illegal aliens in the country. The illegal aliens often as not come from countries where waste dumping is routine. The homeless, many of them are mentally ill, addicted to something, or both, simply don't care and never will.
California’s response has been anything but passive. Over the past several decades, state and local governments have spent billions of dollars building one of the nation’s most sophisticated waste management systems. Recycling mandates, hazardous waste programs, landfill regulations, transfer stations and environmental education campaigns all reflect a genuine commitment to protecting public health and the environment.
Yet Oakland forces an uncomfortable question: If California has built one of America’s most comprehensive waste management systems, why does illegal dumping remain such a persistent problem?
California has also spent billions of dollars on a train that goes from nowhere to nowhere and has not moved one passenger so much as an inch. So citing the amount of money California has spent on a problem isn't terribly convincing. So why is this happening? Because when there are no penalties for a behavior, there is no incentive to cease that behavior. And when you import the Third World, you become the Third World. You don't have to go far to see it; any town on our southern border where you can cross to the Mexican side will give you a vivid look at how waste disposal is handled there. Even big cities like Guadalajara, where I've been several times, have their problems with trash dumping. Sometimes the dumpers will take their trash out into the countryside to dump it, and sometimes any empty lot will do.
Here's the real eyebrow-raiser about all this: The same Democrats who tacitly allow this, who welcome in people for whom standard practice is to take your old furniture out in the beautiful countryside and dump it, people who have no notion of paying California's high rates for waste disposal where there is a nearby alley to dump it in; these are the same Democrats who wax rhapsodic about their love of the environment.
Well, some of us actually live out in the environment, and we don't want people dumping trash all around. But that's what happens; when you import the Third World, you become the Third World.
And think on this: The Democrat Party, the party that oversaw all this, is under attack from its far left, with the rise of the "democratic socialist" wing of the party. And boy, howdy, if you want to see an environmental catastrophe in real time, just look at any socialist or communist country: Cuba, for example. T'was ever thus with communist countries, and from what we can see in California, it's headed that way there, in one of America's most scenic states.
