Reconciliation? Reconciliation of what? Northern and southern Californians? People living in regions that are about to get screwed with their fates? People and the new Californian dream?
Oh. Environmental and Human Water Uses, apparently. That’s a pretty boring thing to reconcile, because what matters in a political system is people’s expectations and their subjective experiences. Do they feel like they’re having their god-given American right to red meat at every meal yanked away from them, or do they feel like they’re planting native plants because they love the bees so much? The report says fuck-all about how to get people to buy into this, and so will the Delta Plan and so will the Flood Plan and so will every other state level document ever on the face of the earth because they don’t consider people and their feelings as knowable important components of what happens. The authors could even just acknowledge that if 38 million people feel like they can’t have what they’ve always had without being given something in its place, they’ll get their torches and pitchforks and recall a bunch of directors, pour encourager les autres.
I am obviously in too pissy a mood to review this right now, although it makes for easy writing. I’m not being entirely fair, because the PPIC report (from first glance) maybe goes on about local solutions to meet state level mandates, and how markets apparently console farmers for losing their way of life, which is a question we could put to the Australians, who never report on that when they detail exactly how wonderful their water market is after 7,000-9,000 farmers (out of 14,000 farmers in the Murray-Darling Basin, according to some guy from there who told me that after I pressed him for a while) were water-marketed out of the farming sector. Those are round-about ways of making people hate our upcoming impoverishment less, I suppose. But I wish we talked about that head on.