Back in November the Schwarzenegger administration gave the go-ahead to an assessment examining the feasibility of restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, which was dammed and flooded in the beginning of the 20th century to provide water and power to the city of San Francisco.

This photo of the O’Shaughnessy Dam at Hetch Hetchy Reservoir was taken by David Cross in July, 1987. Protesters had put in a simulated "crack" on the face of the dam, and inscribed the text, "Free the Rivers! - J. Muir."

I always try to consider environmental issues with respect to how smart ecological practices benefit humans. I even criticize other environmentalists for placing aesthetic and emotional values ahead of human ecological interests, which I generally view as politically unrealistic. I am what you might call a conservationist rather than a preservationist. But every once it a while a cause comes along that seems to me so ethically right that I stop caring about human costs and benefits, and I am reminded that there is a little John Muir in each and every environmentalist.

Water is not the fashionable issue for environmentalists right now – lately we tend to worry much more about electricity, for reasons that should be fairly obvious (see pete’s recent articles if it’s not) – yet aquifers in the western United States are being rapidly drained to provide water to the growing population of the West.

The Central Valley Project was started back in 1935 to help promote development in the arid center of California by subsidizing water from the northern part of the state that was being supplied to farmers in the dry south. The federal government is on the verge of renewing the 50 year old water subsidies, which drastically lower water prices for some of the largest industrial farms in California’s central valley.