The View from My Office

My environmental friends will remind us that the sign of a healthy ecosystem is the presence of wildlife. We'll I must be doing something right. We live on a twenty five acre almond orchard. I have one family of cotton tail rabbits in the back yard and another in the pasture in front yard. You would think that with three dogs and two cats we wouldn't have rabbits. But, once again this morning, as I was doing some writing one of our little bunny friends was hopping right outside my office door.
In the last year I have had a Cooper's Hawk in the wisteria outside my office door and we had a Bald Eagle visit our orchard also. Pretty cool.

Wine Tasting

It's not all work on the farm.

We spent the afternoon wine tasting with our daughter, Heidi, and he boyfriend, Will. We met them at Appellation California at Avenue 7 and 99. (App Call is a wine tasting room where the smaller wine growers in Madera County can bring their wares. You can find them at www.appellationcalifornia.com ).

Fabulous afternoon. We sat out in the garden and enjoyed wine, cheese, crackers and each others companies. It has been a long week for most of us. We started with a Pinot Grigio blend from Mariposa Wine Company. Yummy. Heidi and Will brought some amazing cheeses. The Bravo Farms garlic cheese is a real treat.

We also found some Spanish chorizo at App Cal. A few years ago I found a recipe for Spanish chorizo and scallops. Since I couldn't find Spanish chorizo here I substituted with linguica. THat works very well. Dinner tonight will be scallops with our newly found Spanish chorizo, a salad and perhaps a little more wine.

Spring Planting

There is a deep sense of satisfaction watching seedlings come out of the ground. This week it is our black eye peas. When I see the first cotyledons come out of the ground there is a great sense of relief- we are off and running.

Planting seed is such a miracle to me. I could do all the same work preparing the ground and if we planted pebbles nothing would happen. The fact that there is life in those seeds is still amazing to me. If they are planted in the right conditions of temperature and soil moisture they can truly yield a hundred fold.

You will just have to take my word for this, it is truly a great feeling to see the seedlings come out of the ground.

P

Busy week on the farm. Cotton is out of the ground. The garbanzos are watered and fertilized. Blackeyes are coming out of the ground. Time to fertlize the cotton and get ready to irrigate next month.

Windy today. Have to wait to water the trees until the winds die down. I hate seeing trees fall in the wind.

Job Creation and Natural Resources

Job Creation and Natural Resources
by Paul H. Betancourt
copyright February, 2010

The President is running around telling people that job creation is important. Excellent. He has highlighted the importance of small businesses in creating new jobs. Again, excellent. An unspoken root of the issue of job creation is the question, How do we use our natural resources? Here the natural resource in question is water. In the Pacific Northwest it used to be timber. In other places across the country there are other resources in question.

The Creation of Wealth and the Creation of Jobs
We don’t create wealth as individuals or as a nation by trading paper like Wall Street bankers. We create wealth by producing things or providing services. Some of that ‘producing things’ comes from utilizing natural resources. That very idea of utilizing natural resources has come under suspicion and criticism for a generation now in our country.
It is ironic that the same people who say led the destruction of the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest a decade ago are the same people who say we ought to learn from the Europeans. OK, here’s a lesson from the Europeans. On our first visit to Sweden I noticed beautiful forests full of trees. After a while I noticed that the trees in each area were all the same size. Then I came across some areas that were clear cut. You guessed it- they plant and harvest trees. Yes, they are very careful about how they do it and it is the work of generations. But, they get it done. Timber is one of the major exports from Southern Sweden.
The Swedes is that they have figured out something we have not. They have figured out how to balance utilization of natural resources and job creation. Our current crop in the environmental community do not offer solutions. Just look at the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest. It was gutted ten years ago in the name of the Spotted Owl. A few years ago NPR reported that Spotted Owl populations were collapsing the Olympia National Park where logging was not an issue.

So When Can We Use Natural Resources?
When I asked one of my professors at Fresno State what is the appropriate use of natural resources? He responded, “No one has the answer to this question. Pricing environmental damage into production and consumption would help.” What he is talking about is the economic concept of externalities. That is the idea behind a carbon tax. The tax would cover the environmental damage caused by using carbon products like fossil fuels. I bought a train ticket recently and they asked if I wanted to buy a carbon offset. That is an attempt to pay for the externality of using the train. The problem with calculating externalities is that it is difficult. Indeed, environmental writer Andrew Kimbell says it is ‘incalcuable’ (Kimbell 15).
From the environmentalists the answer to the question, ‘When can we use natural resources? becomes, ‘Never”. They want to count the ‘externalities’ and by their own admission the externalities are ‘incalculable’. We are going to have to develop a working answer without their help.

I appreciate the President focusing on job creation. Part of job creation is addressing the issue of using natural resources. If we do not find a safe and sane balance for the use of our natural resources then our economy will spiral down to where we are flipping each others burgers or washing each others cars.

Lessons from Greece

If you strip away the distractions the fundamental problem is that Greece is nearly bankrupt. In international politics we talk of failed states like Somalia. Greece is a fail-ing state. Greece is not the only failing state. There is an acronym being tossed about- PIGS. PIGS stands for Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. These are countries that are on the verge of bankruptcy. Greece was bailed out by its European neighbors because they are all tied together with the Euro as the common currency. The riots in Athens were triggered by the austerity measures that the EU required before bailing out the Greeks.

The Greek government’s annual deficit is being reported at 13% of Gross Domestic Product, GDP. That means the amount of money that the Greek government spends above what it takes in is equal to 13% of the whole Greek economy from the year! The Greek national debt is 124% of GDP. Do you understand what that means? The Greek government owes more than every man, woman, child and business make in a year!!!
When you and I get that upside down and start missing payments they threaten to repossess our car or our house. Who wants to repo a country?-
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Is there a connection between Greece and California?
The economy of California is bigger than the economy of Greece. While we are not as deeply in the hole as Greece, we are headed in that direction. Some state bonds are nearly at junk bond status already. According to the Public Policy Institute of California the State Debt is equal to 8% of the economy. Eight percent is huge when you have a state economy of $1.7 Trillion dollars per year. Yes, Trillion with a ‘T’. According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office the State Debt is over $55 Billion. That means our debt is equal to nearly half of the State’s annual budget!
As a school board member I have been seeing reports projecting $25 Billion per year state deficits for the next five years. The problem is not being solved and the hole we are digging is getting deeper.

Our friends in the environmental community are concerned about whether this or that practice is sustainable or not. Well, government spending like we see in Greece and have in California is not sustainable.

As I tell my students, “There is more to life than making a buck, but if we don’t care for the bucks we make life can be miserable.” Ben Franklin’s comment was, “Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.”

“ A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread that it has earned- this is the sum of good government.”
Thomas Jefferson

Obviously we do not have a ‘wise and frugal government’. On top of that we have a government that feels free to take from the mouth of labor the bread that it has earned.’ I have a left-leaning friend in local government who actually said it is immoral not to raise taxes since government has made promises it has to keep. I don’t even know where to begin on that one. I do know that was not Jefferson’s view of the good government.

State government in California has been heading for a cliff for some time now. In Greece we can see what will happen if we do not pull away from the cliff and change our ways.