"Droughts may not be avoidable, but their affects can be." Dr. Amartya Sen. 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics

It has been another beautiful Spring week here one the farm. The neighbor's cherries have been blooming. You know what that means? Fresh cherries in a couple of months! That will be nice.

I want to follow up on something I said in my Open Letter to the President last month. The 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics was won by an Indian economist named Amartya Sen, who for proving that governments cause famines. You read that right-governments starve their people to death by bad policy.
   I wrote about this in my book, Ten Reasons: Finding Balance on Environmental Issues. Dr. Sen showed, at a world class level, how government policies mis-managed food and natural resource policy and managed to kill their own people in the slowest possible. I bring it up in Ten Reasons to show the importance of our government policy. There is a lot at stake here.
   I bring it up here because what Dr. Sen said about applies to what we are going through in California right now. Dr. Sen writes, "Droughts may not be avoidable, but their affects can be." Remember, this is not some political hack. This guy won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his research on this.
   Here is a link to Dr. Sen's Nobel Acceptance Speech.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1998/sen-lecture.pdf

 The title of his speech is "The Possibility of Social Choice."He talks about how poverty and famine are related and they are social choices. Well, we have some choices to make about our water policy. Our current policy is crippling our economy and is not helping the environment. We allowed ourselves to get trapped in an either/or scenario. In my book Ten Reasons I make the point we need a healthy environment and a healthy economy. We are dangerously close to having neither.