Community gardens bulldozed into dust:

It’s called The Destruction of South Central Farmers and it demonstrates why short-term, profit-based thinking will ultimately destroy sustainable human life on our planet. Keep in mind what you are watching it the city of Los Angeles destroying a community garden plot. It’s like an apocalyptic future scene right out of Terminator, enforced at gunpoint by clueless city cops who are arresting the very citizens they should be protecting.

Now contrast this with this news:

California’s unfolding drought - now three years running - may prove to be the worst in recorded history. Farms have begun to fail, communities to crumble, food prices to rise and more people are going hungry. How we respond to the drought will offer us a template of how to respond to global climate change.

The drought is a national crisis because California produces 50 percent of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables, and a majority of the nation’s salad, strawberries and premium wine grapes. State and federal agencies that deliver water to farms up and down the Great Central Valley are preparing to cut deliveries by 85 percent to 100 percent. Coastal communities may begin rationing programs within weeks. Even with 50 percent increases in ground-water pumping, which is clearly not sustainable, the Central Valley alone will lose up to 40,000 jobs and $1.5 billion in income, according to a UC Davis agricultural economist Richard Howitt.

Even more disturbing is that rising emotion over water is sparking hostility. Last Thursday in Fresno, a representative of the California Water Impact Network told a television reporter during a debate that saving farmworkers’ jobs is a mistake because they are the “least educated people in America … they turn to lives of crime, they go on welfare, go into drug trafficking ….” This is this blatantly racist, and evokes images of Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.

Drought or hurricanes are beyond human ability to stop. Thus, the human challenge is to offer effective response.  Drought Is Dry Run For Climate Change

Our “response” is going to be knee-jerk stupidity.  We are already seeing plenty of examples of this now.