No. There is too much. Let me sum up."

Rather, let Victor Davis Hanson sum up:

Today's Americans inherited the wealthiest nation in history - but only because earlier generations learned how to feed, fuel, finance and defend themselves in ways unrivaled elsewhere.

Lately we have forgotten that and instead seem to expect others to do for us what we used to do ourselves.

Take our plentiful, cheap and safe food supply. Long ago, Americans struggled to create farmland out of swamp, forests and deserts, and built dams and canals for irrigation to make possible the world's most diverse and inexpensive agriculture.

Now in California - the nation's richest farm state - the population is skyrocketing toward 40 million. Yet hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland this year are going out of production, and with them thousands of jobs.

Why? In times of chronic water shortages, environmentalists have sued to stop irrigation deliveries in order to save threatened two-inch-long delta fish that need infusions of fresh water diverted from agricultural use. And for both environmental and financial reasons, we long ago stopped building canals and dams in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to find sources of replacement irrigation water.

So farmers are asked to produce more food for more people in a desert climate with less water - while environmentalists dream of returning to a pristine 19th-century sparsely populated California of smelt and salmon in their inland rivers. But the end result will be more imported food from less environmentally sound farms abroad.

And there's more--the outsourcing of our energy supply by the squeamish. Read the rest of Hanson's "summing up."

Our Have-It-Both-Ways Generation

quote courtesy of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride

Labels: Social Observation