Mike Tharp: New sticker reads, 'Save the humans'

We live in a desert.

Not just us Mercedians. Not just folks on the edges of Death Valley or the Mojave or the Salton Sea.

Everybody in California.

The Golden State would have stayed a coastal and mountain redoubt for settlers except for the mammoth man-made water projects we all learned about from our history books.

Movies like "Chinatown" and books like "Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner have chronicled the water wars we've waged with one another and Mother Nature for more than 150 years.

"If the contrived flow of water should somehow just stop," Reisner wrote in a later book, "A Dangerous Place," then "California's economy, which was worth about a trillion dollars as the new millennium dawned, would implode like a neutron star."

Now we Mercedians are involved in another water war. Our people on the West Side and next door in Fresno County, especially the town of Mendota, are fighting for their lives and livelihoods because of drought and water policies laid down by the state and the feds.

The stakes became as clear as a desert sunrise on a recent two-and-a-half-hour airplane ride with Gail McCullough. The pilot, who grew up on her daddy's farm at Red Top Ranch, 17 miles south of Merced, flew us in her 1957 single-engine Cessna 170B over the khaki-colored fields, parched in the morning sun.

It reminded me of flying over Iraq.

Gail, a Realtor and well-respected pilot at airports all over the state, wanted me to see -- with a 360-degree, 1,000-foot perspective -- what's happening on and to the ground. Isolated tractors tilled tan fields, leaving dust in their wake that looked like smoke or a brown wind sock. Hay bales resembled Legos near the Harris Ranch feedlot. Bone-white alkali deposits settled like waves on the surface of the soil.

"Nobody can afford to drill down and get water," Gail said. "It would cost them thousands a month."

And in a "Sun Rises in East" headline, politics has imposed its own rules of engagement in the latest campaign. Thanks to our Washington-based McClatchy reporter Mike Doyle's superb dispatches, we know how the Beltway dust-wrestling has complicated any immediate solution to what our farmers and ranchers need -- water.

Just plain water.

The political dynamic would make a dull yarn, except for its importance. Grandstanding by our two U.S. senators and their House Democratic counterparts on one side, and Republicans such as Rep. Devin Nunes and, improbably, Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, on the other, has shed more heat than light on the issue.

It's much more complex than the lectern rhetoric, but one critical factor in the equation is a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service "biological opinion" promulgated last December. It "regulated and reduced water flowing into the San Joaquin Valley for the protection of the Delta smelt (a fish)," according to a news release from DeMint's office.

In June the National Marine Fisheries Service issued another biological opinion that "included salmon, steelhead, green sturgeon and killer whales endangered by release of water in the San Joaquin Valley," the DeMint news release added.

Five bills and a financial package were introduced in Sacramento before the electeds slunk home. All claimed to be fixes to our water problem.

In still more simplistic algebra, the latest water war pits the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and environmentalists on one side of the equation and those who want to repeal or suspend the ESA -- most of our farmers and ranchers -- on the other.

A UC Davis study in May estimated that our three-year-long drought led to a loss of $630 million and 35,000 jobs and 450,000 acres fallowed in the Valley. The study estimated total income lost from the drought at around $830 million. Mendota almond grower Shawn Coburn told The Associated Press, "If you like foreign oil, you're going to love foreign food."