Opinion: Bill comes due for re-engineered way of life
Publisher’s note: This editorial is from the Feb. 18, 2017, Sacramento Bee.
No disaster is entirely natural in our re-engineered state and valley. Owing to our hubris, we humans have a direct hand in them all.
We have built cities on earthquake faults, balanced mansions on hillsides that burn in one season and slide into the ocean in the next, and moor boats in marinas where tsunamis are known to strike.
Having dammed almost all major rivers in California and many tributaries and creeks, we have constructed entire cities in what a century or 150 years ago was swamp, and made islands of rocks piled on peat.
