I think one of the things progressives have to get a position on is Big Industry.  Big Industry will not sit quietly unemployed.  Given nothing better to do, Big Industry will build weapons and gigantic pork projects, and lobby against progressives.

However… big industry can be put to good use, or rather, redirected, and a new big industry of national scale can be created which would help the goals of progress.

That industry would be a Restoration Industry, and Hetch Hetchy’s restoration is a good example of a project worth doing (see here for a previous diary on this subject and some Hetch Hetchy restoration links).

Of course, the restoration of New Orleans is an even more pressing example.

Restoration includes traditional construction, but also ecological and environmental sciences.  It is about making forward looking corrections, detoxification and removal or management of natural contaminants such as silt.  

We have so many sites in this country needing of restoration, so many superfund sites, so many rivers like the Carson River, which is full of mercury from the years of gold mining.

These are huge projects.  They seem undoable… Carson River has thousands of tons of mercury in it… Hetch Hetchy will cost 4-10 Billion to clean.  That’s a lot of money.  But it’s also just a month or two in Iraq.  We can do this, we can restore America, we need only to decide it’s worth doing.

The result would be a lot of jobs, from laboror through engineering and science.  Done right you create businesses prepared not only to help restore American cities and wildlands, but which will also help lobby to do so.

Restore Hetch Hetchy… and New Orleans.