For over six years, the quantity of rain falling in California has been too low. Although we’ve known about this for years, it became official earlier this year when Governor (Jerry Brown) told us all how serious it is. In fact, he’s recently passed a bill to make us all take the drought a little more seriously.

How serious is the drought really? According to the official site (the drought has a website of its own), very serious. Here are some of the problems the drought is causing:

1: Spontaneous bush fires / forest fires. The drought is killing vegetation, leaving it to dry out like hay. This makes perfect kindling for raging wildfires. These fires put homes at risk and harm the environment.

2: Streams and rivers are drying up, harming fish and fragile ecosystems.

3: Hydroelectric power stations are not getting enough water. Fossil fuels are being burned faster than ever in order to make up the power shortage.

4: Farmers are complaining that they don’t have enough water.

The politics of water are complicated, but what they really come down to is this: wildlife don’t vote. Farmers do.

So even though we are seeing natural habitats suffering, with plants and animals dying due to a lack of water, what the governor is pressing us to do is divert even more natural water to the water-greedy farmers.

He’s even authorized a bizarre plan to replace the river water with warm salty sea water that is going to be pumped inland just for the purpose (which is the exact opposite of how nature works, by the way.)

Producing fresh produce takes more water than you would imagine. Here are some scary facts:

* To grow just one almond takes 1 gallon of water.

* Growing a walnut takes 5.

* To grow just one pound of avocados, you need 74 gallons.

It’s easy to blame the farmers. But are they really to blame? Just like any business, they are only trying to meet demand, in this case, a demand for fresh fruit and nuts, which is rising faster than ever. And as California provides the majority of the fresh fruit and vegetables in the US, this demand is crushing the fragile environment faster than ever.

And why is this demand shooting up right now? Who’s demanding more produce at the cost of the environment?

Blame the Paleo diet.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have heard of the Paleo diet by now. The Paleo diet is the latest in a long, long line of fad diets that makes bizarre claims about ordinary foods and demands and requires a radical shift in eating habits.

Since the Paleo diet has become so popular (thanks to an army of bearded freaks forcing otherwise sensible people to read the book), it’s caused a shift in the nation’s eating habits, meaning that we’re eating more nuts than ever.

The “scientific” theory behind the Paleo diet is that you should eat like a caveman. Yes, that’s the science. Here’s why: Cavemen were more healthy.

How do we know they were more healthy? I don’t know; I guess because there are no cave paintings of hospitals?

If anything, common sense should tell us that cavemen were much less healthy than we are now. After all, they lived lives of desperate scarcity, facing famine frequently as well as getting eaten by wild animals, dying from mild diseases and killing each other in bizarre human sacrifice rituals.

Compared to modern people, they were ignorant, naive and lucky to be alive. Hey, I don’t hate cavemen, without them, I wouldn’t be here. But in the last quarter of a million years, we’ve made some progress. We’ve learned to improve our lives. Back then, life was horrible!

Is this the model of health we should be imitating? No!

The truth that these people don’t want to face, the fact that is painfully obvious from every record we have, from the dawn of history to now, is that things have been getting better all the time. We are more healthy now than we have ever been!

Just to compound the absurdity, anthropologists and scientists have proven that most of the dietary claims made by the Paleo diet are false (for instance, cavemen ate plenty of carbs. There are lots of sources of carbs — we didn’t invent them in the last thousand years!)

So not only is the basic concept of the diet flawed, even if it were true, it wouldn’t make any difference!

Basically, like most fads, the Paleo diet is based on someone’s opinion, pushed off as fact.

Now, I’m sure that eating plenty of fresh produce is healthy; I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with avoiding meat from animals who were fed soybeans. If someone described this diet to me without using the word “Paleo,” I’d think “that sounds healthy.”

But that has nothing to do with cavemen — that’s just a bunch of delusional pastoral BS. Or worse, cynical marketing.

Right now, the environmental pressures of growing nuts, seeds, and fruit in California are making the problems worse, and the rising demand is giving the farmers (and the politicians) an ever increasing financial incentive to keep on doing the wrong thing.

In the light of this, what are the super-smug holier-than-though Paleo tree-huggers doing about it? These “alternative” types are supposed to be into the environment, right?

Take a look at any Paleo blog or forum (there are like a million of them) and I challenge you to find even a single mention of the California drought. In fact, the most I expect them to do is start whining when the prices go up, and then keep pushing their philosophy off on the rest of us.

I guess it’s easier to be an environmentalist when that means showing off your Prius and bragging about fair-trade artichokes.

Fortunately, just like any other fad diet (like the Alphabet diet before it), the Paleo diet will run its course. Maybe we should help it on its way by creating another crazy fad to replace it? Just pick a period of history and get everyone to eat what people ate back then.

How about the “black death” diet? It’s a well-known fact that the average weight dropped rapidly when the plague raged through Europe. You could open special centers where people go to get bitten by black rats. People could paint red crosses on their doors, and lock themselves inside the house for weeks on end. The possibilities are endless!

Or how about we go way back into the past, to the earliest animals on earth. All there was to eat back then was plankton! We could farm plankton and call it a super-food, get everyone to eat it and leave the “modern” vegetables alone.

Maybe the real solution is just to stop eating. Just absorb sunlight and photosynthesize your own food! As long as you stay in one spot and never move, you can cut your energy consumption right down to virtually zero.

If any of these suggestions sound absurd, don’t worry, I’m sure lots of people will fall for it. The most important step, of course, is to publish a bestseller and get all your readers to force their friends and family to read it.

Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way. Maybe environment wrecking diets like the Paleo diet are actually a weapon! We should have teams of evil diet scientists working in underground bases, writing diet books in foreign languages as a weapon of last defense.

Who’s to say it hasn’t already been done?