The life aquatic

Los Angeles River. Photo: Wikipedia via Flickr. Click on the image to be taken to Wikipedia

Last call for $30 seats for the The Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council September 28th symposium “The science behind the policy: Clean water and natural resources in California.” After September 17th, the price rises to $40. Click here for details. Personally, I don’t understand the logic of the early bird special. If cinemas did that for movies, only well organized people would attend. Then again, the movies don’t have Pacific Institute president and MacArthur Fellow Peter Gleick. Yet. LASGWC panelists also include economics professor Bowman Cutter of the Pomona College and Adan Ortega, former Metropolitan Water District conservation strategist and a memer of the California Board of Food and Agriculture. Environment correspondent Molly Peterson of KPCC moderates.

This post has been updated from a preliminary stub with date and

Image of the day: Tired in LA

The week that was, 9/5-11/2010

At the news conference announcing Susan Kennedy’s appointment as Chief of Staff, Gov Schwarzenegger said, "We have had incredible accomplishments throughout my administration and I look forward to working with Susan to build upon that foundation and make California once again the golden dream by the sea." Click on the image to be taken to the governor's website and the original announcement in November 2005. Kennedy has been the strategist behind Schwarzenegger's failed water policy.

Schwarzenegger, like all of his predecessors except risk-averse Gray Davis, has tried to mediate the water war and will, like them, leave with the big decisions still to be made. — Dan Walters, Governor will pass the buck on water, Fresno Bee, September 5, 2010

Despite more than three years of meetings and studies, the committee working on the plan has come to little or no agreement on any of the big-ticket questions. —

The Dry Garden: Orb weavers

In the oldie but greatie department, The Dry Garden this week reprises a 2005 foray by two leading entomologists through the haunts of the most common garden and  household spiders of Southern California. For those who didn’t get snared the first time, and who, like me, love spiders, click here. Or to find Dry Garden events for September, click here. Or for information about the Spider Pavilion at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which opens September 26, click here.

Big water

Click on the cover for the Pacific Institute report

A report released Wednesday by the Pacific Institute shows how in a relatively modest pass at obvious waste, California could conserve more than one and a half times the amount of water used every year in Los Angeles through improvements in farm irrigation, city landscaping, more efficient appliances and plumbing upgrades. Thirty per cent of the opportunities were found in cities and the remaining seventy per cent in agriculture. The most intriguing part? The cost is a fraction of the allowance for new dams called for in the bills behind the now postponed state water bond. Click here to read the synopsis, and here for the report. Or to read why conservation is the first most universally logical step for Californians to take to insure their water supply in the future, click here to read one of the report’s co-authors, Peter

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