Who he?
He looks less like the father of LA’s water system William Mulholland (left) and more like ER’s Anthony Edwards, but according to the Los Angeles Times, energy consultant Ron Nichols, managing director of the Seattle-based Navigant, is the new nominee to become the next general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power.
More will become clear about Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s latest candidate for a post whose politics have chewed up and spat out nine water department GMs in the last ten years. All the Nichols bio page at Navigant offers is a nugget that makes him sound like a Wall Street version of Wen Jiabao. “Ron Nichols is a Managing Director in the Energy practice [sic] has over [sic] 30 years of experience in utility asset and enterprise financing, utility mergers and acquisition, and power supply portfolio planning and procurement. Mr. Nichols was the …
How right was Reisner?
It’s a cliche because it’s true: there’s no drier topic than water. In 1986, Marc Reisner, a former staff writer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, published what may be the most gripping book on the subject. Cadillac Desert begins from an airplane window looking down on land so dry that there appears no way that it could sustain the booming cities of the American Southwest, much less the agriculture that the US government had in mind when it formed the federal Bureau of Reclamation.
He then built the book with a succession of free-standing chapters that read more like magazine pieces, most but not all of which were marveling and disgusted histories of the region’s most famous (and infamous) water projects. …
North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
Garden blogs
