“Quenching Las Vegas’s Thirst” wins Best of the West Award
The Las Vegas Sun series “Quenching Las Vegas’s Thirst,” has won first place for Environmental and Natural Resources Reporting in the 2009 Best of the West Awards. From the announcement:
“Emily Green’s series on water was smartly conceived, deeply reported and compellingly written. Water itself isn’t a new subject; the fact of water scarcity and the political battles it causes have been reported extensively elsewhere. But Green’s series brought the issue home. Her series’ structure — profiling five figures — reinforced a key collective insight of the stories: that the state of water in and around Las Vegas is largely a function of the personalities who, over decades, made water-policy decisions.
Green avoided easy preaching, instead telling the tale of a desert metropolis’ water fight in all its moral complexity, which made for much more interesting reading. And yet she uncovered plenty of disturbing facts — particularly, in …
Is AB 1881 Too Wet?
Call Bob Galbreath a drip, and he’ll thank you. The recently retired Outdoor Water Resource Specialist for the City of Santa Monica is Southern California’s pre-eminent expert on drip irrigation. In April 2008, Santa Monica passed its own version of AB 1881, and so I sought out his opinion on what the California Department of Water Resources is proposing as the state-wide irrigation water use standards for 2010.
Not a blogger (or a blowhard) by nature, Galbreath took the plunge and posted a response about AB 1881. It is a picture of polite skepticism, largely to do with the hopelessness of enforcing the regulations. He also directed me to some key differences between the upcoming statewide model and the one already in force in Santa Monica: The Santa Monica code applies to all landscapes in the city, and restricts the precipitation rate of all irrigation devices to 0.75”/hr, which excludes …
De-sal for San Diego
San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board grants final approval for Carlsbad Desalination Project, reports Aquafornia.…
California AB 1881 in bullet points
UPDATE: 2/19/2010: The new book, Landscape Plants for California Gardens by Cal Poly Pomona professor Bob Perry, gives thorough descriptions for 2,100 landscape plants, their ET budgets, run downs on irrigation system efficiency needed to satisfy those budgets, and then links them all back by plant palette and climate zone groupings — for every climate zone in the state. For information on the major new book for professional landscape designers and architects as well as advanced home gardeners, click here.
UPDATE: 9/22/2009 — California’s Updated Model Water Efficient Landscape Ordinance AB1881 was approved by the Office of Administrative Law on September 10, 2009. For a link to the announcement from the California Department of Water Resources, click here.
For a bullet point guide to it, done with help from Julie Ann Saare-Edmonds of the Landscape Program, Office of Water Use Efficiency, California Department of Water Resources, read …
Drought? What drought? So Cal by watering ordinance
The drought affects all of us, but the reactions to it by cities throughout Southern California could not be more different. A linked guide of how different cities and water districts from San Diego to Ventura are tackling it might exist somewhere else, but now it exists here. So far, kudos to Long Beach for having its head furthest out of the sand. For additions, please blog or e-mail me at emily.green [at] mac.com.…
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