The Dry Garden: In search of a ‘water ethic’ for America
Most high-level arguments about how to conserve water in the garden take place without involving home gardeners. Rather, as water managers weigh what an imaginary average consumer would and would not do by way of conservation, we real-life consumers are alternately offered carrots in the form of ephemeral rebate programs and sticks in the form of emergency sprinkler ordinances.
The new book, “Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis,” knocks this tired see-saw off its axis. Author Cynthia Barnett argues that no conservation program will truly succeed unless embraced by the public as part of a universally adopted “water ethic.” After research took her across the US, to the Netherlands, Singapore and Australia, Barnett concluded that the only way that a water ethic can be reintroduced to places that have lost it is if a primal sense of the importance and beauty of water is restored.
It’s unorthodox to …
The Dry Garden: Capturing rain
With the first rain of the season comes a question: How best to capture it for the garden? There is no single answer. Each property has dramatically different opportunities and challenges. Get it right and rainy season becomes a time of unrivaled beauty and pleasure. Get it wrong and you can ruin your house, or your neighbor’s.
This week “The Dry Garden” in the Los Angeles Times is soaked. Click here to keep reading about harvesting rain. …
The Dry Garden: Ask Persephone
Plant a pomegranate and the hole you dig drives straight through time — Persephone deep, founding fathers deep. Pomegranates are in Greek and Persian mythology, the Bible, the Koran, on the seal of the British Royal College of Physicians. Scholarly gardening articles cite pomegranates as having figured in gardens in the colonial Carolinas. Spanish settlers brought them to California. Search the botanical name Punica granatum in technical journals and you find the chemists at L’Oreal are onto them: Pomegranates are named in a new patent for shampoo. Health publications carry studies on the anti-oxidant properties. Martha Stewarts everywhere recommend dried pomegranates for Christmas wreaths.
But gardeners can turn up a lot of trivia without learning one key fact: how to tell when they are ripe. (Hint: the one above isn’t). Click here to keep reading about growing pomegranates to crimson readiness in this week’s Dry Garden column in the …
Opening day notes
From left to right: Las Vegas water authority witnesses Kay Brothers, John Entsminger and Richard Holmes were sworn in on Monday, September 26th at the Carson City hearings being held by the State Engineer of Nevada to determine whether and in what quantity to permit groundwater pumping for a Las Vegas pipeline.
Pat Mulroy seemed haggard and uncharacteristically subdued as hearings commenced today in Carson City over whether to allow Las Vegas to pump groundwater from four rural valleys to support more casinos and houses in Southern Nevada. Yet, as she took more than half a day’s questioning, the performance today by Southern Nevada Water Authority’s controversial general manager built into one of her best. She all but annihilated suggestions by opponents that increased conservation, water trades from California or desalination were magic bullets that would obviate the need for rural groundwater to keep Las Vegas in business. Anyone …
Vegas water hearings
Omnibus hearings before the State Engineer of Nevada that will decide the fate of Las Vegas’s bid to tap the groundwater of four valleys in the Great Basin begin Monday, September 26th in Carson City. If you can’t be there, you can still see there. Click here for webcasts and here for a schedule of witnesses, beginning with the Southern Nevada Water Authority, then following with representatives from ranches, Utah’s Millard County, the Great Basin Water Network, the Long Now Foundation, the Church of Latter Day Saints and the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute. Expect to hear the Southern Nevada Water Authority argue that it needs rural water to keep Las Vegas the economic motor of Nevada, and protestants to dwell on the devastation that broad-scale groundwater pumping would bring the Great Basin. The hearings were ordered after previous awards for Las Vegas from Cave, Dry Lake, Delamar and Spring …
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