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. …
Nevada’s latest test site
We watch big newspapers for the big stories, but the bulletins foreboding grand scale tragedy so often start small, such as this item in the Moapa Valley Progress. It reports that last month the Southern Nevada Water Authority began pumping what will be more than 8,000 acre feet of water a year from Coyote Springs, just north of the authority’s main service area in the Las Vegas Valley.…
The week that was, 12/5-11/2010
Both the Gatun and Alajuela lakes have reached the highest water levels ever recorded… — Panama Canal closed due to rain, Panama Digest, December 8, 2010
“… these rules are dangerous because, on the surface, it looks like the DRBC is doing something when they’re not.” — New Jersey chapter Sierra Club director Jeff Tittel, Delaware River Basin Commission posts proposed Marcellus Shale rules, The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 10, 2010. (For an overview of the water quality debate about gas exploration in the Marcellus Shale, click here.)…
The Dry Garden: Season’s gleanings
We can’t all be Virginia Paca, the gardener profiled on this blog in October who grows food and donates it to food banks. But this winter those of us with orange trees laden with fruit might take a page from the book of that Pasadenan. What more fitting holiday activity could there be than to glean our home orchards and donate fresh fruit to local pantries?
As winter closes in, that fruit very well may be oranges. It is pure serendipity that an activity that feeds people is also good for the orange trees.
Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times.…
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