From press release to pocketbook

Click on the image to be taken to NASDAQ.com

Cadiz, Inc today announced that the Santa Margarita Water District and Three Valleys Municipal Water District have agreed to stand as lead agencies in a review under the California Environmental Quality Act to evaluate the risks of reviving a previously discredited plan to mine Mojave Desert groundwater to serve the Southern Californian urban conurbation.

The share price responded with a jump of more than 14 per cent before declining.

No water has been produced by this 12-year-old scheme, however for the last year skillfully deployed press releases have made Cadiz a volatile and occasionally lucrative stock. It would take a SEC investigation to see if a run on the shares last year involving a privately secured endorsement from the Governor of California amounted to insider trading by directors at the expense of stockholders.

Today’s news about two Southern California water companies

‘Erin Brockovich’ writ large

Josh Fox standing in a stream that passes by his home in Pennsylvania. Source: HBO. After fracking began in Dimock, Pa., local livestock that drank water near gas mines began losing their hair. Fox took up the subject in the documentary 'Gasland' after his family was offered nearly $100,000 by a company for drilling rights on their land. From the Philadelphia Inquirer. Click here to read its review of 'Gasland.'

For Westerners, the connection between gas and water usually centers on Chromium VI, the chemical once used as a coolant by PG&E gas compressor plants and subsequently the Mojave Desert groundwater pollutant made famous by “Erin Brockovich.”

Yet a far greater, clear and present threat exists to a shared watershed extending from New York to West Virginia and throughout gas fields of the midwest and Texas. That is “hydrofracking,” the process in which chemically laced water  is used to fracture

The week that was, 6/13-19/2010

'Tanker Traffic' by Kathryn Altus, 2010. Water based oil on canvas, 36" x 24" and part of the "Some seas" exhibit at the Lisa Harris Gallery in Seattle. Click on the image to be taken to the gallery.

'Tanker Traffic 2' by Kathryn Altus, 2005. Oil on canvas, 24 x 20" oil on canvas. Click on the image to be taken to the artist's website.

Approximately 40 percent of the coastal wetlands of the lower 48 states is located in Louisiana. —Watermarks,” LaCoast / USGS*

Oil has been observed on approximately 503 total miles of U.S. coastline. –Florida update, Gov Monitor, June 19, 2010

“… simply protecting the shore and the nesting habitat is not protecting the birds that forage out over the water.” — Melanie Driscoll, director of bird conservation for the National Audubon Society’s Louisiana Coastal Initiative, Yale Environment 360

The Dry Garden: Log love

Hackberry and coral tree wood gives loft to a bed with the hummingbird sage and an almost insect-like tendril of Artemisia californica (upper screen left). Photo copyright: Diane Cu / whiteonricecouple.com. Reprinted with permission.

In taking nature apart and putting it back together again in our gardens, we err toward the refined. This is the case with mulch. Nowhere is it written that it has to come chipped, much less in a bag from a store. In fact, there is much to be said for laying it down by the log.

Click here to keep reading today’s Dry Garden column on the beauty and benefit of deadwood in the garden. Or for full listings of dry garden events for June and July, click here.

Diane Cu’s photograph comes from this writer’s garden; on Cu’s first visit she was immediately struck by the texture and form of the deadwood and

“The proper and most equitable remedy”

A typical entrance to a ranch in Spring Valley, Nevada. Yesterday's decision by the Nevada Supreme Court leaves 2007 awards of Spring Valley groundwater to Las Vegas standing, but calls for the reopening of a protest period that could usher in a powerful new generation of pipeline opponents. Photo: Emily Green

UPDATED: The Nevada Supreme Court yesterday issued a revision of a January ruling in which it again concluded that the State Engineer of Nevada violated due process rights of protestors by failing to hold timely public hearings on a plan by Las Vegas to tap rural groundwater. As remedy, the Court called for a new protest period that could refresh the ranks of pipeline opponents. However, the decision stopped short of voiding water awards already made to Las Vegas.

In 1989, the Las Vegas agency that is now part of the Southern Nevada Water Authority made sweeping applications

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