Joke shaming water wasters works

The EPA veto of Colorado's massive Two Forks Dam ended the era of big infrastructure and forced Denver to take the lead in urban water conservation.

The Clean Water Act applies to the LA River

Have concrete, will create. A painting from last year's exhibit “The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River" at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. For background on the show and grafitti culture of the LA River, click on the image.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has reversed an earlier US Army Corps of Engineers classification of the Los Angeles River as un-navigable, a term that exempted it from protection under the Clean Water Act.

After William Mulholland and Los Angeles tapped Owens Valley and the Eastern Sierra for its water in 1913, in the 1930s, the Corps paved the LA River, the city’s original source. This turned the river into a main drain of a county-wide flood control system. The upshot: Los Angeles drained the Eastern Sierra, destroying the once crystaline Owens Lake and nearly destroying the neighboring Sierra Mono Lake, while the city that Mulholland’s aqueduct

“Daylighting” urban rivers

FROM THE New York Times science blog Dot Earth comes this Yonkers Historical Society 1920s photograph of a giant flume being run where the Saw Mill River used to flow. Now, according to a story by Andrew C. Revkin,  Yonkers is trying to unbury the river to create a greenway.

For Revkin’s blog on movements around the world, including in Los Angeles, to “daylight” buried or paved rivers, click here.

For information about moves to restore the Los Angeles River, click here.

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