End of days
Today is “World Water Day.” Yippee. Yikes. Whatever. It would be hypocritical of me not to confess to using the occasional chronological gimmick to further pet causes (highlighting March as “Red Cross month” on this site after the Chilean earthquake is a recent example.) But, as a rule, this kind of thing confuses me. Who in their right mind thought, “Hey, we’re wrecking the world. I’ve got an idea! Let’s name a special day (week, year).”
Climate Week didn’t stop the Chinese from upending Copenhagen talks. Forty years of “Earth Day” did nothing to stop the generation that first celebrated it from popularizing the SUV. World Water Day has a hilariously well hydrated-looking Nestle executive in the news.
As we parse the mess we make, dare we conclude that special days are so last century, that while the event-ification of creeping disaster keeps a …
“There was never any incest”
“Evil is elemental … It’s in the air, it’s in the sunshine, it’s in the water.” – So goes a line from New York Times film critic AO Scott in a “video pick” for Chinatown.*
Ah, cineastes. If they ever came out of their screening rooms, they would know that evil is elemental, it’s in the air, it’s in the sunshine, it’s in the water in real life. You don’t need to rent it.
While Scott’s paean was aimed more at Roman Polanski and less at water, it was well-timed. Evil has never been thicker in the world of Western water. …
Sacramento all-nighter produces an $11.1bn package of water bills
The California Legislature passed a wide-ranging water package that includes an $11-billion bond as dawn broke over the Capitol today, reports the Los Angeles Times.
In and Out:
In: 20% voluntary conservation by 2020 by urban areas not farms.
In: a bond measure that started at $12bn, dropped to $9bn then rose again to $11.1bn.
In: $3bn worth of dams demanded by the governor under threat of veto.
In: $2.25bn for Delta restoration and a board to oversee the Delta appointed by the governor and legislature. This would have the power to approve a peripheral canal to channel water around the Delta.
Out: Groundwater monitoring for privately owned properties. The stick, reports the LA Times “is a loss of water funding. Counties and agencies in groundwater basins that didn’t monitor could not receive state water grants or loans.”
Out: Increased penalties and increased enforcement to control illegal water diversion.…
Westlands
AS STAGE armies work Sacramento for their pieces of a proposed $9 plus billion water bill and bond, attorney Lloyd G. Carter would have us wipe some tears from our eyes about the plight of Westlands Water District.
Carter, a former UPI and Fresno Bee reporter, now a deputy in the California Attorney General’s office, has a new article on the subject in the Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal.
He writes of Westlands in Reaping Riches from a Wretched Region: “federal irrigation and farm-subsidy policy in the San Luis Unit since the 1960s has exacerbated grinding poverty while enriching a few dozen of the factory farming dynasties to the detriment of the environment, the human population of the region, small growers, and the public fisc. There are few farms under 500 acres. Rule is by the rich. Indeed, in Westlands, which is a public agency, the …
Los Alamos legacy
FRANK CLIFFORD, author of “The Backbone of the World,” long-time staff environment editor of the Los Angeles Times and now a freelance writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, reports in today’s Los Angeles Times on a threat from the Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Rio Grande. From the story:
Isolated on a high plateau, the Los Alamos National Laboratory seemed an ideal place to store a bomb factory’s deadly debris. But the heavily fractured mountains haven’t contained the waste, some of which has trickled down hundreds of feet to the edge of the Rio Grande, one of the most important water sources in the Southwest. Click here to keep reading.…
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