The problem with people
AS SACRAMENTO legislators work on bills this week to assure the future of California’s water supply, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute points to the elephant in the living room. Population growth. He writes in this week’s San Francisco Chronicle:
The amount of water on Earth is fixed. We’re not losing it to space and we’re not getting more (with negligible exceptions) … But population is not fixed. It is growing, and growing rapidly in some places. As a result, the amount of water available per person (“per capita”) is declining.
To keep reading Peter Gleick in the San Francisco Chronicle, click here.
UPDATE: 10/21/2009 For part two of Gleick’s series on population and fresh water, click here.
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Fuzzy lines and phantasmagorias
DOES Matt Damon’s H2O Africa help water management in developing countries? Todd Jarvis, Associate Director of the Institute for Water and Watersheds at Oregon State University, has doubts. “I just wonder how many of his movie dollars are going to go to solving water problems, and how much is going to get soaked up by corruption.”
WaterWired has Jarvis’s autumn lecture on water and ethics,”Fuzzy lines and phantasmagorias,” posted. To access it, click here. Jarvis’s message to up and coming hydro-geologists: “I have been unethical. Everyone is unethical sometimes … As a professional, you will be on that line. You will walk that line many times.”
Citing the World Bank, he said that while Scandinavia leads the world in non-corrupt practices, the US is “not too far away from Italy with respect to corruption.” This offered a natural segue to look at the $500 billion expected to …
The Dry Garden: Bird baths
Click for a larger image. A Cooper's hawk cools its feet in an inner city fountain. Photo: Emily Green
This being the height of migration season for Western songbirds, and conditions around Los Angeles being bone-dry or fire-scarred, here’s a proposal for even the driest of dry gardeners: Get out your hoses.
There is no better time to set up a birdbath. To keep reading The Dry Garden on bird baths, click here to be taken to the Los Angeles Times.…
Photo gallery: Los Angeles Aqueduct
Helianthus annuus, aka sunflowers, bloom by the roadside in Owens Valley. Photo: Chris Austin. Aquafornia offers a photo tour by Austin of Owens Valley and the Los Angeles Aqueduct system. To see it, click here. To read Emily Green on the smiley face of nature, click here.…
Notable fountains
Click here, or on the fountain of your choice, to be taken to day’s splendid piece of Op-Art in the New York Times.…
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