The week that was, 12/27/2009-1/2/2010
Posted on | January 3, 2010 | No Comments
Revelers go for a New Year's Day swim in Malo-les-Bains, northern France, January 1, 2010. Photo: Reuters. For the Toronto Sun's gallery of New Year's Day plunges around the world, click on the bathers.
“I found out about it when I was about eight, and I never manned up to do it. But now I did.” — Twenty-two-year-old Jeffrey Vanek, while pulling up his boxer shorts amid catcalls from 500 people, “Naked water skiing, Bloody Marys and breakfast burritos — it’s the 30th Annual Bethel Island Frozen Bun Run,” Contra Costa Times, January 1, 2010
Click here to keep reading The week that was
The Dry Garden: ‘Canyon Prince’
Posted on | January 1, 2010 | No Comments
OF ALL the creatures that disperse plants in nature, we humans may be the quirkiest. Take how we distribute New Zealand flax. We fight back its blades along what seems like every other front walk.
This column is to commend an indigenous alternative to New Zealand flax for the gardens of greater Los Angeles: a type of giant wild rye called Canyon Prince. Ninety-nine percent of the time that flax is used in California, this cultivar of Leymus condensatus could perform the same function, but better.
To keep reading the lastest installment of the Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times, click here.
High good, low bad, Mead elevations 1999-2009
Posted on | January 1, 2010 | 3 Comments
Source: federal Bureau of Reclamation. Click on the image for its 2010 operating plan for the Colorado River.
NOT everything went down during the Noughties. While federal Bureau of Reclamation records show that the elevation of Lake Mead, the major “lower basin” Colorado River reservoir serving Arizona, California and Nevada, fell more than 117 feet, the population of the US states served by Mead rose. The US Census Bureau estimates that the population of the driest state in the country, Nevada, climbed 32.3%, while Arizona’s increased 28.6% and California’s 9.1%.
If Lake Mead were a financial institution, people might, stress on might, question the logic of outgrowing one’s resources. As John Fleck of the Albuquerque Journal pointed out after reading the first version of this post, Mead is at its lowest elevation since it was first filled in the 1930s.
But the spendthrift lower basin states such as Nevada have traditionally had a back-up plan when it came to getting more water — beyond raiding their aquifers. The single most basic expectation driving unbridled growth in the lower basin states has been that the federal government would never let them run dry. Rather, southern burghers were sure that surplus Colorado River water by rights belonging to the more sparsely populated “upper basin” states of Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah would be released south.
While unscrupulous, this attitude could be accused of logic in the days of upper basin surpluses. Except, suddenly, nature wouldn’t play. The Colorado River entered a persistent drought in 1999. Even if nature hadn’t rebelled, northerners had no plans to cooperate with the Plan B of the lower basin states. Upper basin states have developers and fertile families too. The Noughties upper basin growth award goes to Utah, the second driest state in the country, whose population increased by 24.7%, followed by Colorado with 16.8%, New Mexico with 10.5% and Wyoming with 10.2%.
Click here for closing elevations of Lake Mead 1999-2009
Tags: chance of rain > December 2009 > Emily Green > Lake Mead elevations
Western datebook: January on the half shell
Posted on | December 29, 2009 | 1 Comment
With warm wishes for 2010, a few events of note:
January 5: “Borderlands,” a show from the International League of Conservation Photographers studying the impact of the border fence between the US and Mexico, G2 Gallery, Venice, California, through February 7
January 13: Southern California Shells and Beaches from Prehistoric Fossils to Modern Seashore Life with Scott Rugh, Collections Manager, Invertebrate Fossils, San Diego Natural History Museum, Casa Romantica Cultural Center Lecture Series, San Clemente
January 13: State of the Bay Report and Conference, Bay Restoration Commission, Stewards of Santa Monica Bay, Los Angeles
January 14: G’day Australia Week 2010 Water Policy Forum, Los Angeles
January 27-29: Climate Change Impacts on Water, policy conference with Jane Lubchenco, Administrator, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Washington DC
Chance of Rain will begin publishing again on January 1st. For Southern Californian readers of the garden elements of this website, please check out a newly loaded calender of Dry Garden Events for January, opening with a January 2nd walk through Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden. For a cyber preview of the gardens in winter from Ilsa Setziol at Rambling LA, click here.
This post has been updated. The State of the Bay event has been added thanks to a nudge from LA Creek Freak and the return date has been changed from January 3rd to 1st, when the standard monthly report on Lake Mead elevations “High good, low bad” will appear on schedule.
Hasta la vista, 60 Minutes
Posted on | December 28, 2009 | 2 Comments
WaterWired and Aquafornia both have last night’s 60 Minutes report on California water embedded for your viewing pleasure. Be warned, WaterWired links back here. Those instantly overtaken by boredom whenever a speech (tv program, headline, fill in the blank) opens with the threadbare Twain quote “whisky is for drinking, water is for fighting,” be further warned: Lesley Stahl opens with it.
Beyond the cliches, the esteemed news magazine offers a decent potted version of our water woes. An empty promise of a free drink to anyone who counts how many times Stahl called the Delta smelt “tiny.”
On the subject of size, a couple of minutes, far fewer than 60, of checking crop output would have taken the enormity out of what the program suggests is a looming almond crisis says On the public record. That and a half-way energetic intern might have put a question mark over the stuff about Schwarzenegger’s “unlikely” political alliance with the Latino Water Coalition. Here’s a Capitol Weekly report about the origins of the governor’s stage army, which the giant network credulously took as an authentic grass roots movement.
Other than that, great work, CBS.
Update 12/29/2009: To see Aquafornia’s round-up of responses to the 60 Minutes broadcast, click here.
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