July dry gardening events
Posted on | July 2, 2009 | No Comments
WE CAN change the world … by treating it sensibly and artfully. What’s more, for Western gardeners, it’s fun. Click here for a full calendar of dry gardening events around Southern California. If you like the look of the Epilobium californica pictured below and blooming now in native gardens across the region with scarcely a drop of water, don’t miss Lili Singer’s “Look Ma, no lawn!” courses for the Theodore Payne Foundation.
Epilobium californica. Photo: Native Sons. Click on photo for link to Native Sons nursery
Lili Singer of the Theodore Payne Foundation
Tags: chance of rain > dry gardening > Emily Green > Native Gardening
High good, low bad: Mead in June
Posted on | July 1, 2009 | 1 Comment
NASA image of the Colorado River Delta in the Gulf of California. Click on image for NASA history of the image and the region.
LAKE MEAD is the Colorado River reservoir holding key water supplies for California, Arizona, Nevada and the Republic of Mexico. The remnants of what was once a vast watershed concluding in the Gulf of California now depend on releases of water from Mead.
DATE ELEVATION OF LAKE MEAD
June 30, 2009: 1,095.26
June 30, 2008: 1,104.98
June 30, 2007: 1,113.50
June 30, 2006: 1,128.26
June 30, 2005: 1,140.46
June 30, 2004: 1,126.93
For May elevations, click here. For April, here. For US Bureau of Reclamation records of Lake Mead elevations, click here. For the shortage sharing agreement between the Colorado River states, click here.
*See Center for Biological Diversity on the Lower Colorado River Multi-Species Conservation Program
This post has been updated on June 2, 2009. A Las Vegas Eyewitness News link about struggling marina operators at Lake Mead posted 12 hours ago has been replaced by the NASA image and the text altered accordingly. The reason? TV has the boaters covered, and so do the scrambling, recreation-industry sponsored politicians discussed in the nightly news report. This blog is more interested in the long-term and environmental consequences of our water use patterns.
Officially dry
Posted on | June 30, 2009 | No Comments
LOS ANGELES is poised today to record its fourth year in a row with below normal rainfall, reports the Los Angeles Times. From July 1 of last year to June 30—the period designated the “rain year”—only about 9 inches fell, compared with the average of just over 15 inches.
For the full story, click here.
Polluters 5, Environmentalists 0: Supreme Court term reviewed
Posted on | June 29, 2009 | No Comments
FURTHER to last week’s 6-3 Supreme Court Decision in Coeur Alaska, Inc v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council et al, the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) at UC Berkeley will be holding a live Webcast Tuesday June 30, 10-11.30am Pacific Time discussing the environmental record of the concluding Supreme Court term.
Panelists include CLEE executive director Richard Frank and Berkeley professors Dan Farber and Holly Doremus, and assistant professor Eric Biber.
The cases under discussion will include Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council (environmental organizations’ challenge to the U.S. Navy’s active sonar testing program); Summers v. Earth Island Institute (environmental groups seeking to block the sale of timber from fire-damaged federal lands in California); Entergy Corp. v. Riverkeeper (environmentalists challenging the EPA’s use of cost-benefit analysis for power plant projects); Burlington Northern v. United States (federal government trying a case under Superfund law that would have made Shell Oil and Burlington Northern liable for cleaning up a hazardous waste site) and the Coeur Alaska case (environmentalists challenging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit that allowed a mine operator to pump mining wastes into a pristine lake).
As CLEE notes in its press release, environmentalists lost every challenge. The agenda before the panel is to assess the impact of these recent rulings and the dissonance between the High Court and the Ninth Circuit, analyze the Robert’s Court’s overall environmental law record to date, preview the Court’s upcoming Term, and consider the impact of a probable Sotomayor appointment.
Lake or dump? You decide
Posted on | June 29, 2009 | No Comments
Slate Lake in the Tongass National Forest, Alaska. Photo: Sierra Club.
FOR THOSE wondering about whether there is recourse to the Supreme Court’s Coeur Alaska ruling last Monday, there is.
The decision, which by a 6-3 vote upheld the legality of dumping gold mine waste into Lower Slate Lake in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, “can be undone in one of two ways,” said Ed Hopkins, Director of Sierra Club Environmental Quality Program. “One is the Obama administration could issue a rule-making and overturn a rule that the Bush administration did in 2002, which essentially created this problem. Or Congress can pass the the Clean Water Protection Act, which would also overturn the 2002 Bush administration rule.”
The Clean Water Protection Act would return the definition of “fill” to its original meaning (ie: not including pollutants), but it has been stymied in the past by advocates of mountain top removal mining in Appalachia. Last Thursday a Senate Subcommittee resumed hearings on the issue.
To read a blistering New York Times editorial on the Supreme Court decision, click here. For a Sierra Club review, click here. Then, if you’re as mad as the author of the New York Times editorial is, write your congressional delegates and the White House. For a Sierra Club primer on how to do that, click here.
Tags: chance of rain > Clean Water Protection Act > Emily Green > Supreme Court
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