High good, low bad: Mead in December 2012
Posted on | December 30, 2012 | 2 Comments
WHAT western water managers preach and what western water managers do is often contradictory. This much can be relied on: inconsistency starts at the top. Only this month a long-awaited report issued by the federal Bureau of Reclamation emphasized the need for conservation over big infrastructure projects. And we can trust its conclusions in that pointlessly hyped McGuffin projects such as diverting the Mississippi to the dry West or towing Alaskan icebergs to San Diego will not happen any time soon. However, only weeks after the release of the Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study, during the dead time between Christmas and New Year, Reclamation’s parent agency, the US Department of Interior, green-lighted the driving of a massive pipeline from Las Vegas hundreds of miles north into the Great Basin. This is the opposite of conservation over big infrastructure and its approval comes in spite of clearly devastating implications for thousands of square miles across the Great Basin.
Where, you might wonder, were our vaunted environmental regulations in all this? The short answer is that these laws and the agencies meant to enforce them are every bit as successful protecting our natural resources as the Securities and Exchange Commission is policing Wall Street. The Southern Nevada Water Authority deputy general manager who for many years fronted the Vegas pipeline once bragged to a local television reporter that she could get anything permitted. To judge by this week’s Record of Decision, she appears to be right. Watch enough projects go through environmental impact review and it’s hard not to conclude that this notionally protective scrutiny is nothing more than a line item on an infrastructure project budget. While reviews too rarely protect the environment, the expense turns out to be valuable to prospectors such as Las Vegas. Feigning diligence proves a useful inoculant against liability.
For a look at how big infrastructure projects and not a new era of conservation is dominating wider thinking in the West, it’s worth revisiting the under-remarked June 2012 Natural Resources Defense Council report “Pipe Dreams.” Then let’s close 2012 with a look at Lake Mead. According to Reclamation, on Christmas day 2012 the Colorado River’s largest storage reservoir was 52% full.
Tags: chance of rain > compliance > Lake Mead > Southern Nevada Water Authority
“Dam Nation” by Stephen Grace
Posted on | December 28, 2012 | No Comments
To snatch a moment from the wild and capture it in words that pulse with life is a feat. Stephen Grace, author of the 2004 novel Under Cottonwoods, makes it seem effortless. When he describes sandhill cranes rising from the wetlands of the Blackfoot Valley, the reader can almost hear the applause of their wings.
It takes an entirely different kind of gift to comprehend and then explain the sophistry of the policies that are destroying those cranes for the sake of alfalfa farms, feedlots, casinos, suburban lawns and swimming pools. But Grace can do that, too. In his most recent book, Dam Nation: How Water Shaped the West and Will Determine its Future, Grace acts as both poet of Western wilderness and translator of water policy.
Click here to keep reading a review of Stephen Grace’s book in High Country News.
Time for a ‘moon shot’ effort over Los Angeles storm water
Posted on | December 21, 2012 | 4 Comments
Los Angeles shimmers after the rain. Even the asphalt gleams. But the smut and litter washed away won’t simply have vanished. Rather, swept up by rainwater, it will have become embroiled in a torrent of grime before being flushed into storm drains, LA’s rivers and finally the Pacific.
Anyone who has been around for a couple of voting cycles will be forgiven for wondering: Didn’t we already pass Proposition O in 2004 precisely to fix that? Didn’t a $500m bond filter our dregs once and for all?
We did and it didn’t. While Prop O money bought grates that now trap trash at many if not all curbside catch basins, and its combination of actual dollars and inspiration value led to a few new “green streets,” capturing the sheer magnitude of toxins and trash that are indiscriminately flushed into the ocean by rain in Los Angeles will take a collective effort more daunting than the moon shot. In recognition of this, a tax is being proposed to begin the long, slow process of cleaning up LA’s rinse cycle. Click here to keep reading
Tags: Clean Water Clean Beaches Measure > Heal the Bay > Los Angeles County Flood Control Division > Natural Resources Defense Council
Tom Lubbock’s early newspaper collages
Posted on | December 6, 2012 | 3 Comments
Tom Lubbock illustration for an Independent newspaper Edinburgh Festival pub guide, 14 August 1989.
I lost contact with Tom Lubbock many years before leaving England in 1998, however landing last night on his almost two-year-old online obituary in the UK Independent instantly drove me to sheafs of yellowing newspaper clippings. I have hoarded these through many moves precisely because they contain Tom’s artwork. Click here to keep reading
Two years in Altadena
Posted on | December 3, 2012 | 5 Comments
Two years ago, this was paved. Click on the image for a photo-diary of a two year garden-making project in Altadena, California.
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