Autumn is planting season for natives
Posted on | October 29, 2012 | 4 Comments
Culver City garden of furniture designer J. Shields and his wife, accountant Anne Tannen. Shields learned to garden through many years of visiting the Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley. Photo: Emily Green
Days are becoming shorter in our bright place. What rain we may get will be arriving in coming months. It’s planting season in Southern California. November and December are the best months for sowing of wildflower seeds; young plants should go in the ground between November and February. The reason that our gardeners bestir themselves for action just as others across the country are locking up the tool shed? California is the only state in the nation with what geographers call a “mediterranean climate zone.”
Tags: chance of rain > Emily Green > Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden > Theodore Payne Foundation
“This evacuation is mandatory”
Posted on | October 28, 2012 | No Comments
Mayor Michael Bloomberg today ordered mandatory evacuation of low-lying areas vulnerable to storm surges as Hurricane Sandy bears down on New York City.
Click here to be taken to New York’s Office of Emergency Management, here for tracking by the National Weather Service.
Tags: chance of rain > Hurricane Sandy > National Weather Service > New York City Office of Emergency Management
The generous light of Campanile
Posted on | October 24, 2012 | No Comments
For those unused to seeing food writing on a site that typically concerns Western water, you do have the right page. This water-to-wine moment was prompted by sheer love of Campanile restaurant, which will close next week after nearly a quarter of a century in business. Above, pictured at a meal on my 50th birthday, are Kate Arding, formerly a cheesemonger with Neal’s Yard Dairy and the Cowgirl Creamery, now publisher of Culture magazine; UK jewelry designer Sarah Herriot; and Jeremy Lee, chef at Quo Vadis in London’s Soho. On the rare occasions when these dear old friends were in town, we went to Campanile. Once, in 1999, Jeremy and I ate there every service for a week. It took a year to pay it off, but it was worth it. Click here for an elegy in the LA Weekly about a restaurant that changed the way Los Angeles ate — so joyously.
Drought and dust
Posted on | October 22, 2012 | No Comments
According to NASA, portions of Interstate 35 in Kansas and Oklahoma, as well as Interstate 80 in Wyoming, had to be shut down due to accidents and poor visibility. Click on the photo for the full resolution image and text from the Earth Observatory.
“Parched by months of drought and searing heat, the Great Plains of the United States endured a widespread dust storm in mid-October 2012,” reports NASA’s Earth Observatory. “Severe winds blew soil and sediment across hundreds of miles, closing highways and reminding longtime residents of the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s and the severe dust storms of the 1950s.”
Tags: chance of rain > climate change > dust storms > NASA Earth Observatory
Opposing faces of optimism
Posted on | October 15, 2012 | No Comments
Limerick believes that Denver Water Board attorney Glenn Saunders, who faced down the US Department of Interior to fill Dillon Reservoir (above), belongs in the pantheon of “water history celebrities” that includes John Wesley Powell and William Mulholland. Photo: Denver Water
McCool sees the demolition of the Glines Canyon Dam on Washington State’s Elwha River as an example of what is possible in reviving salmon fisheries and amenity rivers. Photo: National Park Service. Click on images to enlarge.
Two new books reviewed in High Country News present sharply opposing faces of optimism about the future of Western fresh water management. In her history of Denver Water, University of Colorado historian Patricia Nelson Limerick is frankly admiring of the men who put water in the pipe dream of Manifest Destiny. “The contemporary need for inspiration — for parables of people facing tough problems, refusing discouragement, and pressing on to solutions and remedies — is the most urgent need of the twenty-first century,” she argues in the introduction to “A Ditch in Time: The City, the West, and Water.”
Meanwhile, ” University of Utah political scientist Daniel McCool seizes on an assessment published by the American Geophysical Union that 85% of the dams in the US will be at the end of the operational lives by 2020. Americans have never had a better opportunity to remove the concrete choking rivers, he argues in “River Republic.” The rewards? Sparkling “amenity” rivers for recreation, urban waterfront parks and restored harbors for cities and revival of the fisheries that once symbolized the terrific fecundity of the American dream. As knock ons, he sees the impact to hydropower, barge transport systems and agriculture as opportunity to update and reform outdated systems. Click here to be taken to the HCN review.
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