How Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden grew, 1950-1970
Posted on | March 13, 2012 | 5 Comments
As wild California has steadily succumbed to development during the last century, a doughty effort to conserve its native plants has been underway at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, first at the original grounds in Santa Ana Canyon in Orange County and latterly in Claremont in Los Angeles County. This month, the Claremont garden quietly published a meticulously noted and just as meticulously translated summary of two decades of goings-on inside what amounts to a Noah’s Ark for California’s flora.
As early as the 1920s, the Southland’s oak woodlands, wetlands, riparian corridors and coastal sage-scrub communities were already being destroyed at such a rate that heiress Susanna Bixby Bryant offered roughly 200 acres of her family cattle and citrus ranch in Orange County for the creation of a native plant botanic garden. The objective, recalled Rancho director Philip Munz in 1947, was collecting, growing and thus preserving “a very large percentage” of a very large state’s plants.
To establish what became the collection, Bryant employed the good and great of American botany. Among them: Munz, then a taxonomist at Pomona College; Ernest Braunton, British-born naturalist and garden editor at the Los Angeles Times from 1903-36; father of American landscape architecture Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr; Los Angeles nurseryman Theodore Payne and Berkeley botanist Willis Linn Jepson. Click here to keep reading
Tags: Bart O'Brien > chance of rain > Emily Green > Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden
LADWP: cheaper to fight than fix
Posted on | March 6, 2012 | 11 Comments
Dust off Owens Lake, March 6, 2012. Source: Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District. Click on the image to be taken to district "dust cams."
After suppressing 90% of Owens Valley dust caused by a century of Los Angeles siphoning Eastern Sierra water, the LA Department of Water & Power has sued to stop further remediation work. The move under sophomore DWP general manager Ron Nichols appears to be part of a greater strategy to increase water exports while leaving the affected rural communities tied up in court. The shift under Nichols marks a sharp reversal of the largely good neighbor policy pursued by the four preceding general managers to have served since 2005 under LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Click here to keep reading
High good, low bad: Mead in February 2012
Posted on | February 29, 2012 | No Comments
Click on the graphic to play water manager of the University of Nevada's hypothetical "Lake Heed."
According to the federal Bureau of Reclamation, Lake Mead’s much-watched waters were lapping at roughly 1,133.09 feet on this Leap Year evening, when a post normally reserved for March 1st had to be done early in order to be on the road. As levels go, it’s better than last year’s of 1,095.76 and worse than most since February records began in the 1930s. At an admittedly hasty glance, over the intervening three quarters of a century, elevations were only lower from 1935-38, 1955-57, 1964-66, 1968 and 2007-11. The first set of low readings has little to do with scarcity. The lake was filling after the construction of Hoover Dam. The mid-century dips looks like they at least in part reflect construction of the Glen Canyon Dam upstream. The third announces a prevailing drought on the Colorado River combined with ever-increasing demand on a river that Reclamation describes as “over-allocated” between water users in seven US states, tribes and Mexico. Ah, and nature. The total “system contents” are calculated at 67%.
Leaving aside lower-than-ideal snowpack building around the river’s headwaters this year — there’s always room for hand-wringing about that later — this seems the moment to repost a University of Nevada teaching game spotted by the eagle-eyed Michael Campana at WaterWired several weeks ago. In it, players/students are quizzed on their knowledge about the river system and invited to play water manager. The origin of the game being Nevada, the test is rigged. A key segment of the quiz for stretching the supplies of the hypothetical Lake Mead does not allow for curbing population growth in the dry West as a water management tool.
And so the not-so-subtly gamed take-home point seems to insist that more water will be needed, presumably from the Great Basin Aquifer and delivered through a proposed and controversial Las Vegas pipeline. Critics of the pipeline see Vegas’s problem as not a question of inadequate water but non-existent town planning. A real world decision by the Nevada State Engineer charged with granting or denying groundwater for Las Vegas from four rural valleys is expected in March.
Tags: Colorado River > elevations > Lake Mead > University of Nevada
Just say ‘no’ to Cadiz stock tease
Posted on | February 29, 2012 | 1 Comment
Cadiz, Inc today announced that it has optioned use of a derelict gas line to ship northern Californian water to the Mojave Desert for long-term storage by southern Californian cities. Personally, I’m waiting for the announcement that it will be helicoptering in melting icebergs whose freshwater might otherwise be lost to salty seas. For more than a decade, Cadiz has styled its proposal to pump from 50,000 to 80,000 acre feet of water a year from a Mojave dry valley as a “conservation” project on the grounds that in addition to pulling water it could also conceivably bank surplus water from the Colorado River. Click here to keep reading
Rivers of color
Posted on | February 27, 2012 | 3 Comments
It was James Wood’s review of Edward St Aubyn’s “At Last” that drove me this rainy afternoon to Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, but it was a smattering of tiles around the rear stairwell and along the risers of the stairs leading to the parking lot that made the trip so much more gratifying than ordering the book on the Internet. I had noticed these tiles before, filthy, bunkered up against Southern Californian glare, but never like today, never basking in the milky light made so evenly luminous by cloud cover and rain. There, today, this tile work by the late Los Angeles mosaic artist Bill Crite amounted to rivers of color, so beautiful that even the camera in a frankly crummy cell phone began to capture their power and spirit.
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