Unpaving paradise
Posted on | March 9, 2011 | 5 Comments
This photo essay tells the story of a successful effort between 2003 and 2007 to intercept a re-paving project at 24th Street School in West Adams, Los Angeles. The bid: stop replacement of old asphalt with new asphalt and instead seize the opportunity to introduce teaching gardens, shade, play equipment and freeway buffering into the schoolyard. What military strategists call “mission drift” led to it also involving a full-blown garden teaching program. Click here to keep reading
The Dry Garden: Streetwise
Posted on | March 4, 2011 | No Comments
It was spotting a pumpkin identified as a gourd that prompted Leigh Adams to write John Lyons. She was (and is) an expert in gourd-craft as well as the artist-in-residence at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden. Lyons, whose website carried the photo of the pumpkin, was (and is) a garden designer and regular lecturer at the Arboretum. Yet until Adams wrote, they had never met. That was two years ago. They now joke that they are “as much in love as a non-couple could be.” And they have a baby, a four-month-old garden that is brimming with art, native sages, fruit trees and irrigated by rainwater harvested from the street.
Click here to keep reading “The Dry Garden” in the Los Angeles Times.
Cadiz update
Posted on | March 3, 2011 | 3 Comments
The Santa Margarita Water District has announced notice of preparation of a draft Environmental Impact Report of what is now being styled as the “Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project,” a formerly discredited Mojave Desert groundwater mining scheme rejected by the Metropolitan Water District in 2002. Its resurrection, this time with a clutch of small water companies fronting it, has much the same players in the background, not least of them Keith Brackpool, the brazen good time boy of the Manhattan Beach Country Club, horse racing aficionado and close friend/former employer of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. For the history of a plan to extract 50,000 acre feet of water a year from the Mojave Desert and then to use public facilities to wheel the water to public agencies at cost to public lands and public purse, click here.
For the former environmental review, which describes the same plan in which little more than euphemisms and acronyms have changed, click here.
Public scoping meetings are scheduled for Wednesday, March 16th at 4 pm at the Santa Margarita Water District, 26111 Antonio Parkway Rancho in Santa Margarita and Thursday, March 24th at 6pm at the Joshua Tree Community Center, 6171 Sunburst Street, Joshua Tree, California.
Among many questions forming: Which agencies will be participating and which have been sidelined by the politically connected backers of this project — in short, how the proponents of this blatant mining scheme intend to thread the regulatory needle this time?
High good, low bad: Mead in February 2011
Posted on | March 1, 2011 | 1 Comment
Actionful and remarkably well-groomed bureaucrats: Bureau of Land Management illustration explaining what might appear a Southern Nevada Water Authority-friendly bent in the framing of the pending Environmental Impact Statement. Click on the image to read the captions.
Two decades ago, a plan to tap the Great Basin Aquifer in five Nevada valleys through a nearly 300-mile-long pipeline to slake inexorably booming Las Vegas was a back-up plan. Plan A was that Nevada’s relatively small allocation from the Colorado River could be increased. Las Vegas is, after all, twenty miles from Lake Mead, the largest storage reservoir in the U.S.
Yet when Western cities kept booming after the Colorado River entered long-term drought in 1991, Plan B became Plan A. Tapping the aquifer of the glorious and sparsely populated counties of Nevada’s Great Basin Desert became a central pillar of the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s long term water plan. Steve Wynn’s and Kirk Kerkorian’s empires depended on it, and so did the livelihoods of a lot of casino workers enticed to the Mojave by the gaming industry.
It was not a moral plan, not an environmentally sound one either, but thanks to political heft it was working until cracks began appearing in the legal groundwork. In a series of court cases in 2009 and 2010, Las Vegas was stripped of its water awards from four rural basins. In one case, the State Engineer was found to have awarded water from three valleys without credible evidence that adequate supplies existed. In a further case covering every target valley, the State Supreme Court then found that the State Engineer had denied protestants their due process rights by allowing punishing delays in hearings.
Victory was bittersweet. The protestants didn’t win. Rather, they now get to fight a two decade-old war all over again. This week, the Great Basin Network, formed to fight claims first published in 1989, announced state-wide workshops to help rural Nevadans again go through the expensive and time consuming process of filing legal protests that will ensure them status in upcoming hearings. The first workshop begins Thursday in Las Vegas. Click here for details. The protest period will close March 24th. For a schedule outlining subsequent hearings, click here to be taken to the Nevada State Engineer. Click here to keep reading
Wet weekend
Posted on | February 27, 2011 | No Comments
Briefest of snow in Altadena, California, elevation roughly 1,400 feet, Saturday February 26th.
If you thought that Southern California’s much anticipated snow was the damp squib of the weekend, you didn’t watch the Oscars. More interesting are 2010-11 precipitation numbers to date for what has been a reasonably wet rainy season in Los Angeles County in spite of a La Niña in the equatorial Pacific.
Foothills: Altadena 26.89″ ***, Pasadena: 15.58″ *
San Fernando Valley: Burbank: 14.09″ **
Basin: Downtown Los Angeles: 15.78″ **
Coast: Long Beach: 15.38″ **
If luck amounts to a water plan, then we planned well. To see how a now weakening La Niña has impacted the southern US, from Arizona clear across to Florida, click here for the US Drought Monitor.
*Source: National Weather Service, Los Angeles/Oxnard
**Source: National Weather Service, California Nevada River Forecast Center
***Source: Bill Westphal
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