High good, low bad: Lake Mead in October 2010
Posted on | November 1, 2010 | No Comments
“The advice given to boaters here these days – ‘If you haven’t been to Lake Mead lately, you haven’t been to Lake Mead’ – sounds like a marketing slogan dreamed up to lure return business,” writes Shaun McKinnon in the Arizona Republic. “Except in this case the advice is true. The drought on the Colorado River has reshaped the huge reservoir so dramatically in the past 11 years that it bears little resemblance to the lake captured in snapshots just a few years ago. Water levels have dropped 133 feet. Islands have emerged and grown. Rocky outcroppings push through the surface, creating watery obstacle courses whose paths shift almost daily.”
Click here to keep reading or here for hourly elevation reports from the US Bureau of Reclamation. Lake Mead closed October at 1,082.35, less than 10 feet of the point where shortages will be announced for Arizona and Nevada.
This editorial should have run in a Western paper. Instead it appeared in the New York Times on October 31st: “Last month, Ken Salazar, the secretary of the interior, committed $1.5 million to establish a study group focusing on the Colorado River basin … Since 1922, [the Colorado River’s] water has been allocated among seven Western states under a legal compact. The amount each state can draw from the river is based on water levels measured in 1922, after several wet years. There is a big gap between the amount of water flowing then — about 16.4 million acre-feet per year — and the actual flow in normal years … ” Click here to keep reading.
Click here for contrasting elevations going back to 2001
The Dry Garden: She’s back
Posted on | October 29, 2010 | No Comments
I met Dryden Helgoe six years ago when she was part of team behind a new landscape at Kidspace Children’s Museum in Pasadena. Shortly afterward, I worked with her on a playground plan for a school garden. During both encounters, she was inscrutable: gracious, spookily competent and distractingly beautiful as a Botticelli angel. Then, by the end of 2005, she was gone — off to start a family.
During the intervening years, I wondered more than once if the choice of stay-at-home motherhood would retire Helgoe. When I met her, she was a rising star. The University of Oregon landscape architecture graduate had a year at the Olin Studio in Philadelphia and five with Nancy Goslee Power & Associates in Santa Monica. Helgoe’s disappearance from the scene left a void.
Click here to keep reading about Dryden Helgoe’s return to landscaping in The Dry Garden column of the Los Angeles Times.
America’s best idea on “uncertain path”
Posted on | October 28, 2010 | 1 Comment
Click on the book cover to read more about Uncertain Path and William C Tweed.
The “national park idea as we know it, a veritable covenant between national park managers and the American public, is collapsing and will need to be redrawn,” says William C Tweed in his new book “Uncertain Path.”
While other historians might not refer to their writing as a “walking meditation,” other historians probably didn’t spend three decades as a ranger. Tweed only retired as Chief Park Naturalist at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in 2006.
On Thursday November 11th Tweed will be discussing the future of America’s best idea at the Solvang Public Library, 1745 Mission Drive, Solvang, California. Time: 7.30pm. Sponsor: The Santa Ynez Natural History Society.
Tags: chance of rain > Emily Green > national parks > William C Tweed
November fully loaded
Posted on | October 27, 2010 | No Comments
November dry garden events for Southern California are finally online here. Events include expert tutorials on native plant garden design in Santa Monica, Sun Valley and San Diego. (Run, don’t walk, to the Theodore Payne Foundation to book a place in Susanne Jett’s course — she designed Garden/garden for the City of Santa Monica.) There will be talks by Jessica Hall of LA Creek Freak on stream restoration, Ellen Mackey of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California on stormwater diversion* and Lili Singer of the Theodore Payne Foundation on native plant horticulture. There are plenty of restoration projects and, for those less enamored by the wild and more rapt by exotica, a new CEO will be talking about the future of The Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden. For native plant lovers, the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden will be having its fall plant sale. Afflicted by a sudden bout of common sense, as of November 10th, Rancho’s new west side Grow Native Nursery will finally be open on weekends. Hooray! There are too many good bird events to single one out. Enjoy.
*An earlier version of this post mentioned a talk by Drew Ready on gardening in sympathy with the local watershed. It has been postponed.
Home, where art thou?
Posted on | October 9, 2010 | No Comments
Apologies to regular readers and visitors. I have sold my house but not found a new one. The regular Sunday news round-up The week that was will not appear for the next several weeks. I will resume regular posting in November, either from a street corner or new abode. The November dry garden events calender will be posted before [sweaty pause] Halloween. For a full round-up of California water news, go to Aquafornia, the newsfeed of the Water Education Foundation, or to UC Berkeley’s On Water. For San Diego water news, try Groksurf’s San Diego. Or, for all things fresh water, do check in with WaterWired.
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