The week that was, 8/22-28/2010
Posted on | August 29, 2010 | No Comments
Bullets rain on the Swat Valley in a drawing done by one of Feriha Peracha's students school for "Taliban" survivors. August flooding has brought fresh anguish to the already chaotic and deadly region that Peracha remembers as paradisal during her childhood visits. Source: American Public Media's 'The Story.' Click on the drawing to be taken to Dick Gordon's interview with Peracha.
As we remember the tragic delays after Hurricane Katrina hit the Louisiana coast five years ago today, arguably the single most meaningful way that we can mark the anniversary is to help the millions in Pakistan whose livelihoods are being washed away now, who are desperate now.
For a glimpse of the horror being visited on that country by unprecedented monsoonal flooding, and the bewilderment and desperation of the people in the path of the water, there is no better sampling than Dick Gordon’s August 25, 2010 interview with Pakistani psychologist Feriha Peracha on American Public Media’s “The Story.”
For the last five years, Peracha has run a school for teenaged boys wrested from the Taliban. She accepted the assignment because she remembered going to the Swat Valley as a child, when she says it was a welcoming place where fruit farmers would not let her leave without feeding her.
As Swat fell to the group that the world now calls the Taliban, she will not use that word for them; she insists they be called what they are, which is “terrorists.” Taliban means “student of learning,” she tells Gordon. The thugs offering children false futures in paradise for becoming killers are not students, she argues, but terrorists. Perhaps the most unnerving thing for any listener familiar with American inner cities is how perfectly her description of the methods of terrorist induction of poor children of Swat into the “Taliban” applies to, say, the gangs of Los Angeles.
As the August floods hit Swat, she described being called from the school by a major to see “people standing on the edges of the river … staring at the river as if they could stop it.” They couldn’t stop it. Now, working with aid organizations, she is trying to get food to stranded residents.
We all know that more could have and should have been done in the early days of Katrina. How to use that knowledge? For information from the Red Cross on relief for the Swat valley, click here.
Note: the layout of the American Public Media web page places the link to play Peracha’s story at the bottom of the screen below a second item called “Summer on the Farm,” so be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the page where it says Listen Now. Then click. It will look wrong, but it will be right.
For NASA images of the flooding in Pakistan, click here.
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 to do with water, including a pungent post on Katrina, do check in with WaterWired. New to this site’s water blog roll is Reddit Water, a linking service to water stories in the news. Do investigate it.
This post has been updated.
The Dry Garden: Pruning sage
Posted on | August 27, 2010 | No Comments
Last spring, horticulturist Lili Singer remarked to me that one of the most touching mistakes she sees made by novice dry gardeners is timidity in pruning their sages. And so, in the summer edition of the Theodore Payne Foundation’s Poppy Print newsletter, she nudges native gardening converts to do it.
With thanks to Lili for the push, I am going to echo the prompt in this column in the hope that others may learn to work out their frustrations on their gardens in such a timely fashion.
If it seems late, it isn’t. Only the most ferociously organized gardeners dead-head sage as soon as the flowers fade in June. Watching the flush of flowers drying on the branch through July and August makes for too many sunset grace notes. As Lili notes, birds move in and glean the seeds. Yet by late August, those fluttering elegies to spring just look dead, and it’s as obvious to the most laissez faire gardener as it is to the fire marshal that it is time to prune.
Click here to keep reading about pruning sage in this week’s ‘The Dry Garden’ in the Los Angeles Times.
Four scenarios for climate change and water
Posted on | August 26, 2010 | No Comments
The US Environmental Protection Agency has opened a 45-day public comment period for a draft report looking at impacts of climate change on the water supplies of four American urban regions: the Bay Area in Northern California, Seattle in the Pacific Northwest, New York City in the Northeast and Spartansburg in upstate South Carolina. Climate Change Vulnerability Assessments: Four Case Studies of Water Utility Practices was prepared by the National Center for Environmental Assessment’s Global Climate Research Staff, formerly known as the Tortuous Title Division of Guess Whether or Not it’s a Quango. As it is a draft, the agency requests that readers not cite or quote the content. However, it does welcome feedback. Consider mine given on the title and name of the author. Click here for the EPA’s main climate change page.
Betting man seeks angles
Posted on | August 25, 2010 | No Comments
It’s unclear to seasoned observers whether the speculators behind Cadiz Inc, a company pushing an outlandish plan to tap desert groundwater for Southern California cities, plan to go for actual water, or are content to capitalize on the stock market on the sheer prospect of mining it. Cadiz founder Keith Brackpool likes to play all the angles.
To appreciate just how many angles, check out Capitol Weekly’s report today on a Brackpool-backed bill in the California legislature seeking to change rules as to how one can wager on horse-racing.
“One key component added to the bill is exchange betting,” reports the Weekly. “This is a type of betting that allows players to essentially bet against a horse, or bet that a horse will finish in a particular spot in a race, or take innumerable other possible positions. Unlike traditional betting, where the track provides odds on particular horses, the house merely facilitates complex bets between willing parties. People can stake out positions and even sell them to others bettors prior to a race.”
Brackpool, a generous donor to [and/or employer of] a string of powerful politicians including former California Governor Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger Chief of Staff Diana Kennedy and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, was appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger to the state horse-racing board last September and became chairman in January. The Weekly reports that he also owns several politicians, excuse me, horses.
The city flower
Posted on | August 24, 2010 | 3 Comments
LA's city flower, the bird of paradise, is actually a native of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. The image is a detail taken from "The Lilies," a Taschen collection of paintings of plants in the Liliaceae by botanical illustrator Pierre-Joseph Redouté. Click on the ikhamanga, aka Strelitzia reginae, aka bird of paradise, to find out more about "The Lilies" and the 18th century artist nicknamed 'Raphael of Flowers.'
A year after the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power began offering $1/square foot for home owners to rip out lawn, KPCC reports that the Los Angeles County Waterworks Districts is following suit. A teaser interview today by Patt Morrison with horticulturist Lili Singer, special projects director of the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers & Native Plants, will be followed by a longer appearance by Singer tomorrow on AirTalk.
By all means tune in because ripping out your lawn is the right thing to do, but tune in if you simply like plants. Many of you will know Singer from the garden show that she did for KCRW in the 1990s, others will have taken her newsletter, yet others will have followed her in the Los Angeles Times. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, there is a treat in store. Her presence on AirTalk makes it one phone-in program where even too-cool-for-school types should seriously consider dialing the expert. Singer’s kind, helpful, smart, funny and, best of all, back on the radio.
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