Do I hear three dollars?
Posted on | March 30, 2010 | 3 Comments
Click on the checklist to be taken to the Long Beach lawn-to-garden program website
Las Vegas topped the regional cash-for-grass payout rate with $2 per square foot (now down to $1.50) until the City of Long Beach today announced that it will be offering $2.50 per square foot up to $2,500 for qualifying homeowners.
The calculus behind this sort of bribery is that it is cheaper for a Western water authority to pay homeowners to remove turf and replace it with a drought tolerant garden rather than for the city to vie with competitors for ever more water from an ever shrinking common pool.
Beyond the decision to increase the bounty on turf, what sets Long Beach’s program apart from, say, the cash-for-grass scheme launched by the City of Los Angeles last June is an enviable combination of conviction and competence.
While the City of Los Angeles sat on its hands during 2006-07, the driest rain year in Southern California history, Long Beach voted in strict watering ordinances. When in 2008-09, Los Angeles finally followed suit with watering ordinances and offered a cash-for-grass program of $1 per square foot, the incentive got lost in a Metropolitan Water District-sponsored phone system whose automated voice mail greeted visitors with news that all rebates had been canceled. Only those who hung on after being told to go away were eventually put through to an operator from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
Meanwhile, Long Beach had moved on to sponsoring yard makeovers in each of its districts.
This year, the Long Beach program has expanded to a cash-for-grass program timed to coincide with local events designed to teach residents about replacement landscapes. These include the Long Beach City College plant sale on March 31-April 3 and the Theodore Payne Foundation Tour on April 10-11. For a look at some of the gardens on the tour, including two in Long Beach, click here (and groove on the fact that one is an apartment complex).
For a full listing of dry garden events around Southern California, click here.
This all begs the question as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power fishes around for a new general manager, why can’t we have someone from Long Beach?
The Dry Garden: Eco-snooping
Posted on | March 26, 2010 | No Comments
Yes, yes, yes. We all know that native gardens save water, curb greenhouse gas pollution, save homeowners thousands a year on mow and blow fees and entitle their owners to eco-sainthood. But what do they look like? Are they beautiful? If so, are they hard to plant and maintain? Where can you put down the baby? Will those who might want one still be allowed a patch of lawn?
To help Los Angeles homeowners see the almost endless possibilities open after they start incorporating local flora into their gardens, the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers and Native Plants calls upon its members every spring to open their homes to the public. The upshot is a tour in which the smartest, most experienced native gardeners in Southern California get down with whoever shows up asking for help.
Click here to keep reading the first of a three part series as the Los Angeles Times column “The Dry Garden” previews coastal, inland and foothill gardens from the upcoming Theodore Payne Foundation garden tour.
The anguish of spring
Posted on | March 26, 2010 | No Comments
National Weather Service Graphical Forecast detail for Los Angeles, CA, March 31, 2010 as issued on March 26, 2010. Click on the map to be taken to the interactive tool.
Updated 4/1/2010. Earlier this week, this site carried an explanation of why what was supposed to be a wetter than normal year turned out to be a slightly drier one in Southern California. Yet almost immediately meteorologists spotted what may be our last rain of the season. Ken Clark has a chatty explanation on AccuWeather. For those whose hearts only beat faster when presented with cold hard graphics, a similar prediction may be found at NOAA’s Digital Forecast Database. Click on your region, then on the day in the Probability of Precipitation panel. For Los Angeles, the screen tops 50% chance of rain for the evening of Wednesday, March 31st.
Will it come? The anguish of spring in an arid region again brings to mind a passage from Luis Bunuel’s autobiography “My Last Breath” about growing up in Aragon, whose mediterranean climate is almost identical to that of Los Angeles: “Whenever an adventuresome cumulus wandered into view just above the mountain peaks, all the clerks in the grocery next door would rush to our house and clamber up onto the roof. There, from the vantage point of a small gable, they’d spend hours watching the creeping cloud, shaking their heads and murmuring sadly: ‘Wind’s from the south. It’ll never get here.'”
Update, April Fools Day, 2010: Less than .01 inch of rain fell in downtown Los Angeles between midnight and 5am.
Adaptation
Posted on | March 25, 2010 | 1 Comment
Big problem, big title. The US Environmental Protection Agency Office of Water has issued the National Water Program Response to Climate Change report for 2009. Click here for highlights or to read the full report.
Tags: chance of rain > Emily Green > US Environmental Protection Agency > Water
The water issue
Posted on | March 24, 2010 | No Comments
Print editions of National Geographic’s special issue “Water: Our Thirsty World” (now online) will be on newsstands on March 30th. An accompanying exhibit opens at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles on March 27th. Among the features is “California’s Pipe Dream,” written by Joel K. Bourne, Jr with photographs by Edward Burtynsky.
Bourne opens, “On a blistering day in the megalopolis that is southern California, Shivaji Deshmukh of the Orange County Water District offers me a cup of cool, clear water that just yesterday was swirling around in an Anaheim toilet bowl … After spending the past century building one of the most elaborate water-delivery systems on the planet replete with giant pumps and thousands of miles of pipes and canals, California has come to this — akin to the last desperate act of lifeboat-bound sailors drinking their own bodily fluids.”
Once a body of water so well fed by Eastern Sierra glaciers that it sustained steam boats, Owens Lake became a salt-crusted valley after being tapped by Los Angeles at the turn of the last century. Photo: Edward Burtynsky / National Geographic
There are few more succinct summaries of California’s water crunch from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to the Salton Sea than that offered by Bourne’s short, incisive feature. The graphics and photographs explain why no other organization has bested National Geographic for environmental story-telling. Other features cover pending global fresh water shortages, desalination, rainwater harvesting, Asia’s glaciers, holy water, groundwater depletion in the High Plains Aquifer, a photo essay on water towers, vanishing wildlife of freshwater streams, water in recreation, pharmaceuticals in our water supply, how three Middle Eastern rivals are sharing the Jordan River and conservation in the American Southwest.
The Annenberg water exhibit will be accompanied by “Iris Nights” lectures from National Geographic photographers beginning April 1st. Click here for the program.
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