The Dry Garden: Capturing the spirit of LA’s streams
Contemporary map of the Ballona Creek watershed with overlay of 1902 streams and wetlands. Source: "Seeking Streams" by Jessica Hall et al, 606 Studio, Cal Poly Pomona.
WHEN it snows in the mountains and rains in the basin, Jessica Hall thinks of the lost streams of Los Angeles. In fact, she thinks of them all the time. For the last nine years, the 41-year-old garden designer has been retracing the paths of the native creeks, streams and springs that once ran wild before they were filled in and paved for homes.
In the process, Hall has come to believe that the best town planning and landscape design principles for the future may lie in understanding the habits of the watercourses of the past.
Those who missed the profile of Hall last August by Times staff writer Hector Tobar have a treat in store reading about how Hall tracked down Sacatela …
El Nino intensified in November, NASA reports
OCEAN conditions known as ‘El Nino’ and associated with wet winters in California intensified in November, reports the NASA Earth Observatory today. For a satellite photo of this week’s storm, click here.
For National Weather Service forecasts of continuing rain, click here. For preliminary rainfall amounts in greater Los Angeles from last night’s showers, here.
Elsewhere around the world and the web, the New York Times has a simple, informative interactive map showing which countries are at the United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen and what they seek. To access it, click here. For a Los Angeles Times update from the negotiating floor, click here. For Day 5 of the Copenhagen conferenc…
‘Ghost of Tulare’
“Tufts of unmilled cotton line Utica Avenue like clumps of dirty spring snow,” writes Judith Lewis in High Country News. “The road is like hundreds of others in the dun-and-green checkerboard of California’s Central Valley, a two-lane highway running straight as a zipper past geometrically arranged almond orchards and vineyards. Steve Haze, a candidate for U.S. Congress, is out here on what he calls “recon,” determined to debunk the local billboard slogans. “Congress-Created Drought” is common in fallow fields, right behind “Food Grows Where Water Flows” and “Water = Jobs.” The signs were put up by corporate growers and water-management leaders, who complain that a federal court decision that reduced their irrigation deliveries to save a tiny fish put thousands of people out of work. Haze thinks the reality is more complicated … He would like to see [Tulare Lake] brought back to life to help solve California’s water …
Casting daily: ‘Brad Pitt is saving Planet Earth in Copenhagen’
From the London Guardian's daily picture gallery of the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen: "The director Tue Biering (right) and assistant Marijana Jankovic (left) go through the script with a potential actor wearing a wig and sunglasses during the casting for a film called Brad Pitt is saving Planet Earth in Copenhagen. Every day someone is chosen to act in one scene, culminating in 12 scenes making a movie which will be screened on the internet at the end of the climate conference." Click on the image to be taken to the entire Guardian photo gallery. This photo: Adrian Dennis / AFP / Getty Images
Chance of rain
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