The Dry Garden: Raven at Rancho
Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, at dusk in a meadow of irises, poppies and sage at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont, California, where he was honored for his work on biodiversity last Sunday. “It makes sense that we’ll come to a point where we’re sustainable,” he told the audience. “The question we must ask ourselves now is how long it will take and what we will lose in the process?" Photo: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times.
As the program had it, the ceremony at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont was to honor Peter Raven. But those who came away from Sunday’s event might be forgiven for believing that Raven, the man Time magazine called a “hero for the planet,” had come to honor Rancho Santa Ana.
For those unfamiliar with Raven, he is to plants what David Attenborough is to animals. He …
Climate change is real
Source: NASA. Click on the graphic to be taken to NASA's page outlining key climate change indicators.
It’s a rare letter whose content runs a page and a half and whose signatures take up four and a half more. But that is the scale of consensus about climate change from 255 of the country’s leading scientists, including 11 Nobel laureates, who in today’s Science magazine once again try to drive home the message that Climate Change is Real. To get through to the likes of George Will, they keep it simple:
(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.
(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.
(iii) Natural causes always play a …
Review-Journal sues its own source
Anyone who doubts that enforcement of copyright law is out of step with fair play and how journalism is gathered should consider that yesterday representatives for the Las Vegas Review-Journal filed suit against the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada.
The case against the liberal advocacy group joins a growing list of complaints by the R-J’s parent company, Stephens Media, and its legal affiliate, Righthaven LLC, which in recent months have filed suit against a number of organizations as disparate as a Killerfrogs.com, a sports booster website of Texas Christian University, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and a realty office based in Henderson, Nevada.
Each suit claims copyright infringement on the grounds that the organizations posted articles by Stephens Media outlets on their websites.
Leaving aside the Killer Frogs, marijuana advocates and the realtor, what makes yesterday’s lawsuit against the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada …
Badass tats for a good cause
It’s been a long dry spell since the “save water, shower with a friend” campaign from back in the day (when was it? 1970s? 80s?). But finally conservationists are having some fun again. And this time they’re bearing some badass tats. To learn more about a new non-profit, SaveTheColorado.org and a grant program dedicated purely to foment conservation along the river’s nearly 15,000 mile course, click here.…
Kay sera sera
Kay Brothers retires this week as Deputy General Manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. There will probably be parties and there should be toasts, during which she may be heralded as a force in developing groundwater storage programs for the Las Vegas Valley Water District in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Even her worst critics would have to raise a glass. The kind of storage of Colorado River water undertaken by Brothers and Terry Katzer, the man who hired her in 1986 at the SNWA seed agency, was a model of progressive water management in a desert where evaporation empties reservoirs with sparkling remorselessness — and in a valley where subsidence is measured in feet, not inches.
However, it is unlikely that she will be remembered for that. Rather, second only to her boss Pat Mulroy, Brothers has been Justifier-in-Chief for the Las Vegas pipeline project unveiled in …
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