California, Nevada, Eastern Washington, Eastern Oregon and Texas Red on Drought Outlook

 

Click on image for link to National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center

…

Weekly Drought Map

Click on map for link to the National Drought Mitigation Center

…

Santa Fe Springs wins Guttersnipe Award

 

Dry season run-off trickles to a storm drain outside of the Santa Fe Springs offices of the Greater Los Angeles Vector Control District. Photo: Emily Green

CONGRATULATIONS to the City of Santa Fe Springs and its water supplier, the Central Basin Municipal Water District. You are recipients of the first Chance of Rain Guttersnipe Award.

In fact, you inspired it.

This distinction goes exclusively to those who passively or aggressively promote dry-season run-off through the storm-drain system, pollution of the Pacific with said run-off, and the spread West Nile Virus by creating most excellent mosquito habitat in the sewer system.

While dry season run-off from sprinklers is so pervasive that most Southern Californian residences, city governments and water authorities are contenders, Santa Fe Springs and Central Basin win for sheer irony. The pictures right and below of a stream flowing through a  Santa Fe Springs gutter were taken outside of …

White House releases climate change impacts report, prognosis grim for Western water

Graphic: NOAA

 

A MULTI-AGENCY report released by the White House today includes predictions of worsening Western drought, falling water quality and insect infestations. Lest anyone imagine that this warming and its cascade of knock-on effects is somehow part of a natural cycle, the report repeatedly names the trigger for the changes as “human-caused.” 

Government certification of this mother of a problem was not released without some semblance of a solution. Would that this didn’t boil down to a cue to plan on disaster. As part of that, for Western water managers, the message is: All bets are off. We must rethink our system.

Bullet points from the water resources chapter of the report include:   
  • Regional differences in climate will become more prounounced. Rain will increase in the Northeast and Midwest and decline in much of the West, in particular the Southwest. 
  • Substantial changes in the water cycle are expected. A
…

The Colorado River in San Marino

THIS  kind of discretion could put a reporter out of business, or in court, but the essay by photography curator Jennifer A. Watts introducing the “Downstream” exhibit at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens is too beautiful to bowdlerize. Better to lift it intact: 

Karen Halverson, Davis Gulch, Lake Powell, Utah from the Downstream series, 1994-1995. Archival pigment print. 24 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

ONE WINTRY MORNING IN 1994, KAREN HALVERSON (b. 1941) awoke convinced she needed to photograph the Colorado River. 

An accomplished artist who had already spent 20 years exploring the American West, she set off on a two-year encounter with the vast, breathtaking terrain along the river’s serpentine route. “The impulse to photograph the Colorado River came to me out of the blue,” she writes, “but I acted on it as if it were my destiny.” Personal destiny and the Colorado River …

« go back — keep looking »

  • After the lawn


  • As you were saying: Comments

  • As I was saying: Recent posts

  • Garden blogs


  • Contact

    Emily Green by e-mail at emily.green [at] mac.com

  • Categories