Long Beach is groovy
If Los Angeles Department of Water & Power buildings were landscaped like the people inside believed in water conservation, Southern California would be a far better place. We residents have a way to go for that, unless you live in a city as progressive as Long Beach, whose water department, headquarters pictured above, walks its talk about outdoor water conservation.
As if further proof were needed that Long Beach is groovy, this week the City College is holding a sale of many drought tolerant plants, co-sponsored by the Water Department. Add to this, the Los Angeles Times has a dispatch from Jeff Spurrier about a thriving urban garden there.
Maybe it’s the city’s proximity to the Pacific, or simply that Long Beach selects for sanity, but unlike just about every other water agency in the region, Long Beach Water Department also gives a damn about fish.
That is reflected …
End of days and weeks
As we enter Native Plant Week in California and approach Earth Day world-wide, this advocate of native plants and appreciator of the Earth will observe them exactly the same way that I observe World Water Day. I won’t. Chronological gimmicks don’t work. Worthwhile goings on in April packaged up by others as part of Native Plant week are in this blog part of the normal run of Dry Garden Events.
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Here it is. Take it.
Map showing Metropolitan's service area and aqueducts. MWD's announcement comes on the back of the state Department of Water Resources reporting snowpack in the California mountains to be 165% of the April 1 average. Single click on the map for the DWR release.
“We anticipate residential consumers and businesses throughout the Southland will continue to use water efficiently,” said Jeffrey Kightlinger, General Manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California in a press release signaling that the giant wholesaler will be resuming full deliveries of water to 26 member agencies after several years of shortages. The shortages triggered region-wide conservation programs, whose fates and continued effectiveness are unclear in the momentary face of plenty. Click here for the full release.
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KPCC and the “reasonable listener”
If you don’t think KPCC is a great radio station, then you probably don’t listen to it. Between the conversational parsing of the day’s news by Larry Mantle and Patt Morrison, the exceptional feeds of shows from Terry Gross and Dick Gordon in the evening, the purely delicious “Off Ramp” and the mix of local and national reporting, the Pasadena-based public radio station is widely regarded as a pillar of Southern Californian journalism. Yet, like so many pillars in greater Los Angeles, that column may not be solid. A station memo leaked last Friday showed that the station temporarily pulled sponsorship credits to Planned Parenthood when the reproductive health organization became the center of culture wars underlying the funding debates in Washington.…
Delta 101
Chris Austin, editor of the newsfeed Aquafornia for the Water Education Foundation, has added yet another slide show to her personal website Maven’s Photoblog. This time her subject is the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the largest estuary on the US Pacific Coast. “Northern Californians think Southern Californians want to drain it dry,” she writes. “Southern Californians, for the most part, don’t even know where the Delta is, much less why it would be important to them.”
It’s important because, fed by the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Mokelumne, Cosumnes and Calaveras rivers, roughly half the state’s snowmelt, including drinking water for more than 20 million Californians, runs through its tributaries. For anyone wishing to learn about the Delta, its fisheries, its farms, its wildlife and the water that we export from it, Austin’s new slide show is a good place to start. To understand the modern world logic of how …
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