The week that was, 5/2-8/2010
Click on the image for NOAA updates and links to the British Petroleum / Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Due to heightened interest in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, media aircraft have been conducting low flights and landings on Breton National Wildlife Refuge’s Chandeleur Islands. These flights and landings threaten the very birds that the media are covering and that the public is concerned about. — Deepwater Horizon Response on Facebook, May 8, 2010
“It’s the ocean, baby.” — Jim O’Brien, Florida State University oceanographer and meteorologist, “Grand Ole Opry flood and other crazy weather: El Niño’s fault?” Christian Science Monitor, May 4, 2010
Why do people wait and watch the water rise? Why do they keep their luggage in the boat and themselves in water the color of milky coffee that is no doubt full of snakes? — “Our deluge, drop by drop,” an op-ed …
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 …
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 …
« go back — keep looking »North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
Garden blogs
