“Underground Rivers”
Via WaterWired: A draft version of the new book “Underground Rivers from the River Styx to the Rio San Buenaventura with occasional diversions” by University of New Mexico engineer Richard J. Heggen is available to download for free. For a fuller background on Heggen, go to WaterWired. To download the draft chapters, click here.…
Whiskey’s for drinking at CBS
Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting
No sooner has Lesley Stahl snapped shut her dictionary of Twain quotes* used in the recent CBS show “60 Minutes” on the California water crisis as it’s been opened again to the same page — this time by the network’s Atlanta-based reporter Mark Strassmann for a CBS Evening News broadcast.
This time one of the figures driving the network to drinking cliches is the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s general manager Pat Mulroy, who will appear on CBS Evening News tonight to discuss American water shortages, including those of her agency covering Las Vegas. Those who don’t buy that serving unfettered development in the Mojave Desert qualifies her as a conservationist may need to start drinking now. To see how heavily, click here.
*See the Albuquerque Journal’s John Fleck at Inkstain on the veracity of the Twain attribution. This post …
Happy New Year, San Diego. Use less, pay more
San Diego celebrated the New Year with a water rate hike. That said, may every one greet it with the same civic mindedness of Groksurf’s San Diego. As that leading Southern California water blog observes, water in San Diego is still cheap.
To that this website can only add: Few counties enjoy such a good network of conservation educators. Click here for listings of events from the San Diego chapter of the California Native Plant Society.
For a steady stream of advice and inspiration from two of the county’s distinguished garden writers, try the websites of fellow Los Angeles Times contributors Nan Sterman and Debra Lee Baldwin.
Update: Groksurf’s editor George Janczyn shot in an e-mail a day after this post appeared commending Lost in the Landscape, the website of San Diego artist Jim Soe Nyun. To this haul of …
The Dry Garden: Sheltering nests
Some of us are familiar with the concept of stilling the saws to allow birds to breed, but we follow an Eastern calendar. Unfortunately, that time frame doesn’t apply in Southern California. Whereas bird-nesting in the East is a spring event, it begins here in winter. Two of our most beloved local hummingbirds, Allen’s and Anna’s, started nesting in December and will be nesting throughout spring, says Kimball Garrett, collections manager for the ornithology department of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Click here to keep reading the Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times.…
Western datebook: “There it is. Take it.”
In a December article for Chance of Rain, Southern California irrigation specialist Bob Galbreath recalled the arrival of Owens Lake water in Los Angeles from the Eastern Sierra and William Mulholland’s 1913 exhortation, “There it is. Take it!”
Take it we did — with such abandon that a century later our water supply is on the verge of exhaustion. Galbreath, who for two decades has preached abstemiousness in the form of drip irrigation over sprinklers, concluded the article by musing, “Perhaps it would help if I put out a big pile of drip tubing at my next seminar and said: ‘There it is. Take it!'”
Perhaps indeed. To see if he does, go to his talk on January 7th at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, where he is the first guest of the new year in …
« go back — keep looking »North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
Garden blogs
