Image of the day: ‘Borderlands’
Chris Linder’s photograph of a sagauro cactus, icon of the Sonoran desert, is part of the 13-person show “Borderlands,” which opens tomorrow at the G2 Gallery in Venice, California.
Sponsored by the International League of Conservation Photographers, the exhibit documents life along the fence dividing Mexico and the United States.
“Borderlands” runs until February 7, 2010. Click on the image to be taken to the gallery.…
The week that was, 12/27/2009-1/2/2010
Revelers go for a New Year's Day swim in Malo-les-Bains, northern France, January 1, 2010. Photo: Reuters. For the Toronto Sun's gallery of New Year's Day plunges around the world, click on the bathers.
“I found out about it when I was about eight, and I never manned up to do it. But now I did.” — Twenty-two-year-old Jeffrey Vanek, while pulling up his boxer shorts amid catcalls from 500 people, “Naked water skiing, Bloody Marys and breakfast burritos — it’s the 30th Annual Bethel Island Frozen Bun Run,” Contra Costa Times, January 1, 2010…
The Dry Garden: ‘Canyon Prince’
OF ALL the creatures that disperse plants in nature, we humans may be the quirkiest. Take how we distribute New Zealand flax. We fight back its blades along what seems like every other front walk.
This column is to commend an indigenous alternative to New Zealand flax for the gardens of greater Los Angeles: a type of giant wild rye called Canyon Prince. Ninety-nine percent of the time that flax is used in California, this cultivar of Leymus condensatus could perform the same function, but better.
To keep reading the lastest installment of the Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times, click here.…
High good, low bad, Mead elevations 1999-2009
Source: federal Bureau of Reclamation. Click on the image for its 2010 operating plan for the Colorado River.
NOT everything went down during the Noughties. While federal Bureau of Reclamation records show that the elevation of Lake Mead, the major “lower basin” Colorado River reservoir serving Arizona, California and Nevada, fell more than 117 feet, the population of the US states served by Mead rose. The US Census Bureau estimates that the population of the driest state in the country, Nevada, climbed 32.3%, while Arizona’s increased 28.6% and California’s 9.1%.
If Lake Mead were a financial institution, people might, stress on might, question the logic of outgrowing one’s resources. As John Fleck of the Albuquerque Journal pointed out after reading the first version of this post, Mead is at its lowest elevation since it was first filled in the 1930s.
But the spendthrift lower basin states such as Nevada have …
Hasta la vista, 60 Minutes
WaterWired and Aquafornia both have last night’s 60 Minutes report on California water embedded for your viewing pleasure. Be warned, WaterWired links back here. Those instantly overtaken by boredom whenever a speech (tv program, headline, fill in the blank) opens with the threadbare Twain quote “whisky is for drinking, water is for fighting,” be further warned: Lesley Stahl opens with it.
Beyond the cliches, the esteemed news magazine offers a decent potted version of our water woes. An empty promise of a free drink to anyone who counts how many times Stahl called the Delta smelt “tiny.”
On the subject of size, a couple of minutes, far fewer than 60, of checking crop output would have taken the enormity out of what the program suggests is a looming almond crisis says On the public record. That and a half-way energetic intern might have put a question mark over the …
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