In an op-ed in today’s Sacramento Bee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, has a lot of ideas for fixing California’s water problems: bigger dams tweaks (unspecified) to the Endangered Species Act a Peripheral Tunnel (do we still call it “Peripheral”?) to ease conveyance of water from north to south of the water Californians will be storing …
Continue reading ‘Dianne Feinstein has a bunch of #cawater ideas’ »
Via Henry Brean, Pat Mulroy shares her views of the Imperial Irrigation District’s efforts to funnel water into the Salton Sea: Mulroy is definitely worried about Lake Mead, which supplies about 90 percent of the Las Vegas Valley’s drinking water. But she also voiced broader concerns about river water being used to prop up a …
Continue reading ‘Pat Mulroy doesn’t think much of the Salton Sea’ »
When I left Pasadena nearly 25 years ago, my water mentor Tim Brick was hard at work on the problem of restoring a semblance of riverness to the Arroyo Seco, the channel that defines that Southern California city’s western edge. Via a visit by our old mutual friend Larry Wilson to the confluence of the …
If men will fight over water, they will also cooperate to conserve it and the history of water controversies is that, in the long run, the rule of cooperation prevails. Yet another nugget from my current favorite book, Carey McWilliams’ California: The Great Exception. Do you think he’s right? (The quote’s the opening of a 1949 …
The absence of a state policy governing the use of underground waters is, in fact, the outstanding weakness in California’s water conservation program. Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception, 1949 To what extent does this still hold today?
Matt Weiser at the Sacramento Bee offered up a fascinating framework in a piece last Sunday for thinking about California’s $23 billion (and counting) proposal to reshape the way water moves in and through the largest estuary on the western coast of North America: [A]s the process now stands California voters will have no formal …
Continue reading ‘Fixing Northern California’s Delta: some process issues’ »
In the enclosed shopping mall near our home is a Hollister store, which bills itself as “the coolest destination for genuine SoCal style clothes for guys and girls.” They sell surf-themed garments to residents of a landlocked state. There is history here: Novel conditions of living, reflecting climatic differences, created a compulsion to invent something …
Continue reading ‘California and the invention of “sportswear”’ »
Despite growing up a little kid’s walk from an avocado grove, I didn’t discover their blessings until my late teens, when a college classmate from San Diego brought a car trunk load on a drive from Southern California to eastern Washington. We would lay them out on newspaper on our laps in the front seat …
Visiting a farm recently, I was reminded that business people for whom water is an input think about water conservation differently than city folk like me. For a given amount of water available, the farmer wants to grow and sell as much food as possible. So it should not be surprising to see water conservation …
Continue reading ‘water conservation diaries: it’s about making more food’ »
Busy with New Mexico’s drought, I’ve been paying scant attention to the rollout of California’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan, AKA the Peripheral Thingie. This is the scheme to build tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to move water south to California farms and cities. It’s the biggest and most interesting US water policy gambit out …
Continue reading ‘BDCP rollout: did anyone say anything that surprised you?’ »