It’s just geographical coincidence that Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber were at Berkeley in 1973 when they published their Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning (pdf), less than 30 miles as the American white pelican flies from Sherman Island at the downstream mouth of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. But as we await tomorrow’s unveiling of the …
Is this Michelle Nijhuis piece on the Colorado River terrific because she’s willing to go against the grain and argue for an optimistic future? [D]eputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior David Hayes, ecologist Osvel Hinojosa Huerta of the Mexican conservation group Pronatura Noroeste and University of Arizona paleoclimatologist Jonathan Overpeck all described …
Nancy Gardner at the Omaha World-Herald has done a nice job of placing the current US drought into context: [W]hile a federal report released earlier this week ranks this as the largest drought in the lower 48 states since 1956, Fuchs cautions against making too many comparisons to the droughts of the 1950s and 1930s. …
Increasingly, I’m seeing the Sacramento Delta argument turned, from the traditional water conveyance and water users v. fish frame to a focus on levees. Here’s the San Jose Mercury News editorial board: The primitive conditions of the levees guarding the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta are shocking. The Delta is mostly below sea level. It provides …
A very smart piece by Mike Lee at the San Diego Union Tribune about water in the west and in the world: “It used to be that our agreements were to share the water,” Scott said. “Now we are trying to figure out how we are going to share the shortage.” That’s meant to be …
If I had more time, I’d write a post about how Chinatown is just a movie, full of stuff that’s made up. But it’s the end of week two of the Tour de France, so posting here’s been light, sorry. Distracted. Can you believe it? We’re in the middle of a drought, and the water …
Smart Mark Lubell on why a better scientific understanding of our groundwater foibles – even “perfect science” – isn’t enough: But there are many policy-makers and citizens who will take that perfect science (even when presented in a very simple manner) and flick it away like a bothersome mosquito because they don’t trust the scientists, …
Jeff Michael did a pithy job Thursday of untangling the snag of old fishing line that is “regulatory assurance”, the Endangered Species Act and the proposal to build giant tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to get water from California’s wet north to its thirsty south with, it is hoped, minimal disruption to the delta …
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Matt Grubs talked to Laura Paskus and I on last night’s In Focus on local public telly. It perhaps goes without saying that we talked about water.
The conventional wisdom about the US Clean Water Act (which I’ve always believed) is that it’s been a great success. Maybe not? On the fortieth anniversary of the Clean Water Act this paper reports the first quantitative assessment of the aggregate trends in water quality in the U.S. using a single standard over the years …
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