The Desert Sun has been doing a great series on California’s drought, but this is surely the most important of the stories. While the rest of California worries about a dwindling supply, some poor residents of the palmy, leafy, lawny Coachella Valley, playground of Southern California wealth, don’t have a safe drinking supply at all, …
Continue reading ‘In Coachella Valley, poor people who are always in drought’ »
I’ve been avoiding wasting time on the “someone’s wrong on the Internet about California drought” genre – so much is being written that is so bad. But Elijah Wolfson’s Newsweek cover story (I won’t link, find it if you must) is so breathtakingly well-researched-and-written-ly bad that I’ll let it stand in for the genre: We’re …
Continue reading ‘Some breathtakingly bad California drought journalism’ »
UCLA’s Jon Christensen* has written a lovely, loving essay remembering the late water historian Norris Hundley, who wrote so well about western water, and (Jon argues) is important now, in California’s time of need: It’s not for nothing that we often talk of western water wars. What Norris showed is that at times this looked …
Continue reading ‘A great water historian in California’s time of need’ »
A friend notes that I may have cut the best part from the “Cadillac Desert” quotation in this week’s California court decision on tiered municipal water rates. We hope there are future scientists, engineers, and legislators with the wisdom to envision and enact water plans to keep our beloved Cadillac Desert habitable. But that is …
Continue reading ‘One more money quote from the California court decision on tiered water pricing’ »
From yesterday’s landmark California court ruling on the legality of tiered municipal water rates (pdf): Southern California is a “semi-desert with a desert heart.”1 Visionary engineers and scientists have done a remarkable job of making our home habitable, and too many of us south of the Tehachapis never give a thought to its remarkable reclamation. …
Continue reading ‘Tiered water rates in the Cadillac Desert’ »
Crazy California’s proclivity for “governance by voter initiative” seems to have just undercut one of the major tools in the municipal water conservation kit. Tiered water rates, in which residents are charged a low rate for basic needs and increasingly higher rates for high usage, violate California law, according to a court ruling handed down …
Continue reading ‘In California, you can’t charge water hogs more than the rest of us’ »
What to make of this California drought story from Alex Breitler? Farmers within the Delta and farmers south of the Delta aren’t exactly bosom buddies. Not when it comes to water. But this spring, as their lawyers geared up for another year of fighting over limited supplies, farmers on both sides quietly started talking. They …
Continue reading ‘In California drought, when the water’s not fer fightin’ over’ »
Brian Devine has written one of those special pieces that made me smack my forehead repeatedly and say, “Yeah, that!”: To conflate the myriad problems of water in California into a single problem is the hallmark of a generalist reporter on deadline, as if I wrote that the Detroit auto industry’s collapse was because they made …
Continue reading ‘Deconstructing media coverage of the California drought’ »
Darren Ficklin at Indiana University has a new paper exploring trends in drought in the United States which notes that the trends are not universal: [F]our regions of increasing (upper Midwest, Louisiana, southeastern United States (US), and western US) and decreasing (New England, Pacific Northwest, upper Great Plains, and Ohio River Valley) drought trends…. But …
I know, I know, beware the romanticism of desert agriculture, but these trees are such a nostalgic throwback to my childhood. I grew up on the fringe of the Los Angeles suburbs. Trips to the desert were part of my childhood. And date palms along the highway were an iconic image of those jaunts. The …