Phil Isenberg, California water’s self-described “grumpy old guy”, put down a marker today with a particularly useful, nuanced take (pdf) take on this week’s Bay-Delta Conservation Plan announcement, arguing that it is a bigger deal than some of us have been willing to acknowledge. “Serious public policy people should pay attention,” Isenberg wrote. As I’ve written before, the …
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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 …
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 …
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 …
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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Some months ago, I complained in the newspaper about water consumption in Palm Springs: Today … customers of the Desert Water Agency, which serves Palm Springs, consume an average of 540 gallons of water per person per day. Having just visited Palm Springs on a desert vacation, I had that number in mind last week …
The greatest beneficiaries of the Colorado River’s bounty, in terms of irrigation water for agriculture, are at the bottom end of the system – in California’s Imperial Valley and across the border in Yuma County. But the community payoff for all that liquid wealth seems limited. From today’s Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly unemployment report: …
When the US government’s Board of Commissioners on the Irrigation of the San Joaquin, Tulare, and Sacramento Valleys of the State of California duly reported to Congress in 1874, its members issued a warning. If a plan for irrigating the rich but arid lands of California’s great Central Valley is not worked out with care the …
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Here’s a cool map for folks thinking about California’s current discussions about building some sort of Peripheral Thingie to carry water around (through? beneath?) the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta: That’s the vote thirty years ago on a ballot initiative asking voters whether the state might build a Peripheral Canal to do the same thing. The red …
When I interviewed Mike Connor, the Bureau of Reclamation’s then-newly minted commissioner, back in 2009, one of his central points was that the era of American dam building was behind us: Michael Connor, the New Mexican who took over as head of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation three months ago, inherited an empire. It is …