How might we keep the lights on, water flowing, and natural world vaguely intact? It starts with grabbing innovative ideas/examples to help kick down our limits and inspire a more sustainable world. We implement with rigorous science backed by hard data.
We've put together a series of popular landscape options, along with information on how they fare against the traditional Californian lawn in five areas.
Whether she's driving a hybrid car, installing solar panels on her roof or tearing up her beloved front lawn and replacing it with mulch, Carrie Wassenaar said, she wants to do her part for the environment.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
Clearly, we don't all need computer controlled flushing our our rain barrel systems, but the idea is a sound one for larger systems (think apartments, office buildings, etc.). Again, the cost will be huge for the early adopters but pave the way for more affordable systems in the future.
There are about 16,000 golf courses in the United States, and they all need huge amounts of water. The sport must take notice of limited resources and develop courses that are more in harmony with the environment.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
Water, water, everywhere...or at least for Golf Courses.
Here are some more California-centric and more recent numbers:
The latter suggests that for SoCal courses we are using something like 350,000 or so gallons per day, but the stated restrictions suggest golf courses are using something like 20% less water in recent months owing to the scarcity of water. This would put such courses at something like 280,000 gallons per day.
The Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club welcomes your participation in its century of involvement in the enjoyment and protection of our planet's environment. The Angeles Chapter spans Los Angeles and Orange Counties in Southern California, with an extensive program of hikes/hiking, national and international travel, local conservation campaigns, political action, and programs for people of all ages.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
While many of these concerns and points are valid, this may well be fighting a battle that is already over. With places like Santa Barbara with effectively reserves remaining and no other possible source of water other than desalination, the writing is on the wall.
The country's largest agricultural water district, Westlands, maintains that California has plenty of water. It's just mismanaged.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
This is the consequence of directed efforts to fight environmental regulations via methods demonizing those seeking to make sure we have a healthy, long-term life-support system that perpetuates the remnants of the ecosystems that have thrived in California for many thousands of years.
Very sad state of affairs. The fact people seek to stoke political wars rather than seeking true solutions that are sustainable and just is pathetic.
Want to know which cities suffer from water stress? The Nature Conservancy has published a list of the top 20 of cities with water stress. Over 500 cities around the world were investigated. In (big) cities like Tokio, Shanghai and LA, a large number of people in a relatively small area puts a lot of pressure on water supplies, especially during times of drought.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
We often hear about how efficient our cities are, with low per capita carbon footprints and energy consumption. But hidden in here is the simple fact that with these masses of humanity, we need to supply huge amounts of materials and energy flows to sustain the often many millions of individuals and all their associated activities.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power crews were still busy Saturday morning trying to repair a broken water main that closed a portion of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood on Friday.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
This is the latest high profile failure of our water infrastructure here in California. This pipe was laid a century ago and concrete-lined to extend its useful life...in the 1950s. One might think that servicing more than once a century would be on the to-do lists of public works agencies. I understand all the arguments about why this is so hard, but the fact remains: physical materials wear out and need physical replacing. That is the long and the short of it.
Central Valley farmers took a crippling blow Friday when U.S. officials made the unprecedented announcement that they would get no irrigation water from the federal government this year because of the drought. California's unusually dry weather is forcing producers of fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains to make tough decisions about which crops to plant, and which ones not to plant due to a lack of water, leaving harvests that are likely to fall short of demand. A recent estimate by an industry group, the California Farm Water Coalition, suggested that as much as 600,000 acres of land, or about 8 percent of the state's total, could be left fallow in the coming year. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials said Friday that meager snow and rain in the Sierra Nevada means they won't be able to provide farmers any of the water they normally receive from the federally run system of reservoirs and canals fed by mountain runoff. Farmers still reelingWhile the announcement wasn't unexpected, it was more bad news for an agricultural industry in California that is the nation's most valuable, and is still reeling from last year's low water allocations. Residents and business in many communities also rely on the state and federal water projects, as do wildlife such as sensitive fish populations. In the San Joaquin Valley, the state's most productive agricultural region, many growers have already ceased planting winter crops such as broccoli, tomatoes and lettuce because of the drought.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
I very much like this photo at the header of this story. It says so much: "Congress Created Dust Bowl."
When the rhetoric is turned to folks who are not directly to blame (well, okay, they partly funded most of the infrastructure that created the modern gland that is the Central Valley of California...but leaving that aside), you know you are in for a wild ride and a "battle" of falsehoods.
Why are we in this situation? Perhaps because we drained the hell out of one of the most impressive and vast wetland-wet meadow ecosystems on earth. We got the water out of there to create farming land. Then we literally re-plumbed the entirety of the western United States to supply abundant water to cities, suburbs, and farms in California and beyond. The insane irrigation patterns of past decades have created something of a salty mess in much of our topsoils (requiring even more water to rid the soils of these contaminants). The farmers (and we who ate their bounty) were the prime beneficiaries of this water wind fall.
This unusual weather pattern (see https://vimeo.com/87351461) is at the core of both the intense winter back east and the lack of moisture here in California. While the jury will remain out for some time, it appears quite likely to many of us that climate change has at least a partial hand in all of this (if not a tight grip). So we can all thank ourselves for this situation in which we find ourselves. It is nice and easy to point a finger at congress, but the reality is that we all had a hand in this. Just perusing the landscape around that "dust bowl" sign will tell you how deviant the central valley is from what anyone might call "natural." And how far we are from an easy landing to this crisis.
Surviving this whole mess will be difficult. Not all will make it. But we must begin by facing reality. No one here is a demon. And no one is a saint.
TAPPED documents how the bottle water industry is wrecking havoc on the environment and examines the role of the bottled water industry and its' effects on o...
PIRatE Lab's insight:
CSUCI's Centers for Community and Multicultural Engagement invite you to our next cinÉngage documentary, Tapped, on Tuesday, March 11 from 6:00PM-8:00PM in Malibu Hall 100.
Stephanie Soechtig’s debut feature is an unflinching examination of the big business of bottled water. This timely documentary is a behind the scenes look into the unregulated and unseen world of an industry that aims to privatize and sell back the one resource that ought never to become commodity, our water. Run time 54 minutes. Q & A with a speaker will follow.
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