High good, low bad: Mead in March 2012

Posted on | April 3, 2012 | 1 Comment

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The steady rise of Lake Mead, clearinghouse of Colorado River water for the Southwestern US and Mexico, was heartening while it lasted. From a November 2010 low only seven feet shy of triggering shortage declarations, a steady flow into the biggest reservoir in the US throughout 2011 pushed Mead’s elevation 58 feet above the austerity line.

However, in March 2012, the level began to fall again. Look at year-on-year figures from the federal Bureau of Reclamation and it is clear that since 2000 the overwhelming trend has been downward. The entire river system, including Mead, is only 63% of what Reclamation classifies as full.

If there is good news to be had in decline, and there is, part of it is that an innovative landscape architecture instructor at Cal Poly Pomona is tweaking the founding Reclamation mission to “make the desert bloom.” Charged with leading a sustainability studio this winter, teacher Jessica Hall asked master’s degree candidates to “make the river the client.” Click here to keep reading

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Category: Colorado River
Tags: chance of rain > Jessica Hall > LA Creek Freak > US Bureau of Reclamation

Pacific coast irises: Look now, buy later

Posted on | April 1, 2012 | 5 Comments

spacer spacer spacer Last spring I wrote about how the March release by nurseries of Pacific coast irises  tempted many — myself included — to plant the flowers in April. I put up this post-script because, having done it in 2011 after a wet winter leading into what proved a cool summer, I still saw mortality rates of 15%. Anyone trying it this April would be starting after a dry winter going into what looks like it’s going to be a hot summer. Here’s the problem: If you are watering newly planted irises as they become dormant in May and June, and given the only partially charged soil, you probably will be, it’s a perfect recipe for root rot and death. At $5 a plant, or more, there are much less dispiriting ways to waste money. So in these dewy days following our long-awaited rain, my advice is to inspect established Pacific coast irises in good native gardens, note which you like, even take pictures. Then take your shopping list to a good nursery (a Pacifica hotspot being Matilija Nursery in Moorpark) next  autumn, and then plant irises when they have a long cool period to become established. These are shots of this year’s survivors from a selection of plants purchased from Matilija and the Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley.

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Category: Native Gardening
Tags: chance of rain > Emily Green > Pacific coast irises

Aroused by rain

Posted on | March 27, 2012 | 3 Comments

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The appearance of this mushroom after a much-needed rain in the Los Angeles foothills demanded that I Find The Camera. In the interim between putting the photo on Facebook this morning with a request for an ID and getting a response to an e-mailed query from Los Angeles County Natural History Museum mycologist Florence Nishida this evening, speculation as to its genus involved unbridled merriment. Southern California resident treasure, memoirist Erika Schickel, ventured that it was a Micropenisula shlongaeria. My own suspicion had been a Phallus anthonyweinerii. After more ribald speculation and some genuine mycological story-telling on the social network, Nishida’s response by e-mail in early evening had a “eureka” quality.

You are a lucky girl,” she wrote, “nature has gifted you with a stinkhorn, aka phalloid fungus. It’s probably Lysurus borealis, though another species is very common in southern California, Lysurus mokusin. Just looking at your photo, that’s my guess. L. borealis has arms meeting at the tips, but not fused, and the arms are pale flesh color; the gleba (spore mass) is brownish green.  L. mokusin however, has a bright pink stalk, arms nearly blood red, tips are fused to form a tapering spire, and the gleba is in the spaces between the arms, light to dark brown.”

A gift indeed, not to mention two inches of  garden irrigation. Free. From the sky. For more on what mushrooms might be appearing in your garden after this weekend’s rains, do read this account of a 2010 tour of my former central LA garden with Nishida on the amazing, ephemeral fungi that are aroused, all too briefly, by our all too rare rains.

 

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Category: Image of the Day
Tags: chance of rain > Florence Nishida > gardening > Los Angeles > stinkhorn mushrooms

Water quality beneath the asphalt

Posted on | March 25, 2012 | No Comments

spacer Those wondering why so much of the recent rain across Los Angeles was flushed out to the Pacific through a storm drain system instead of socked into the local aquifer will find part of a complicated answer in a fact sheet issued last week by the US Geological Survey. Run-off from the Transverse Ranges into the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys hits land that the USGS classes as 83% urban, which means largely paved and impermeable. (For how a combination of arrogance and greed led to over-building of the Los Angeles flood plain, there is no better source than historian Jared Orsi’s “Hazardous Metropolis.”) Another  limit on our ability to store mountain run-off  in these valleys is groundwater pollution brought by that urbanization. The map below shows solvent hot spots. 

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Hat tip to the Water Education Foundation’s Aquafornia for signalling the sheet’s publication.

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Category: groundwater
Tags: chance of rain > Emily Green > Los Angeles > USGS

Nevada State Engineer refills Vegas pipeline

Posted on | March 23, 2012 | No Comments

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Click on the scoreboard to be taken to a Las Vegas Review-Journal report of yesterday's pipeline decision.

It was never supposed to be a fight. When 22 years ago Las Vegas water manager Pat Mulroy first filed claims on all the theoretically unappropriated water in five rural valleys in eastern Nevada, opponents were supposed to roll over or be crushed. In Mulroy’s corner were all the money and influence that Vegas could bring to bear. A remark reportedly made early in 2007 by Mulroy during a Las Vegas Sun editorial board meeting summed up the odds. In it, when asked what she would do if the State Engineer denied her claims, Mulroy allegedly replied that she would have the Governor of Nevada replace him.

The story may or may not be true*, however, the point is that it could be. It sounds like Pat. No one familiar with what is now newsroom legend doubted then or doubts now that her backers — among them Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Sheldon Adelson and homebuilders such as the Sun’s proprietor Brian Greenspun — collectively had the power to do it. They not only arguably controlled  Mulroy, they also controlled the Nevadan congressional delegation of both parties, including by that point US Senate majority leader Harry Reid. They controlled the state legislature. The US Department of Interior’s agencies overseeing the affected territories were so biddable that they signed off on the pumping in exchange for vague monitoring promises before the State Engineer even began hearing Vegas arguments for the water.

The only things that Las Vegas dollars didn’t control were the rural communities in the path of the proposed 300-mile-long pipeline.  Click here to keep reading

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Category: Las Vegas
Tags: chance of rain > Emily Green > pipeline > Southern Nevada Water Authority
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