During your next meal, I encourage you to look down at your plate. More closely. No matter if you live in San Diego or Baltimore, chances are, one or more of the foods on that plate was grown or raised right here in California. With nearly half of American-grown nuts, fruits and vegetables produced in California, the state is on your plate.
But the delicious and diverse array of California food available to us is only half the story.
Louie Campos stopped drinking the water from his faucets in Visalia, California, so long ago that it takes him a minute to recall just how many years it has been since he held a glass to the tap and took a swill. By his closest approximation, the plainspoken 43-year-old has ripped through a 24-pack of bottled water a week for the last eight years. Bottled water, he says, is a hidden tax Visalia’s residents must pay to live there.
An attorney for The San Diego Union-Tribune has been awarded more than $160,000 in legal fees for a case in which she successfully argued that information about recipients of turf removal grants should be a matter of public record.
The grants, totaling $340 million, were given out by the Metropolitan Water District and its members agencies throughout Southern California to encourage people to replace lawns with drought-resistant landscape amid drought.
As he drove east of Fresno to the next Wildfire Awareness Week event in Kern County on Wednesday, Cal Fire Chief Ken Pimlott turned his gaze toward the browning landscape.
“I’m looking at grass that’s 2 feet tall easily, and it’s already dead,” Pimlott said. Meanwhile, far away in the southern and central Sierra Nevada, foliage on 29 million trees infested with bark beetles are turning orange and red and dying, with countless more stretching north toward Sacramento expected to meet a similar fate over the next year.
Southern California’s section of the San Andreas fault is “locked, loaded and ready to roll,” a leading earthquake scientist said Wednesday at the National Earthquake Conference in Long Beach.
The San Andreas fault is one of California’s most dangerous, and is the state’s longest fault. Yet for Southern California, the last big earthquake to strike the southern San Andreas was in 1857, when a magnitude 7.9 earthquake ruptured an astonishing 185 miles between Monterey County and the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles.
My husband and I took a road trip a few weeks ago, driving from Los Altos down to Bakersfield on Interstate 5 and then east to Sedona, Ariz., returning via Bakersfield and then up Highway 101.
As far as the Pacheco Pass, the landscape was lyrically green with oaks and buckeyes sporting fresh foliage, and wildflowers filling the crevices between the hills with streams of yellow mustard, buttercups and golden poppies. Rock outcroppings were wreathed in ribbons of late-rising fog like the karst peaks in traditional Chinese landscapes.
Flowing over 250 miles to from the high desert of southern Oregon through the Cascades Mountains before emptying out into the Pacific Ocean in northern California, the Klamath River and its Coho and Chinook salmon and steelhead runs were vital to Native American tribes for thousands of years before settlers arrived.
But within decades of their arrival there would be half a dozen dams constructed on the river, effectively blocking salmon and steelhead migrations on what was once the third-highest salmon producing river on the West Coast.
When things go wrong — especially if they go really, historically wrong — people tend to look for answers. So when California entered the fourth year of one of the worst droughts the state had ever seen, everyone — the media, politicians, scientists — wanted to know what had gone wrong.
In the process, a number of things were set upon the altar of public opinion as scapegoats for the drought: lawns, golf courses, wealthy Californians taking more than their fair share of the state’s dwindling resources, climate change. But none provoked the maelstrom that surrounded the almond, which seemingly transformed overnight from a healthy snack to the evil source of California’s water woes.
California faces major changes in its water supply. The sooner everyone realizes these changes are coming, the better the state will be able to cope with what lies ahead.
Today’s changes are driven by efforts to end groundwater depletion, by sea level rise and loss of snowpack, salts and nitrate accumulating in groundwater, new invasive species, population growth and California’s globalized economy and agriculture.
Gazing down from atop 3,489-foot high Mt. Diablo, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta levees create a patchwork of nearly 60 islands and tracts surrounded by water flowing toward San Francisco Bay.
The 1,100 linear miles of levees was created after the Gold Rush to reclaim vast wetlands for farming. The soil — laden with extremely rich nutrients — is considered among the most prime farmland in California.The levees ultimately made it possible for California to develop the planet’s most elaborate — and lengthy — movement of water stretching as far as Shasta Reservoir to San Diego covering more than 670 miles.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
