You are now in California and the U.S. category.

California’s high country is a delight in summer, a cool respite from the heat of the state’s lower elevations. That’s especially true in the Sierra Nevada, where a corridor of shade transports vacationers from Fresno to Yosemite National Park under a dense canopy of cedar trees, firs and pines. But after five years of drought and insect infestation, more than 66 million trees have died across the state, many in the eastern Sierra. In tree-ringed communities such as Bass Lake and Shaver Lake, up to 80 percent of the pines and other conifers have died.

 

Water, we are repeatedly told, will be “next oil.” In the United States, climate projections predict increasing drought frequency throughout most of the country. Around the world, political and even military conflicts due to water scarcity are multiplying. Water is a limited and essential resource, and we are becoming more sensitive to the need to use it wisely. So it probably seems like good news that the U.S. Interior and Agriculture Departments have pledged almost $50 million in new public investment to improve water efficiency in domestic agriculture.

A late-season surge of rain and snow melt made a bad year better for the Colorado River, but it wasn’t enough to lift Lake Mead out of record-low territory. The reservoir that supplies 90 percent of the Las Vegas Valley’s drinking water bottomed out at 1,071.61 feet above sea level on July 1, its lowest level since May 1937, when the lake was filling for the first time behind a newly completed Hoover Dam.