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

Most mornings, I walk my dog at Hahamongna Watershed Park in Pasadena, pausing by the reservoir to watch grebes and ducks glide across the water. It’s a quiet routine, but since the fire tore through Eaton Canyon in January, the silence feels louder, like this place has something to say.

As an urban planner, I’ve spent years working on land use and water policy. When I walk through my Altadena neighborhood, I don’t see a freak disaster. I see a moment of reckoning, in a much older story about the quest to control nature and consequences that echo across generations.

Those of us following water politics and the water industry have become familiar with the most common units of water volume and water flow. Professionals in the industry make constant use of terms, often reduced to acronyms, forgetting that the rest of us may have no idea what they’re talking about.

When it comes to encouraging meaningful discussions over water policy, understanding these terms is mandatory. But whether it’s politicians who rely on staff members who are themselves usually spread too thin to become expert anyway, or journalists who often just grab a quote with a number in it to give their story a whiff of verisimilitude, water numeracy is unusual.

When two of every three Californians pay their water bills each month, they pay for reservoirs and aqueducts that were designed for them a half century ago. The State Water Project was conceived in the mid-1950s, when California’s population had doubled in the previous 15 years. Floods had recently ravaged Northern California towns. The concept was as simple as it was bold – bring water from the wetter parts of the state to the cities and agricultural operations that were outgrowing water supplies in the Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley, and Southern California.

Fast-forward decades, and the State Water Project has helped resolve groundwater problems in the Santa Clara Valley, South Coast, and elsewhere. In the San Joaquin Valley farm belt, groundwater overdraft persists, but by law irrigation districts must bring aquifers into sustainable conditions by 2040.  The 27 million Californians who pay for the State Water Project have become a $2.3 trillion economic engine, the equivalent of the eighth-largest economy in the world.

As Gov. Gavin Newsom pushes for building a giant water tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, his administration is saying it’s the “single most effective” way for California to provide enough water as the warming climate brings deeper droughts and more intense storms.

Environmental advocates and political leaders in the Delta, among other opponents, condemned a new state analysis that draws that conclusion, arguing that building the tunnel would harm the environment and several types of fish and would push water rates much higher for millions of Californians.

A new study that compiles decades of data on air quality in the Salton Sea region says there is more to worry about than polluted dust from the exposed beach of the shrinking sea.

Ozone, hydrogen sulfide gas, algal blooms, black carbon, wildfires, incinerators, landfill fires and unpaved roads contribute to the cocktail of bad air, according to the report, published on Thursday by Pacific Institute, a California-based sustainability research organization.