It’s often said you can’t make something out of nothing. Cody Friesen may have come as close to succeeding as anyone. To show me his technological sleight of hand, Friesen invites me to a hillside house in Berkeley, California on a sunny afternoon. There, in a shaded courtyard, we each sample a cup of water that flows from a drinking fountain. The water is cool and delicious – and it was made out of thin air. Literally.
It’s time for California to rethink how it manages water for the environment. Despite four decades of effort, many of the state’s freshwater-dependent native species are in decline. Controversy over water for the environment remains high. The latest drought left lasting impacts on already-stressed species and their ecosystems and highlighted the need for a change of course.
After our recent drought, the importance of providing sustainable water supplies for California’s cities and farms – both now and over the long term – is clearer than ever. And long-term water planning has to include a commitment to manage groundwater aquifers carefully, recharging them whenever possible and pumping from them only when necessary. Modesto must protect its groundwater supplies. It’s the only way for farmers and city dwellers alike to maintain their economy, their heritage and their very way of life for future generations.
I got up at 5:15 a.m. on Saturday morning with the idea of driving 100 miles to watch the sun rise over the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. I wanted to show my 84-year-old mom the beauty of one of California’s best-kept secrets. Maybe see some of the Delta’s magnificent sandhill cranes capable of flying up to 400 miles in a single day. But my real goal was to get a clearer perspective on the merit of building a single, 35-mile tunnel to provide a more reliable supply of water for generations of thirsty Californians.
The first atmospheric river-fueled storm of the season is expected to make landfall in California on Wednesday afternoon, when it will dump inches of rain in the Bay Area, disgorge up to a foot of snow over the Sierra Nevada and likely trigger flash floods in fire-scorched wine country. The National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning from 4 p.m. Wednesday to 3 a.m. Thursday for those areas of Sonoma and Napa counties that were scorched by a multiple wildfires in October.
The current three- to seven-day forecasts Americans have come to rely on for planning everything from weekend picnics to hurricane evacuations rely heavily on constant updates from satellites that orbit Earth’s poles measuring temperature, moisture and a host of other variables that define the planet’s ever-changing weather. Early Tuesday, NASA plans to launch the first of four state-of-the-art polar orbiters for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a $1.6 billion weather satellite that will monitor the entire planet as it rotates below, feeding computer models the data they need to make increasingly accurate predictions.
A roaring “pineapple express” is expected to blast the Sierra Wednesday and Thursday, marking the biggest storm of the season so far. The warm, moisture-rich storm is fueled by an “atmospheric river” originating in the South Pacific and predicted to bring up to a foot and above of snow at elevations as low as 7,500 feet.
One of the nation’s most successful partnerships between farm and urban water agencies has lately run into serious turbulence, potentially threatening an important Colorado River water-sharing deal. Twelve years ago, the Palo Verde Irrigation District in Blythe, California, signed an agreement with the powerful Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. It allowed the latter to pay Palo Verde farmers to fallow up to 35 percent of their acreage in times of water scarcity, and take delivery of the unused irrigation water, via canal, to serve its urban customers in the Los Angeles area, some 200 miles away.
California’s most important federal water reform law – the Central Valley Project Improvement Act (CVPIA) – celebrated its 25th anniversary on October 30. The landmark law, signed by President George H.W. Bush, was a historic effort to protect and restore California’s wetlands, rivers, migratory waterbirds, salmon and other fish species, and also to promote more sustainable water supplies for a drought-prone state. Before the CVPIA’s passage in 1992, Central Valley rivers, wetlands and salmon runs had been severely damaged by the construction and operation of the federal Central Valley Project (CVP), a water system including 20 dams and 500 miles of canals.
California could one day be uninhabitable. Fire. Heat. Floods. Infestation. Disease. Suffering. Scientists have for years warned about the ravaging consequences of a warming planet. Decamping for the 23rd session of the Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Convention on Climate Change, California academics and political leaders were mulling how to better deploy the distressing projections to give unwary citizens a better understanding of what’s at stake and compel them to see the wisdom of embracing sustainability.
