Posted by Barry Nelson in Living Sustainably
Environmentalists have long decried subsidies for water used in the agricultural sector. In the water-short West, agriculture uses 80 percent or more of the developed water supply. Subsidizing agricultural water use exacerbates shortages for other farmers, increases environmental conflicts and...
Posted by Barry Nelson in Living Sustainably , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places
In many ways, the state currently has two ambitious processes planning the future of the Delta -- the Delta Stewardship Council and the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan process. The creation of the Council was the result of a high-profile debate in...
Posted by Barry Nelson in Living Sustainably , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
Around the world, Americans are notoriously energetic and impatient. That’s both good and bad. I learned this first hand when I taught in China after I finished graduate school more than 25 years ago. I was struck by how common...
Posted by Barry Nelson in Living Sustainably , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places
The CALFED Bay-Delta Program has taken a great deal of abuse in some quarters. I’ve dished out a little myself, for the program’s failure to wrestle with issues like finance. But most knowledgeable people acknowledge that CALFED played a major...
Posted by Barry Nelson in Living Sustainably
When the legislature passed the package of water policy reform bills last year, there were a few key issues that were not addressed. One of the most important pieces of unfinished business is known in the water community as “finance”. ...
Posted by Barry Nelson in Living Sustainably
Last week, I attended the second meeting of the Delta Stewardship Council. It’s remarkable that a meeting of this council, which took so much work to create and whose work has such profound implications for the State, could be so...
Posted by Barry Nelson in Living Sustainably
If Hell is going to freeze over, you don’t expect it to happen in Las Vegas. Here’s a story from the Las Vegas Sun reporting that something extraordinary happened when the Sonoran Institute released a report asserting that there is...
Posted by Barry Nelson in Living Sustainably
If you’ve read many of the stories about water and agriculture in California over the past year or two, you might think that the agricultural economy has tanked. In fact, the opposite is true. Here’s a remarkably upbeat story in...
Posted by Barry Nelson in Living Sustainably
For the past several years, the Bay-Delta Conservation Planning process has been studying the potential benefits and impacts of a large “alternative conveyance facility” in the Delta. Such a facility would run from the northern Delta more than 30 miles...
Posted by Barry Nelson in Living Sustainably
The Sacramento Bee’s editorial this morning makes a key point about water issues. It’s time to look forward and focus on solutions. Much of the past year has been consumed with a fundamentally backward-looking debate about the biological opinions (BOs)...
Posted by Barry Nelson in Living Sustainably
The media in the Golden State is filled almost daily with stories about water supply and water shortages. Most Californians know that most of us live in a dry place. But today is World Water Day, making this a particularly...
Posted by Barry Nelson in Living Sustainably
This story in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times makes a compelling case for what NRDC calls the virtual river – new water supplies that can be tapped without pumping more from our overtaxed rivers. In fact, the dam advocates themselves make...
Posted by Barry Nelson in Living Sustainably , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places
There’s a lot to be encouraged about in the Department of Interior’s announcement of initial water allocations for the CVP – as well as the reactions coming from many quarters. The focus of discussions today has been on solutions that...
Posted by Barry Nelson in Living Sustainably
I must admit that when I first heard the term Low Impact Development (“LID”), I thought it meant locating townhomes near mass transit. However, LID (also known as green infrastructure or urban stormwater capture) is rapidly emerging as a significant...
Posted by Barry Nelson in Health and the Environment , Living Sustainably
I just came across an interesting article from the San Diego Union-Tribune about a bold shift taking place among California farmers that has been largely overlooked. Acala cotton, long known as King Cotton in the Central Valley, is losing its...
