The recent Bay Delta draft plan proposal has been roundly criticized by the environmental organizations and the fishing industry as a disastrous violation of the key agreement in State policy that water users should cut their dependence on the Bay-Delta and secure alternative water supply sources. The chart above, from NRDC sources, shows the increasing water withdrawals over the years that is creating the crisis in the water situation for California.
The NRDC took the position a year ago that the "urban water story" that this plan is based upon was not accurately portrayed in a 60 minutes episode in 2009, it's about the ecological collapse brought about by overdrawing water from the Bay Delta for agricultural uses. The construction industry collapse has been responsible for unemployment in the San Joaquin valley, not agricultural losses from drought.
A recent open letter from the fishing industry recommends that this draft plan, advocated by Schwartzenegger, be abolished so that the ecosystems and fisheries can recover from the drastic overdrafting of the water in the Bay Delta ecosystem, threatening collapse of levees and intrusion of salinated water. Its first of seven recommendations is as follows:
Issue an executive order mandating all state agencies to comply immediately with the provisions of the federal biological opinions protecting Central Valley salmon, Delta smelt and other species. To comply with these decisions, the state and federal governments must reduce water exports, better manage water releases from dams, remove dams and provide fish passage for fish above dams.
The conservation groups are appealing to the incoming Brown administration to improve this plan with a rigorous scientific basis for the Bay Delta plan, not a political one driven by agricultural interests and water agencies seeking to increase income at the expense of these natural systems that provide the basis of most of California's wealth of resources. As of today, that element will begin to play out.
Update: On the Governor's new official website up today, Issue No. 7 is "Water for the 21st Century":
Ensuring safe and sufficient water supplies for the 21st century requires significant investments in our water infrastructure and natural ecosystems. After five decades of divisive wrangling, the time has arrived for the governor to provide real leadership and solve our longstanding water problems. The goal must be to maintain and enhance water supplies for all Californians and take action to restore the Bay-Delta and meet California's true water needs.
The remains of Boghall Castle at Biggar are emblematic of the Scottish environment LINK, an outline of the new environmental laws put into place this November. It's the turning of a new page in Scottish culture and its burgeoning environmental movement. This movement embraces history and tradition as well as a future that protects biological diversity and plans for a sustainable society going forward. This is outlined in the document, "Scotland's Environmental Laws Since Devolution - From Rhetoric to Reality". It focuses on the protection of the National Parks, Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park and emphasizes biodiversity, a core issue. How can these and other parks be protected with a clear strategy while developing river management plans and wind farms? The necessity for public participation in this dialogue are emphasized, for it's people and culture that make Scotland unique.
In Scotland, one of its indigenous customs is among oldest celebrations in human history - the Hogmanay. It's the ancient New Year's winter pagan festival, famously celebrated throughout Scotland's cities and towns. So with that, we'll take a cup o' kindness yet, for auld lang syne. And welcome the earth's renewal in the coming years.
Murree and Shimla both remained a second home for the ruling elites of India and Pakistan even after the Englishmen’s departure. Much of colonial resorts, golf clubs, and grounds, like most of the colonial assets, were taken over by the military after the independence.
While colonial schools and chapels continued to serve the ruling elites and, like almost all prestigious colleges in both nation, still running on the English patterns, cut off from the outside world. More on the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Murree.
Again, after a fall rainstorm, the golden leaves are swept away in the wind. We're having a stormy period this time, interspersed with record-breaking high temperatures. This decade is the hottest on record, and the progression keeps slowly moving on, with increasing fires in the foothills. Our local disastrous Station Fire of August of last year has left us with denuded hillsides above the foothill cities in the San Gabriel valley, so those places are expecting rain and mudslides again. Recovery will take years. In the meantime, we're hoping that the US Forest Service will take further responsibility for the management of the remaining forest lands and begin the restoration process in areas that need them.
Restoration and enhancement of viable natural habitat in the mountains and forest lands is crucial to regaining the ecological balance of the woodland habitat, as well as water management issues that arise with the debris basins during the winter. Lately, the County of Los Angeles has attempted to catch up with lack of maintenance in these dams by proposing to truck out large amounts of sediment and dump it into what little riparian area remains. This is happening at the Santa Anita Reservoir and at the Hahamongna Watershed Park near JPL in Pasadena, creating a huge backlash by the local residents. Of course the problem is exacerbated by the debris flows from the fire, but a comprehensive and rational management approach is needed. One that allows the water and sediment to flow downstream and recharge the aquifer in a more natural fashion without destruction of the mature trees and habitat that currently exists.
The USGS California Water Science Center has been working in the Delta for decades. Their work includes water monitoring, experimental wetlands and fish tagging. This data is the basis for the evaluation of the ecological health of the Bay Delta. The 2008 Bay Delta environmental study was ruled last Tuesday to be based upon faulty science and called for a rewrite of the US Fish and Wildlife plan for the Bay Delta.
This decision by Judge Wanger in the complex case of resolving the water management issues in California's critical water supply has reset the terms of discussion and future agreements of managing this resource, based upon information from all parties and the benchmarking by the USGS. The Fish and Wildlife Service has always emphasized the Delta Smelt issue as being key to measuring the Delta's health and functioning, and this ruling upends that argument. The responses cheering this decision are primarily from Southern California entities which filed the lawsuit and that are demanding more water from the Delta, including the MWD and its associated Water Contractors. The decision opens up the opportunity to send more water to Southern California and to agriculture, which drives the requirement for the Peripheral Canal construction to move more water out of the Bay Delta.
This Peripheral Canal would be funded by a water bond that was postponed from the midterm elections to the next statewide ballot in 2012. The proposed implementation of the Peripheral Canal has been covered very comprehensively by the Los Angeles Times. Today's edition covers a compromise "tunnel" option to the canal and existing pumping systems that's also on the table.
Aquafornia has a review and discussion of how the Bay Delta functions as the hub of water storage and and delivery, but also points out the deterioration that has taken place in the levees and water flow management. It also reviews the earlier decision by Judge Wanger in 2007. In March 2007, a state court ruled that DWR was in violation of the California Endangered Species Act by repeatedly failing to protect the smelt and endangered salmon over the last two decades. The judge threatened to shut down the pumps in 60 days, but the decision was appealed. In May, Judge Oliver Wanger, a federal court judge, threw out the federal permit, ordering all parties back to the court in August 2007. This decision had the effect of cutting water exports from the Bay Delta, but only in a temporary fashion. Now the Federal Secretary of the Interior has weighed in with support on the "tunnel option" as a solution to the impasse on dealing with this situation.
This battle for water as a diminishing resource in the State of California will only become more critical going forward, so it's imperative to develop a major plan for managing this key water resource in a responsible way. Its degradation shows just how treating it all as a plumbing problem to supply the highest water bidders is shortsighted and eventually disastrous.
Remember Paul Ehrlich's book, "Population Bomb", which predicted mass starvation by the early 1980's due to runaway population growth? Didn't happen, we ducked that bullet by increasing the agricultural yield and upped our consumption of fish and meat. This required corporate farming and fishing which used financial resources to input the energy and effort to increase food supplies, mostly at the expense of local ecosystems. Part of it is due to the costs of energy and equipment to keep food production at a maximum - turning oil into food - which again dumps pollution, pesticides, fertilizers and carbon into the air and water. It's a system of money that props up an artificial food supply that is increasingly volatile and has encroached on natural systems that are the "commons" of the globe.
Money is one form of information, and tracking it as it expands and contracts underscores how systems can collapse and degrade very rapidly, and take years to recover. It's a dynamic interaction, with many complex factors that have to be balanced in order to prevent the degradation of the common resource pool that unregulated use of assets creates. There is no "invisible hand" moving capitalistic systems or natural systems to balanced equilibrium. It is, rather, an increasingly volatile cycle of intensive buildup and subsequent disintegration.
The "Tragedy of the Commons" is a paper that showed that the relationship of self-interest and resource management has to be balanced. This rationale, originally an exploration of the issue of overpopulation, has now expanded to show how self-interest destroys common assets and natural resources. This means that the modern commons must be considered as all of nature and animal populations in the global commons. There is obviously a limit to how much humanity can consume without restoring balance to the natural systems.
But how do you achieve this preservation of the common global resources with a population that has already exceeded earth's carrying capacity since 1980? An interview with Bill Ryerson, founder of the Population Media Center, outlines how groups of people can be taught through stories to change their behavior. These stories are entertainment, soap opera, and educational documentaries. What this could do is help populations of people become self-limiting by choice, and thus diminish the demands on ecosystems that use up all available resources and diminish the critical diversity of species that is necessary for functioning ecosystems.
The fiscal reality check that we're currently experiencing on a worldwide basis has its parallel in natural system collapse, which is something that can be averted by the development of a steady-state system that produces a livable environment without consuming the world's common resources. That's the tragedy of the commons. Everyone's self-interests ends up devouring more than the planet can bear.
The idea of regenerative architecture being used to heal existing degraded land or add land mass to accommodate structure is emerging as an advancement in sustainability. Many of the large design firms are tackling this issue in creative and thoughtful ways. For example, "Blue is the new Green", this being a mode of going beyond building conservation strategies and taking a deeper look at all the elements of sustainability and using less energy while regenerating the natural environment, returning water and resources, especially developing landscaped "carbon sinks". This goes well beyond the code mandates, even the benchmarking that is evolving in building design. For example, GSA is seeking for info on green building technologies as a process streamlining rather than new thinking about regenerative processes.
There has been an "existing green" urban rehab strategy in New York City for quite awhile, and it's beginning to show some results. This is an urban fabric repair that tries to bring down the energy consumption and improve the efficiencies of older buildings.
Blue design, however, creates places that are not just neutral, but actually add back to the natural world and its resources, and is the future of sustainable design and architecture, according to an interview with Paul Eagle, managing director of Perkins+Will, New York; and Janice Barnes, principal at the firm and global discipline leader for planning and strategies.
Another major design firm, F X FOWLE, has published a Regenerative Architecture series, which involves land reclamation in Copenhagen. These new concepts are addressing the climate change issues that we are now faced with because of the carbon that's been dumped into the environment since the industrial revolution. As a global community, we haven't been able to come to an agreement or put measures in place to abate the carbon damage we're doing to the land and the ocean, so it has come to this: figure out how to adapt to a rapidly deteriorating planet.
An open turf area. This open space hosts "civitas", the means to foster, mobilize and coordinate civic concern in the community for sustainable public and private spaces. This includes urban planning, public policy, infrastructure, watershed management, zero impact projects and regenerative "green" strategies. These create innovative spaces and design so people can reconnect with nature.
The California Natural Resources Agency just released its fourth Climate Change Assessment, a call to action on rising global temperatures — the state’s first in six years. August 2018, 132 pages covering these issues:
A space program initially launched in response to the Soviet challenge and put forth in a speech by John Kennedy in 1961 resulted in not only technology advances, but a shift in human awareness of the biosphere we all inhabit. This resulted in the Apollo program that put men on the moon and let human eyes look back upon the world.The view of a blue globe floating in empty space marks a transformation in human understanding and points towards an evolutionary change in collective priorities.
Ongoing action via the Planetary Society - Carl Sagan, from his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us." And that Bulgarian folk song from Sagan's Golden Record that NASA sent off into interstellar space in 1977. And that poem by Maya Angelou inspired by Sagan's "mote of matter". Carolyn Porco writes about how this image of our planet came to be.
Apollo 8 astronauts later presented their experiences to the US Congress: "To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together." Here's a movie of that experience from the astronauts.
Public presentations from JPL/NASA on climate change are available as videos from the Pasadena League of Women Voters as part of their Climate Change Forum series
The Fibonacci sequence is a famous group of numbers beginning with 0 and 1 in which each number is the sum of the two before it. It begins 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and continues infinitely. The pattern hides a powerful secret: If you divide each number in the sequence by its predecessor (except for 1 divided by 0), then as you move toward higher numbers, the result converges on the constant phi, or approximately 1.61803, otherwise known as the golden ratio.
My regenerative concept for the Trade Center was submitted to the New Visions New York panel for consideration as an overarching vision. The documentation is here. The concept of crystalline light shattering at 9:15 am on Sept. 11, in a site regenerated with a tree of life and "green towers" now lives on in many other urban design schemes.
The recent Bay Delta draft plan proposal has been roundly criticized by the environmental organizations and the fishing industry as a disastrous violation of the key agreement in State policy that water users should cut their dependence on the Bay-Delta and secure alternative water supply sources. The chart above, from NRDC sources, shows the increasing water withdrawals over the years that is creating the crisis in the water situation for California.
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