A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
June 2, 2008
2. Supply –
Desert dwellers must learn to conserve water
The Desert Sun- 6/1/08
Blog
Consumers say O.C. is in a “water crisis”
Orange County
Northwest may hold secret to water woes: Cascades hold far more than Sierra
The
Quenching
Las Vegas Sun – 6/1/08
Tapping
The good, and bad, of conservation
The San Francisco Chronicle – 5/31/08
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Desert dwellers must learn to conserve water
The Desert Sun- 6/1/08
By Ulysses S. Rosas
Every summer when I come back home to the
However, without realizing it, those rock lawns I was helping to install reduce water usage drastically. Approximately 70 percent to 80 percent of the water we use domestically is outside the home. Water usage concerns not only residents of the
According to estimates from the International Water Management Institute, one-third of the world population will be affected by water scarcity by 2025. What does this mean for us in the desert? Well for starters, one of the places listed that suffers from growing water scarcity is the
However, issues of water scarcity are not necessarily a result of insufficient water sources, but instead it is because of the choices people make of how they use their water.
Additionally, the population growth of the
Now, golf courses are to blame as well since their maintenance and irrigation consumes a large portion of water in the desert, but an initiative is already in place to create a MidValley pipeline to import recycled water for golf course use rather than using groundwater sources. What is left is for us as individuals to do our part.
Since three-fourths of our water usage is outside in landscaping, we should take into consideration how we use water in our lawns. If possible, converting an all-grass lawn to all-desert landscaping can result in decreases in water usage by about 70 percent. Adjusting your sprinkler system to seasonal needs and simply making sure that the sprinkler completely faces the lawn can result in significant decreases in water consumption. Similarly, using a broom instead of the hose to clean the driveway can save 80 gallons of water every time. And yes, just like we have energy-efficient appliances there are also water-efficient plants that need less water annually to flourish. Since fresh water is shared globally by decreasing water consumption we not only help keep our bills low, but we also do our part to address the global issue of water scarcity.
We may not like the idea of changing our beautiful gardens to desert landscapes, but we must realize that we live in a desert that gets less than 4 inches of rain annually. Therefore, it is important for us to help in the struggle to conserve water. So, the next time one of you happen to see my dad or I working on those lawns, losing 50 percent of our water mass in the heat, remember to help conserve water in the desert.# http://www.mydesert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080601/COLUMNS26/806010302/1004/opinion
Blog
Consumers say O.C. is in a “water crisis”
Orange County
By Gary Robbins
The telephone survey of 300 voters also reveals that many people feel that local water agencies are doing a lackluster job of informing the public about water issues.
The survey was conducted April 22-24 on behalf of MWDOC, a wholesaler that serves 2.3 million of
The results largely reflect public anxiety about below-average rainfall and snowfall in the Sierra Nevada and Colorado River, which provide half of the water consumed in
The conditions are so worrisome that the Metropolitan Water District of Southern
The new survey posed a series of questions, including: “Do you believe we have a water crisis in
What do you think?
Fifty percent of the respondents said they’d accept higher rates to ensure water quality, and 55 percent said they’d pay more to ensure environmental protection.
Respondents also were asked: “Thinking about the job that local water agencies are doing of informing the public about water issues, how would you rate their job performance? Fifty-six percent said the agencies were doing a fair or poor job.
The latter response appears to show that there’s confusion among the public about the state of the water supply.
Darcy Burke, a spokeswoman for MWDOC, says, the agency “is defining this crisis as an unstable time in which a decisive change is pending. The reality is that in average years, supply and demand don’t match up.” But MWDOC has managed to meet demand.#
http://sciencedude.freedomblogging.com/2008/06/01/consumers-say-oc-is-in-a-water-crisis/
Northwest may hold secret to water woes: Cascades hold far more than Sierra
The
By
In a few days, most rivers and streams draining from the
The melt came early this year. Just like last year.
Climate change threatens
And that, one scientist says, is likely to increase interest in a more reliable source: the porous lava flows of the Cascade Range in
As water supplies tighten in coming decades, the Northwest's groundwater surplus is likely to garner new attention from around the western United States, said Gordon Grant, a hydrologist for the U.S. Forest Service in Corvallis, Ore. Grant presented his research earlier this spring to fisheries experts gathered for a conference in Lodi.
"It is almost inevitable that the areas that store large quantities of groundwater will become increasingly looked at to provide water," Grant said.
As early as the mid-1960s there was talk in California of tapping the Pacific Northwest by diverting the Columbia River and pumping flows south through a massive system of canals, tunneling through mountain ranges on the way to Los Angeles.
The original proposal died in 1968, was resurrected in the early 1990s but ultimately was not politically viable. Even if it had been, officials at the time said, conserving water and allowing farmland to lie fallow would be far cheaper than building an extensive network of canals.
Today,
But climate change is looming.
The Cascades hold up to seven times more water underground than the range stores in its snowpack each year, Grant said. That's enough groundwater to fill
Snowflakes melt and trickle into the ground, emerging perhaps several decades later in lush forested springs. For this reason, waterways there flow steadily even late into the summer.
On the other hand, snow drains off the rocky
As a result, rivers and streams begin to dry up earlier in the summer.
"At a minimum, the value of those rivers will only increase," Grant said.
Water may eventually become the most valuable product harvested from national forest lands, he said. This could mean changes in demographics - where people live and work.
"If you project forward into a climate-warm world, the places where water is available, particularly in the late summer, those places are going to be disproportionately attractive to human beings," Grant said.
Exactly how that's going to play out, he said, he doesn't know.#
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080601/A_NEWS/806010332/-1/rss02
Quenching
Las Vegas Sun – 6/1/08
By Emily Green
Editor's Note
Two decades ago a freshman
It was a bold question. Officials had tried and failed for 60 years to win the support of ranchers to create
Indeed, he was sitting at rancher Dean Baker’s kitchen table in 1985, waiting for a reply.
You’ll have to protect our water, Baker said.
The Great Basin aquifer, which sweeps underneath the great parched
To Baker’s delight, Reid agreed. The water would be protected.
Reid and Baker met again 20 years later. The years had been kind to them. With water guaranteed, Baker was a wealthy man. Reid had moved up to the Senate and was on the verge of becoming majority leader, one of the most powerful posts in the nation.
The occasion of their meeting in July 2005 was the dedication of a new visitor center for the park the two men had had a hand in creating. But things had changed.
So on this day, Reid asked Baker: “What are your water rights?”
Translation:
Harry Reid and Dean Baker became adversaries.
How had it come to this? A thriving region of nearly 2 million people was running out of water even as the mighty
Richard Bunker will not be judged.
As a Mormon bishop, he doesn’t gamble, he doesn’t smoke, he pays a full tithe to his church and he served a three-year mission in
A direct descendant of some of the region’s earliest pioneers and the son of a city councilman, Bunker too has dedicated his life to building
As
In the process, he became a kingmaker in
He vows that his last act for
• • •
The
The Mojave is largely a Californian desert that spills into
Both are known as “hot” deserts, names that make more sense when it is 120 degrees in the summer than 10 below freezing on a winter night. Rains do come, but so rarely that the Sonoran’s saguaro cactuses and the Mojave’s Joshua trees have become international symbols of stoicism.
North of Las Vegas, the
As elevations steadily rise in the northward climb, the yuccas of the hot desert give way to a luminous green shrub called greasewood. The sheer brightness of its foliage screams a secret. Where there is greasewood, there is water.
There was ground water once in
But in the world of water, proximity to water doesn’t count. Historic claims do.
The biggest belong to
So to fuel its growth,
To get it, a water authority in no small part built by the Bunker family is in its 19th year of slowly but surely moving to pipe that water south.
To Bunker, it is a historic duty to right a historic wrong.
To critics, it is the biggest urban water grab since William Mulholland plumbed
• • •
The thickset 74-year-old who enters a top-floor boardroom of the Southern Nevada Water Authority looks just like the figure captured over the years in newspaper photos.
There is the rich crop of hair, now silver, the sun-spotted skin and the watchful and watery (and it turns out gray) eyes. Bunker may have retired, but the handshake hasn’t. It is confident, firm but not crushing. Bunker has been around prying gentiles long enough to appreciate that his family story requires a disclaimer, which he delivers with high propriety: “My great-grandfather was a polygamist before the church came out with an order called ‘The Manifest,’ which forbids plural marriages.”
Richly framed photographs of that great-grandfather, Edward Bunker, and his first wife, Emily Abbott, hang in the original Mormon statehouse in
Edward barely made it home before the church sent him off to proselytize in
By the time Edward Bunker homesteaded his last colony for the church in 1877, he had been halfway around the world, had three wives and ended up in one of the most sun-blistered, hardscrabble bishoprics on the Mormon trail. At the suggestion of Brigham Young, his new colony on the Virgin River in the newly minted state of
From the comfort of an air-conditioned office and removed by more than a century, great-grandson Richard Bunker shakes his head at the thought of it.
“Brigham Young could have sent him anywhere,” he says. “He chose to send them to Bunkerville. There are lots of nice valleys in
He’s not complaining, he adds. “It’s an interesting thing to contemplate.”
Moving water out of a river and spreading it across desert is as old as civilization. The ancient Persians did it. The Egyptians did it. The Romans did it, and as the West was settled, the Mormons did it.
They had no choice. Vigilantes had chased them out of
But the
The Bunkervillians dug irrigation ditches. They planted sorghum, alfalfa and vegetables. But the soil wasn’t good earth, Bunker says. It was “alkali dirt.”
The distinguished Mormon historian Juanita Brooks grew up in Bunkerville and her accounts lend sharp detail. The summer heat was so fierce, she recalled, that it “thickened the whites of eggs left in the coop” and made lizards “flip over on their backs and blow their toes.”
The church gave up on polygamy before Edward Bunker gave up on Bunkerville. Only after the 1890 manifesto ending plural marriage did he take his first wife, and Richard thinks also the second, to
• • •
To understand why Richard Bunker or any deeply rooted Southern Nevadan despises Californians — and they do, oh they do — just follow the water.
As the unfettered Colorado River once tumbled out of the Rockies, it swelled to a massive force with infusions from tributaries in
The state with the most natural claim on the billions of gallons of rushing snowmelt is
The 19th-century settlers who did this most successfully happened to sit farthest from the water’s origin, in the
The
They had established a legal claim to the water. Under the law of prior appropriation, the first to claim the water had first rights to it.
Californians might have claimed the whole river had they been able to build a dam capable of containing it. But that would take cash as well as concrete that only federal money can buy. Before the federal government could be persuaded to step in and dam the lifeline of the West,
That was a tall order. But in 1922, then-Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover resorted to jamming delegates from the seven states on the river into a remote New Mexican hunting lodge. He made sure that it was uncomfortable. They could come out when they agreed on a plan.
It did not go smoothly. Four states, dubbed the
Under the Colorado Compact and the act that six years later ratified it, the river basin was divided in half (with some treacherous exceptions).
At the time, the puny share did not bother the Nevadan delegation. The ground water springs of
Umbrage came later. Only when
There were no
“There is no doubt that they imbibed,” Bunker says. “They followed almost to the letter the lead of the
“For them to say 300,000 acre-feet was a lot of water for a place that was sand dunes, mosquitoes and rattlesnakes sounds fair,” Bunker says. “But when you look at what
• • •
The notion loosely held by Northern Nevada negotiators was that the Mormon farmers around
That didn’t happen. As the Bureau of Reclamation began construction of Hoover Dam in 1931,
In short, the mob didn’t invent modern
By the time Bunker was born in 1933, his family had moved to
His father and uncles became pillars of the community, serving on the city council and in the state Legislature and the U.S. Senate. But according to a touching eulogy for one of Bunker’s uncles given by Nevada Senator Harry Reid, they still managed to be just folk, small-towners who ran a gas station and mortuary and who pulled together to create the Las Vegas convention center and its Mormon temple.
Bunker himself made several stabs at elected office — for a seat on the county commission early on and another in the state Legislature later in life — but never won. He was perhaps too private, too proud and without a doubt something rarer: an audacious bureaucrat who became an unmatched political fixer.
After graduating from
As lobbyist and then county manager, Bunker didn’t so much manage the place as reinvent it. “I had to replace the head of the building department, replace the fire chief and replace the head of the planning department,” he says.
Then in 1979, one of
Mormon proscriptions against gambling go back to Joseph Smith. But from the time a
Bunker recalls wrestling over it this way: “I went to a friend, James I. Gibson, a religious icon here in the
The Gaming Control Board investigates applicants for gaming licenses. The Nevada Gaming Commission then issues the licenses. Heading the commission was another Latter-day Saint politician, a young Harry Reid.
Who better to grasp the nettle than two Mormons?
Except by June, Reid himself was beleaguered, presumed to be the “Mr. Clean” and “Mr. Cleanface” alluded to in FBI mob tapes unsealed in Kansas City.
One of Bunker’s earliest jobs would be, at Reid’s insistence, to investigate Reid, who, Bunker concluded by February 1980, had been the victim of “unmitigated character assassination.”
For the next year and a half, Reid and Bunker held hearings. Licenses were suspended. Names were put in the black book. A bomb was discovered in a Reid family car. Bunker sent his children to school with a police escort. Both men somehow survived the ridicule of 1981, when they announced they could find no evidence that Frank Sinatra was associated with the Mafia.
While Reid endured the derision quietly, Bunker snapped. The Bunkerville Bunker turned on the visiting press corps, delivering what The New York Times correspondent described as his “soliloquy.”
“This state over the last 46 years has been very good to me, and it’s because of the gaming,” Bunker said. “I personally don’t believe in gaming, but it has provided the livelihoods for thousands of people who raised their children in this state. We have an economy here that is based on something that is illegal to every other jurisdiction but
As Bunker tells it, Howard Hughes, Steve Wynn and Kirk Kerkorian, the modern models of casino owners, entered stage left as the mob exited stage right. The industry duly cleansed, Bunker went on to become treasurer of Circus Circus and president of both the Dunes and Aladdin hotels.
By 1990, Steve Wynn had opened the first megaresort, his competitors had half a dozen other huge ones on the boards, and Bunker was the head of the Nevada Resort Association and the most powerful gaming lobbyist in the country. One need only review
But as New Vegas and its suburban skirt grew inexorably up and out, the problem was no longer the competition from
It was water.
• • •
There was so much native ground water in early Las Vegas that not only did boys swim in springs, but according to Florence Lee Jones’ classic “Water: The History of Las Vegas,” homeowners routinely left town with their sprinklers running. Who knew that the local springs would be pumped dry?
As it turned out, a succession of state engineers knew.
By the 1950s, the valley had been pumped so hard that the ground was caving in beneath Nellis Air Force Base. Just as the golf courses began cropping up around casinos, the Strip had been pumped to capacity. Capping the wells and getting water users to hook up to a newly formed water system eventually killed the man who issued the battle cry. Months after the water stopped briefly in
But right up to the point that he died, Muth insisted
As
In 1952, it just so happened that
The logic: If the highest court in the land was revisiting terms for
As this giddy notion took hold a third of the way through a decadelong case, a reporter covering the trial concluded: “Thus far in the suit only one thing has been definitely established. There is not enough water in the
After the special master assigned by the Supreme Court to hear the arguments also had a heart attack (he lived), he recommended that the court deny
In other words, between 1956 and 1962, the Supreme Court special master nearly died in the course of telling
As the population of
But
This time the obstacle wouldn’t be
The Great Basin covers most of
It fell to Bunker to represent
Standing with him in a larger political press for it is his old confrere, Harry Reid.
Again,
Again, Richard Bunker will not be judged.
Part two of five will be published on Sunday, June 8.#
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jun/01/satiating-booming-city/#/Defining_the_Southwest/
Tapping
By Barry Nelson
There is only one river left to slake the thirst of
One needn't look far to find the virtual river. It's just a Google search away. State water managers have known about it for years. In fact, they put it in
Why tapping the virtual river is not the top priority of every water leader in
The situation on the
In the last century, pioneering engineers, with names such as Mulholland and O'Shaughnessy, tapped mighty rivers to provide water supplies, without which the
The virtual river offers many other benefits. It can save energy and reduce global warming pollution because vast amounts of energy are currently needed to pump water from the Delta and the
Like the rivers that provide water for
We are at a turning point in water policy – and in
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080530/news_lz1e30nelson.html
The good, and bad, of conservation
The San Francisco Chronicle – 5/31/08
Mistakes were made, as politicians are fond of saying. And mistakes will continue to be made so long as humans, well intentioned as we may be, inhabit the planet. That includes missteps in our efforts to save the planet.
Case in point: A minor tip from last Saturday's Home&Garden on conserving water drew indignation from a number of readers.
Our tongue-in-cheek recommendation that the chic new hostess gift would be bottled water (instead of a bottle of wine) prompted several to chastise us for promoting bottled water, whose producers draw down aquifers at the source and use large amounts of petroleum to manufacture plastic bottles and distribute expensive products that are nearly free to those who turn on a tap. All true, and though we should have noted we meant pricey water in glass bottles and not cases of plastic six-packs - and as one reader pointed out, a lot more liters of water go into producing 1 liter of wine than the same amount of bottled water - the point is taken that everything has a consequence.
Some more than others, of course. The economic and environmental downsides of the much-touted and subsidized corn ethanol include adding to the rising price of food and scarcity of fertilizer around the world while the biofuel from sugarcane in
Bamboo, marketed as a sustainably grown and environmentally friendly flooring material, is turning up in landfills in the form of disposable dishes and tableware.
I don't know the answer to cloth versus disposable diapers for East Bay Municipal Utility District customers who must ration their water use, but even under water rationing, there are other considerations for consumers besides simply saving water. And as with everything else in life, thoughtful decisions may vary from one family to another. The goal should be conscious living, not blinders-on adherence to any one set of environmental or economic rules - lest we continue to make the corn ethanol mistake. #
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/30/HODJ10UUQF.DTL
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