UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences

The UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences is actually a really great spot to work for a little while. I just noticed that they also have a good, clean website: http://watershed.ucdavis.edu/

flying window seat

I fly window seat, incurabely. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been on countless flights over the bast four decades and stared downward over numberless vistas of forest and wetland, prairie and river. When the flight attendants ask for people to lower the window shade so that you can see the movie better, that’s my shade still up, my face pressed against the glass.

I revel in the details of geography and sweep of biology that can be seen from the air. I trace trails into box canyons and along mountain ridges; search tundra for oriented lakes; look at sediment roiling downcoast from a turbulent river mouth; scan bayous for cypress islands; enjoy the dendritic meanderings of channels through a tide flat; discover oxbow lakes along the fringes of a river basin.

Anyone who shares this affliction with me knows, however, that what one sees most of the time along too many common routes is the human footprint: dams and dikes, farmland, shopping malls and roads, hills bulldozed, forests flattened, massive works of civil (and uncivil) engineering.

- Joshua Peterson Myers, from Gretchen C. Daily (ed.), 1997, Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems, Island Press

Re-valuing front lawns and other land around us

I just received an article about pushing for a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. While per se that is far fetched, the point is well taken. Here is my response (with original article below).

—————

Shivani,

Thanks for sharing. This email from you came just after minor storm erupted in Sacramento when it was reported a couple would be fined for not watering their lawn (we are officially in a drought here–the couple thought it the right thing to do). The fine was dropped today after many citizens, including me, complained to Sac’s councilmembers. See: http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/1057802.html. The immediate issue was enforcing a city’s code requiring “landscaping, irrigation, and maintenance” around houses, but also brought to the public’s eye the general issue of options for front yards other than the English-style, water-intensive, low-value lawns of grass that are so inappropriate, especially for a mediterranean climate such as we have here.

One “greener” option is actually less green: to use native species, which are naturally more drought resistant. This is an old concept, but for middle-class suburbanites around here a novel idea, even for California. The other great option is, of course, what this article is about–growing veggies in the front yard. Although probably more water intensive locally than native plants, when compared to the water energy intensive growing and distribution systems for big agriculture, it would save much more water and energy than it would consume. The touted option of artificial turfs is just plain silly.

One reason for landscaping regulations is the impact of landscaping on the value of neighbors’ properties (a neighbor reported the water-conserving couple to the code enforcers). A veggie-laden front yard might not look as pretty to some as a well-manicured golfing green. Would a vegetable garden in the White House front yard reduce its value? I, for one, would pay more for a place with fresh produce out front and less for a putting green. But would the appraiser’s see that? Who decides the value of a home or neighborhood?

The point is that we do need to fundamentally change the way we see value in our local surroundings. Of course, aesthetics are important, but I have seen many a beautiful vegetable garden–some even very carefully landscaped.

Keep the emails coming and take care.

David

—– Original Message —-
From: Shivani
Sent: Friday, July 4, 2008 10:49:19 AM
Subject: Independence garden?

from: www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/07/02/0703goodman_edit.html

America should become a nation of grow-it-yourselfers
Ellen Goodman, THE BOSTON GLOBE
Thursday, July 03, 2008

SCARBOROUGH, Maine — It’s been decades since that famous forager Euell Gibbons reached through the White House fence and picked four edible weeds out of the president’s garden. This is not something that the Secret Service would recommend you try today.

But Roger Doiron has a better plan for eating the view of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. He’s started a campaign to get a kitchen garden growing on the White House lawn.

Doiron works out of his small cape house in Maine, where I find him one summer day. A wasp-thin 41-year-old, he’s part of the fastest growing — I used the word literally — movement in the country. His organization, Kitchen Gardeners International, is one link in a loose chain of partisans who are neither conservatives nor liberals but locavores. They want to think global, eat local. Very local. As in their front and back yards.

He shows me the lawn sign that expresses his politics: “1,500 Miles, 400 Gallons, Say What?” It’s a reference to the average miles food travels to your plate and the gallons of fuel used in its migration. It’s not the sexiest slogan, but kitchen gardeners are probably as passionate about vegetables as Republicans are about tax cuts.

Doiron spent a decade with a grass-roots environmental group in Europe. Weekdays he worried about mad cow disease, and weekends he ate happily out of his Belgian mother-in-law’s garden.

After returning to his homeland and hometown the week before 9/11, he became a lettuce-roots environmentalist. As head of KGI, he also walks the walk, showing me 50 varieties of vegetables he grows for his family of five on about a sixth of an acre. Memo to other amateurs: You will be pleased to know that Doiron’s garden also has weeds.

The appeal of kitchen gardens — food you grow for the table — has been increasing pretty steadily. Taste bud by taste bud. But this year, a harmonic or maybe disharmonic convergence of factors led to a giant leap in the number of grow-it-yourselfers.

For one thing, there’s the rising cost of food — 45 percent worldwide in two years. There’s also the rising consciousness about the carbon footprint on your dinner plate. There is, as well, recognition of an international food shortage and moral queasiness about biofuels, growing corn to feed cars while people are going hungry.

Meanwhile, we’ve had more uncertainty about food safety, whether it was spinach in 2006 or this year’s tomatoes. And the floods that ruined millions of acres in the Midwest have undermined our easy sense of plenty.

“When people feel they are living in uncertain times, they turn to things that give them a sense of security,” Doiron says. “There are not many sure things, but if you put a few seeds in the ground and you don’t muck it up too much you’ll get a crop.” As proof, he stands beside a neat patch of potatoes.

He adds, “Don’t do it because it’s the cheap thing to do or because Al Gore said it’s the right thing to do. Do it to make a small yet concrete step. You may not be able to single-handedly take on Exxon and Chevron, but you can take on your backyard.”

In that spirit, Doiron is pushing for edible landscapes everywhere from schoolyards to governor’s mansions to empty urban plots. But Doiron set his eyes on everybody’s house, the White House.

He wants the candidates to pledge they’ll turn a piece of the 18-acre White House terrain into an edible garden. Or rather, return it into an edible garden.

After all, John Adams, the first president to ever live in the White House, had a garden to feed his family. Woodrow Wilson had a Liberty Garden and sheep grazing during World War I. And, of course, the Roosevelts famously had their Victory Garden during World War II, a time when 40 percent of the nation’s produce came from citizen gardeners.

It’s way too late for a Bush harvest, but the campaign to get the next president to model a bit of homeland food security has sprouted on Doiron’s Internet site called EatTheView.org.

Eat the View doesn’t have the marching sound of John Philip Sousa. It doesn’t have the patriotic salience of a flag.

But in dicey times, the idea of growing just a bit of your own food carries the real flavor of July Fourth.

It smacks a lot of independence.

ellengoodman@globe.com

Subject: Change water priorities in times of drought

The Sacramento Bee recently reported on a couple who face a fine for not irrigating their lawn (http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/1054905.html). While fundamentally the issue was about aesthetics (I think…maybe it was neighborhood politics) the effect was official sanctioning of wasteful watering of lawns in a city with one of the highest per capita water uses in the world. So I wrote a letter to my council member, the only responsible thing to do:

Mr. Fong,

I was quite surprised when I read in the Sacramento Bee about a couple facing a fine for conserving water by not irrigating their lawn (http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/1054905.html).

While I certainly understand the need to maintain healthy and aesthetically acceptable areas around our houses, a fine for not irrigating a lawn in a drought year is irresponsible at best. As a water resources professional, I see a fundamental disconnect between attempts to more efficiently manage water at the state-wide level and demand management at the municipality level.

We should be encouraging as little water use as possible by promoting, for example, use of native vegetation and other low to zero irrigation schemes, rather than penalizing those who realize that we do, indeed, live in a dry region and choose to act accordingly.

I thank you for your concern for and leadership in responsible water use.

Regards, David R… (Land Park)

Dam the Salmon

Here’s an op-ed article on the Klamath from a (presumably) Randian site Reason.com, published by the Wall Street Journal

Dam the Salmon

In the Northwest, environmentalists want to have it both ways.

It is significant because it appeared in the WSJ. Reason.com is, of course, going to be very opposed to anything environmentalists (preservationists) support. There is more on it on the Hydropower Reform Coalition website, including links to responses from American Rivers (a river recreation-oriented group) and Friends of the River: Wall Street Journal: Dam the Salmon

Water Research Network

Just found this great site from Norway: Water Research Network.

In particular, they have quite a nice–but minimally organized–list of water related links.

Natural Heritage Institute

An organization worth checking out: Natural Heritage Institute

everything you always wanted to know about water (but were afraid to ask)

Just found this great introduction to water as a substance:
Water Structure and Behavior by Martin Chaplin from the London South Bank University.

Lake Qarun (Nile River, Egypt)

Lake Qarun is a saline lake about 45m below sea level located in the Faiyum Depression just 80km southwest of Cairo. Of hydrological significance for me is its connectedness to the Nile River. It seems that it is fed in part by the Nile River, although in reality this feeder system most likely never reaches the lake itself and is instead completely withdrawn for the intensive irrigation needed for the agricultural production in the depression. Upstream of Cairo, the Nile River has a much smaller parallel river to the west, one that must have been originally formed during the routine flooding of the Nile, but which is now stabilized in its location since that flooding has stopped (due to the Aswan High Dam). This parallel river, called ???, originates when it splits off via a manmade channel from the mainstem of the Nile much farther upstream (just south of Mallawi). That river can be seen in this map from the website of the Lake Qarum Project of the University College London

(image url: http://ecrc.geog.ucl.ac.uk/qarun/images/faiyum_map.gif):

On the same website, the History of Lake Qarum gives a good overview of the basin itself. As I mentioned, of hydrological significance is the question of Nile connectivity. The following image from Google Maps shows the exact point where that connectivity occurs (the image that follows shows, with the green arrow, where this occurs in relation to the depression). The river comes in from the south and splits here: the north and northwest channels both send the water northwest into the Faiyum, whereas the eastward flowing channel sends the water back along the course of the Nile and into the delta.

more on Lake Chad

From NASA’s earth observatory, Dust Storm in the Bodele Depression:

Today, Lake Chad seems like little more than a muddy puddle surrounded by increasingly dune-streaked wetland (tan stripes across the green vegetation)… But between 5,000-10,000 years ago, a much larger lake extended across the area, a low-lying basin… Today, part of the former lake bed, the Bodele Depression, is probably the largest single source of wind-blown dust in the world. In the image, a dust storm is whipping across the Bodele…softening the orange sands of the Sahara into a pale tan.

Of hydrologic significance, in more recent times (in the past century), the lake used to flow into the Bodele Depression by way of the Bahr-el-Ghazal, as indicated by the Encyclopedia Britannica (see Online Encyclopedia entry on Lake Chad, with the caveat that I have yet to investigate the legitimacy of this source):

Beyond the south-east corner of the lake is a depression known as the Bahr-el-Ghazal (not to be confounded with the Nile affluent of the same name). This depression is the termination of what is in all probability the bed of one of the dried-up Saharan rivers. Coming from the Tibesti highlands the Bahr-el-Ghazal has a south-westerly trend to Lake Chad. Near the lake the valley was formerly swampy, and at high-water the lake overflowed into it. There was also at one time communication between the Shari and the Bahr-el-Ghazal, so that the water of the first-named stream reached Chad by way of the Bahr-el-Ghazal.