Tag Archives: water

Study Predicts Massive Tree Die-Off in the Southwestern US

by FDXDiane4749 Posted on January 6, 2016

A recent study has warned that the American Southwest may be facing a massive tree die-off as a result of climate change. The study, published in Nature Climate Change, examined the effects of anticipated climate change patterns on the coniferous forests of the Southwest. Unfortunately, researchers found that if global temperatures continue to rise as anticipated by scientists, it could spell disaster for these breathtaking natural landscapes.

Theforecastedtree die-off

Researchers simulated global temperature increases and examined their effects on trees. They simulated both an extreme scenario and a more moderate 2-degree rise in global temperatures, which is the current goal suggested by climate scientists to avoid catastrophic changes to the planetary ecosystem. Unfortunately, their findings showed that even if we do limit temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius, it will only delay tree die-off by about a decade.

The extent to which we may lose our Southwestern forests will be based both on the current drought that is plaguing the region and the temperature increases were expected to face. The Washington Post explains that the drought will cause plants to close their stomata in order to retain water, depriving themselves of carbon.

Plants cant survive in a state of carbon deprivation, nor can they survive without adequate water. Scientists are anticipating that the problem will be detrimental to the health of the forests. According to the paper, 72 percent of Southwestern forests will die off by 2050, a mortality rate that is expected to hit 100 percent by 2100.

Why are trees important?

Trees are beneficial for both human health and that of the planet. A study published in the journal Environmental Pollution found that the presence of trees was responsible for preventing 670,000 annual cases of acute respiratory symptoms in the U.S. alone, primarily because our countrys trees absorbed 17.4 tonnes of air pollution. Based on that figure, scientists predict that investing in treesparticularly in polluted urban areascould save the country about $7 billion in annual health care costs.

However, our own respiratory health isnt the only reason we need trees. Trees, like all plants, sequester carbon and as most of us know by now, we need as much help as we can get when it comes to keeping atmospheric carbon levels balanced. American Forests notes that a single tree can sequester 48 pounds of carbon each year. Considering that the earth is populated by approximately 3 trillion trees, thats a staggering potential for atmospheric carbon reduction.

What can you do to help?

Unfortunately, the predicted tree die-off is bigger than any one of us. If were to prevent these kinds of die-offs from occurring, we need to focus on keeping global temperature increases under the 2-degree mark. Supporting reductions in carbon emissions, reducing our personal carbon footprints and making trees a priority in our communities is the best way to help. Here are a few ideas:

Support policymakers who put climate change action at the top of their priority lists.
Reduce your carbon footprint by using fewer resources in your own life, whether that means taking public transportation, upgrading your home to be more energy-efficient, or downsizing to minimize your households energy usage.
Conservewater. The Southwests current drought is no joke. Conserve water in your own home and throughout your day.
Get involved in your community. Development committees are responsible for deciding upon things like whether or not a new community will be dense and walkable or far-reaching and sprawly. The former reduces the need for carbon-emitting cars while conservingland for trees and wildlife. Your local community could also support the environment by planting more trees, encouraging sustainable landscaping and incentivizing the use of rainwater collection barrels or green rooftops.

Related
Climate Change is Putting Your Favorite Foods at Risk
How to Eat Vegan Without Feeling Deprived
How Do Animals Communicate?

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Visit site – 

Study Predicts Massive Tree Die-Off in the Southwestern US

Posted in alo, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Study Predicts Massive Tree Die-Off in the Southwestern US

The 7 Biggest Food Stories of 2015

by JerryKeynes8 Posted on December 30, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The food politics beat was as tumultuous and fascinating as ever in 2015. Here, in no particular order, is my list of the year’s biggest stories. Let me know what I missed in the comments section.

1) Chipotle loses its halo. Unlike its rather timid salsas, Chipotle Mexican Grill’s stock has typically been red-hot, rising more than sevenfold between 2009 and the end of 2014. The burrito behemoth drove its rapid growth by successfully marketing itself as a rustic, farm-friendly alternative to faceless, soulless agribusiness. This year, however, the company’s halo has plunged into the muck. Chipotle got caught in a seemingly endless chain of foodborne illness disasters: an E. coli outbreak that sickened 53 people, including 20 who had to be hospitalized, mostly in the northwest; a norovirus eruption in Boston, affecting 80 people, including 10 members of the Boston College basketball team; and just last week, another E. coli imbroglio, this time centered in the Midwest. Adding insult to (gastric) injury, in one of Bloomberg BusinessWeek‘s final issues of the year, the cover depicts an image of a Chipotle burrito vomiting its contents.

As the Washington Post’s Roberto Ferdman suggested, serving hand-prepared food from fresh ingredients is tough to pull off safely while also opening new stores at a fast enough clip to appease growth-hungry investors. (The company’s total number of stores leapt from 704 in 2007 to 1,783 in 2014—150 percent growth in less than a decade.)

Meanwhile, the excellent financial writer Helaine Olen revealed that Chipotle’s much-ballyhooed “Food with Integrity” pledge apparently doesn’t extend to employee wages. The company got its wrist slapped by the National Labor Relations Board for firing a St. Louis employee for participating in the Fight for $15 campaign. And Chipotle workers make just marginally more in wages than their peers at McDonald’s, Olen showed. Chipotle stock lost around a quarter of its value over the course of the company’s rough 2015.

2) The meat industry’s antibiotic problem festers. In order to churn out cheap product, the global meat industry relies heavily on antibiotics—the very same drugs used by doctors to stave off infections in people—to spur animals to grow faster and avoid disease in tight conditions. Here in the United States, the meat industry burns through about three times the amount of antibiotics used in human medicine, according to the Food and Drug Administration’s latest reckoning. And the meat industry’s demand for “medically important” antibiotics grew an eye-popping 23 percent between 2009 and 2014, the FDA found. The practice drew a rising crescendo of warnings from public health authorities in 2015. Echoing similar statements from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned that the meat industry’s antibiotic habit “often leaves the drugs ineffective when they are needed to treat infections in people,” leaving kids particularly vulnerable.

Scarier still: A group of Chinese and UK researchers published a reported in The Lancet that they had discovered a strain of E. coli in Chinese pig farms that can shake off colistin, a last-resort drug for a variety of pathogens that can resist other antibiotics. And this particularly ferocious superbug isn’t likely to stay put on those Chinese hog farms, the researchers warned. Once the E. coli gene that arose to resist colistin “becomes global, which is a case of when not if, and the gene aligns itself with other antibiotic resistance genes, which is inevitable, then we will have very likely reached the start of the post-antibiotic era…At that point if a patient is seriously ill, say with E. coli, then there is virtually nothing you can do,” one of The Lancet study’s authors told the BBC. Uh oh.

3) The GMO industry doubles down on herbicides… Since GM crops first hit farm fields in the mid-’90s, the industry has relied heavily on one blockbuster innovation: a gene that confers corn, soybeans, cotton, and a few other crops with the power to shake off an herbicide called glyphosate, marketed by Monsanto as Roundup. The product rapidly conquered US farm fields and minted profits for Monsanto, which made bank from selling the high-priced seeds and the weed-killing chemical, which farmers could spray on their fields at will, leveling weeds and leaving crops unscathed. But the so-called Roundup Ready seeds became too successful for their own good—weeds developed the ability resist the ubiquitous chemical, leading farmers to uncork a gusher of older, more toxic herbicides onto their fields.

After years of development and regulatory hurdles, the GMO/agrichemical industry debuted its new (weed) killer app to solve the problem: genes that confer resistance to those older, more toxic herbicides, to be mashed up with the Roundup-resistant gene. Dow introduced its Enlist Duo line of corn and soybeans, engineered to resist a cocktail of glyphosate and a decades-old herbicide called 2,4-D. And Monsanto is hotly anticipating approval of its own double-herbicide-resistant product, cleverly deemed Roundup Ready Plus: corn and soybeans tweaked to stave off a mix of gyphpsate and dicamba, another mid-century-era weed killer.

But the herbicide cocktail party got crashed by a few skunks in 2015. The World Health Organization declared glyphosate and 2,4-D—the two ingredients in Dow’s new mix—“probable” and “possible” carcinogens, respectively. And the Environmental Protection Agency temporarily revoked its approval of Dow’s herbicide cocktail just before Thanksgiving for reasons explained here, though Dow vows the cocktail will be back on the market in time for spring planting (and weed killing).

4) …and eyes dazzling new techniques. While the industry harbors high hopes for its herbicide-resistant products in the near term, it looks ahead to a future of genetic wizardry that promises to make old-school GMOs look as vintage as an iPod. First, there’s RNA interference, or RNAi, an emerging technique that allows engineers to turn off specific genes in living organisms, including crops, weeds, and insects. The industry has already used RNAi to create potatoes and apples that don’t brown quickly after cutting (neither of which has taken off in the marketplace). But the industry’s main hopes for big RNAi profits is through generating gene-silencing pesticides and herbicides, as this excellent MIT Technology Review article shows. The pitch is that these RNAi sprays will be able to precisely target specific pests, leaving everything else unscathed. Some scientists, including a USDA whistleblower, are unconvinced, as I’ve explained here and here.

Even more hype swirls around a powerful new technique called CRISPR (explained briefly in this video), which allows engineers to edit genomes like you might edit a document in Microsoft Word—by deleting unwanted genes and inserting new ones. DuPont announced that it’s experimenting with CRISPR to create drought-tolerant corn and soybeans, and it has vowed to have these crops in the field in as few as five years.

Then there’s something called “gene drives,” in which engineers can transform entire species by ensuring desired genetic alterations are passed on across generations—which could make crop pests like weeds and insects easier to kill, according to Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

5) A historic El Niño eased California’s drought—but won’t fix its water troubles. The Golden State endured its fourth consecutive year of punishing drought, to which farmers responded by drawing ever more deeply from finite underground aquifers. In California’s vast Central Valley, one of the planet’s most productive farming regions, farmers have withdrawn water so rapidly that the ground is sinking by as much as a foot per year in some parts, permanently reducing the aquifers’ water-storage capacity and causing tens of millions of dollars in fouled-up infrastructure, including train tracks, roads, and bridges. Meanwhile, growers continued to shift from annual crops to long-lasting ones like almonds and pistachios, putting long-term strain on those same aquifers.

A historically powerful El Niño oceanic warming event is currently bringing much-needed rain and snow to the state, sparking hopes of a drought reprieve. But as I showed here, the state’s farms have gotten so big and productive that their water demands have outstripped the state’s water resources, even accounting for wet years.

6) Midwest farms can’t stop fouling water. While California was drying up, the nation’s other major farming region, the corn- and soybean-dominated Midwest, underwent a different kind of water crisis. Fertilizer from farms, along with manure from massive hog-raising facilities, is leaching into drinking-water supplies, causing dangerous nitrate spikes in Des Moines and Columbus and feeding toxic algae blooms that periodically make Toledo’s water supply poisonous.

After years of paying millions of dollars annually to remove Big Ag’s nitrates from its water, Des Moines pushed back, launching a lawsuit that would place farmers in its watershed under Clean Water Act regulation.

7) Americans are losing their appetite for Big Food (and Beer), which have responded by getting bigger. The American appetite for processed junk finally showed signs of waning, pinching the bottom lines of giant food conglomerates and inspiring them to woo back customers by cutting out artificial dyes and other hoary tricks of the trade. Another way the industry responded was by combining forces in hopes of slashing costs—see the merger of behemoths Heinz and Kraft.

Americans also continued to lose their thirst for corporate beer—giants MillerSAB and InBev saw sales drop even as craft-brew sales boomed. That trend inspired InBev to lean on its US distributors to sell less craft beer, a tale I laid out here. Similar trends played out globally, and that inspired SAB and Inbev to embark upon a megamerger. The resulting company will churn out nearly one in three beers consumed worldwide—nearly all of them, according to my palate, undrinkable.

Merger mania also extended to agrichemical companies—Dow and DuPont combined and have promised to create the globe’s largest GMO seed/pesticide company, bigger even then Monsanto and Syngenta. And those two companies nearly merged in 2015, and may yet.

More: 

The 7 Biggest Food Stories of 2015

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The 7 Biggest Food Stories of 2015

Shit Is About to Get Real in California, El Niño Report Predicts

by RefugioDurbin Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

After four years of drought, Californians are bracing for another potentially destructive weather event: El Niño. Earlier this week, FEMA released a disaster plan including what to expect from the upcoming rainy season. Here are the key takeaways:

This may be the strongest El Niño on record. Weather reports indicate that this year will be warm and wet—perhaps even more so than the winter of 1997-1998, which is currently the strongest recorded El Niño. That year, California evacuated 100,000 people.
The dry conditions mean more flooding. The lack of soil moisture has made the soil “harden and act like cement,” making it, paradoxically, less likely to soak up the rain. The chance of flooding is far higher than usual, especially in the productive farm country of Central Valley and the surrounding area—including America’s the state’s capital. “The primary risk areas are in populated areas mostly notably in Sacramento,” the report reads—and because of that, “a major flood situation would have significant impact on the economic, cultural, and political life of California.” Additionally, a catastrophic levee failure in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta would jeopardize a major source of water for 60 percent of California homes and for a portion of the state’s agricultural industry.” One in five Californians lives in a flood zone.
Wildfires in the summer mean more landslides in the winter. The wildfire season this year was devastating in California, scorching more than 300,000 acres. Mudslides are common in these scorched areas, called “burn scars,” because water quickly runs off and there aren’t trees to keep the soil, rocks, and other debris in place. Southern Californians got a little taste of what this might look like when rain led to severe landslides in October.
King Tides, El Niño, and the Blob mean higher sea levels and more potential damage. Sea levels typically rise a few inches during El Niño, but this winter, scientists predict that the giant swath of warm water off the West Coast dubbed the Blob will lead to a rise of between 8 and 11 inches. State officials are particularly concerned about the potential damage caused by storms towards the end of both December and January, when the highest tides of the winter, called King Tides, are expected.
The rains may ease the drought, but won’t solve it. All this water will certainly ease the drought and raise levels in the state’s depleted reservoirs. But because the state is so behind on precipitation, it’s very unlikely that it will make up for the state’s now four-year water deficit.

View article:

Shit Is About to Get Real in California, El Niño Report Predicts

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Shit Is About to Get Real in California, El Niño Report Predicts

Carbon farming: another low-tech climate solution

by Apollinaryial Posted on December 7, 2015

green4us

Visit site:  

Carbon farming: another low-tech climate solution

Posted in eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, organic, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Carbon farming: another low-tech climate solution

This Devastating Chart Shows Why Even a Powerful El Niño Won’t Fix the Drought

by ThelmaPenman Posted on October 14, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In California, news of a historically powerful El Niño oceanic warming event is stoking hopes that winter rains will ease the state’s brutal drought. But for farmers in the Central Valley, one of the globe’s most productive agricultural regions, water troubles go much deeper—literally—than the current lack of precipitation.

That’s the message of an eye-popping report from researchers at the US Geological Survey. This chart tells the story:

USGS

To understand it, note that in the arid Central Valley, farmers get water to irrigate their crops in two ways. The first is through massive, government-built projects that deliver melted snow from the Sierra Nevada mountains. The second is by digging wells into the ground and pumping water from the region’s ancient aquifers. In theory, the aquifer water serves as a buffer—it keeps farming humming when (as has happened the last three years) the winter snows don’t come. When the snows return, the theory goes, irrigation water flows anew through canals, and the aquifers are allowed to refill.

But as the chart shows, the Central Valley’s underground water reserves are in a state of decline that predates the current drought by decades. The red line shows the change in underground water storage since the early 1960s; the green bars show how much water entered the Central Valley each year through the irrigation projects. Note how both vary during “wet” and “dry” times.

As you’d expect, underground water storage drops during dry years, as farmers resort to the pump to make up for lost irrigation allotments, and it rises during wet years, when the irrigation projects up their contribution. The problem is, aquifer recharge during wet years never fully replaces all that was taken away during dry times—meaning that the the Central Valley has surrendered a total of 100 cubic kilometers, or 811 million acre-feet, of underground water since 1962. That’s an average of about 1.5 million acre-feet of water annually extracted from finite underground reserves and not replaced by the Central Valley’s farms. By comparison, all of Los Angeles uses about 600,000 acre-feet of water per year. (An acre-foot is the amount needed to cover an acre of land with a foot of water).

The USGS authors note that the region’s farmers have gotten more efficient in their irrigation techniques over the past 20 years—using precisely placed drip tape, for example, instead of old techniques like flooding fields. But that positive step has been more than offset with a factor I’ve discussed many times: “the planting of permanent crops (vineyards and orchards), replacing non-permanent land uses such as rangeland, field crops, or row crops.” This is a reference to the ongoing expansion in acres devoted to almonds and pistachios, highly profitable crops that can’t be fallowed during dry times. To keep them churning out product during drought, orchard farmers revert to the pump.

The major takeaway is that the Valley’s farms can’t maintain business as usual—eventually, the water will run out. No one knows exactly when that point will be, because, as Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology, never tires of pointing out, no one has invested in the research required to measure just how much water is left beneath the Central Valley’s farms. Of course, averting this race to the bottom of the well is exactly why the California legislature voted last year to end the state’s wild-west water-drilling free-for-all and enact legislation requiring stressed watersheds like the Central Valley’s to reach “sustainable yield” by 2040. The downward meandering red line in the above graph, in other words, will have to flatten out pretty soon, and to get there, “dramatic changes will need to be made,” the USGS report states.

Meanwhile, one wet El Niño winter won’t do much to end the the decades-in-the-making drawdown of the Central Valley’s water horde. And people pining for heavy rains should be careful what they wish for—parts of the Central Valley, especially its almond-heavy southern regions, are notoriously vulnerable to disastrous flooding. Then there’s the unhappy fact that El Niño periods are often followed by La Niña events—which are associated with dry winters in California. The region could be “whiplashed from deluge back to drought again” in just one year’s time, Bill Patzert, a climatologist for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recently told the Los Angeles Times. “Because remember, La Niña is the diva of drought,” he said. The last big El Niño ended in 1998, and as the above chart shows, what followed wasn’t pretty.

Excerpt from: 

This Devastating Chart Shows Why Even a Powerful El Niño Won’t Fix the Drought

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, ProPublica, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Devastating Chart Shows Why Even a Powerful El Niño Won’t Fix the Drought

A more permeable concrete will inspire you to achieve your wildest dreams

by MargieFaber Posted on October 7, 2015

A more permeable concrete will inspire you to achieve your wildest dreams

By on 7 Oct 2015commentsShare

If you think concrete is boring, then you’ve never watched it soak up 4,000 liters of water in 60 seconds to a Tracy Anderson-approved soundtrack. Let’s just say that Shia LaBeouf better watch his back — this parking lot is vying for his job as the world’s best motivational speaker.

Topmix Permeable is a new type of highly porous, fast-drying concrete developed by the U.K.-based cement company Tarmac. According to Smithsonian Magazine, this veritable Tony Robbins of construction material can absorb up to 1,000 liters of water per square meter per minute. And so can you! Er — sorry — I’m still amped up from that video.

If you’re not impressed by the simple fact of a parking lot absorbing 4,000 — four thousand!!!! — liters of water in 60 seconds, you must be quite jaded indeed, but this actually serves a valuable purpose. A permeable concrete could help cities both conserve water and avoid flooding — something that a Joaquin-ravaged South Carolina could really use right about now. Here’s how it works, from Smithsonian:

Typically, road paving material is made of a mix of large and fine crushed stone held together by a binder. With Topmix Permeable, the fine crushed stone or sand is left out. This makes the resulting material porous enough to accept large amounts of water. A layer of Topmix Permeable concrete is installed on top of an aggregate sub-base of crushed stone, which generally sits on top of the soil. Rainwater drains through the top surface, collects in the aggregate layer, and is slowly released into the ground.

As Smithsonian points out, porous asphalt is already a thing, but it’s not strong enough to handle heavy traffic, lets pollutants run into the water system, and needs regular maintenance in order to keep from clogging. Topmix Permeable is stronger, although still not ideal for heavy traffic areas, and can filter out contaminants like motor oil. It also contains more air space than your average porous asphalt — 35 percent, compared to 20 percent.

Unfortunately, Topmix Permeable is not yet available in the U.S. But, by god, that video is — and if I watch it enough, I might just have to cover the whole world in permeable concrete! Wait, that’s not the point?

Source:

This Concrete Can Absorb a Flood

, Smithsonian.com.

Share

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Get Grist in your inbox

Visit source:

A more permeable concrete will inspire you to achieve your wildest dreams

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, ONA, PUR, Radius, Smith's, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A more permeable concrete will inspire you to achieve your wildest dreams

Here’s What I Saw in a California Town Without Running Water

by JessikaSegura Posted on September 7, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Juana Garcia, 49, and her daughter, Noemi Castro, 11, in their home in East Porterville, CA. The family has had a dry well for the past two years. Gabrielle Lurie

Glance at a lawn in East Porterville, California, and you’ll instantly know something about the people who live in the house attached to it.

If a lawn is green, the home has running water. If it’s brown, or if the yard contains plastic water tanks or crates of bottled water, then the well has gone dry.

Residents of these homes rely on deliveries of bottled water, or perhaps a hose connected to a working well of a friendly neighbor. They take “showers” with water from a bucket, use paper plates to avoid washing dishes, eat sandwiches instead of spaghetti so there’s no need to boil water, and collect water used for cooking and showers to pour in the toilet or on the trees outside.

East Porterville is in Tulare County, a region in the middle of California’s agriculture-heavy Central Valley that’s been especially hard hit by the state’s historic drought. More than 7,000 people in the the county lack running water; three quarters of them live in East Porterville. The community doesn’t have a public water system; instead, residents rely on private wells. But after years of drought, the nearby Tule River has diminished to a trickle and the underground water table has sunk as more and more farmers rely on groundwater. Last week, I spent a few days interviewing residents in the town, also known as “ground zero” of the drought.

Tulare County delivers bottled drinking water to dry homes, where each resident receives half a gallon per day. Gabrielle Lurie

Like many small towns in the Central Valley, East Porterville is home to the pickers and packers of the fruits, veggies, and nuts grown nearby and distributed across the country. Many are poor; more than half of kids growing up in East Porterville fall below the poverty line. Throughout the town are the telltale signs of rural poverty: Dogs guard run-down trailers and homes, roads of uneven pavement devolve into dirt without warning. The air is hazy with dust from the fields and roads. It clings to the tables and chairs and boxes of bottled water left outside; it collects between fingers and toes, turning the shower water a cloudy brown. Everyone coughs. Asthmatics end up in the emergency room.

Iglesia Emmanuel, in East Porterville, houses portable showers where residents can bathe until 9 p.m. Gabrielle Lurie

At the county’s drought resource center—a trailer in East Porterville—residents can sign up for bottled water deliveries, take showers, and apply for loans to fund well drilling. Julia Lurie

Despite fallowing farmland because of the drought, Tulare County continues to lead the nation in sales of agricultural products. Gabrielle Lurie

Among the first to report a dry well was Donna Johnson, a 72-year-old retired recreational therapist who lives in East Porterville with her husband, Howard, and a handful of rescue dogs. In the spring of 2014, she turned on the tap to find that it had reduced to a dribble—then no water at all. Howard tried to extend the pump further into the well, but where there should have been a splash of water, there was simply a “thud” of solid against solid. When Johnson called a well-driller and learned the company had a long waiting list, she started wondering just how many wells had gone dry. After a couple of weeks of knocking on the doors of strangers in her neighborhood, Johnson had a list of more than 100 homes.

Over the past 18 months, Johnson has become known as East Porterville’s “water lady,” as she spends her days collecting donations of water and paper goods and delivering them in a pickup truck to a list of homes with dry wells—a list that’s expanded to hundreds of addresses. “There’s always somebody calling, saying, ‘I don’t have water!'” she said.

Donna Johnson drops off water for Bill Dennis, whose well went dry last month. Gabrielle Lurie

â&#128;&#139;Reuben Perez fills up a barrel of water at the public tank to bring to Juana Garcia’s home. The water will be used to do laundry, take bucket showers, and flush the toilet. Gabrielle Lurie

The county, in part prompted by Johnson’s discovery, has also stepped in. Locals can now bathe in portable showers outside the Drought Resource Center (a trailer set up in a church parking lot) and sign up for bottled-water deliveries (half gallon per person per day). Tanks of nonpotable water sit outside the fire station; in the evenings, residents fill up barrels for things like laundry and bathing.

As an interim solution, the county is installing large plastic tanks of water connected to some dry homes. But progress has been slow. So far, 320 tanks have been installed; more than 1,300 still remain dry.

It doesn’t help matters that homes in the directly adjacent, slightly wealthier town of Porterville have running water from the town’s municipal water system. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is on the city boundary: Locals take showers at Igelsia Emmanuel in East Porterville; directly across the street, in Porterville, is a patchy but green golf course.

Some pets are fed potable water delivered by the county, others are left with dirtier water or are abandoned. Gabrielle Lurie

A map of East Porterville at the county’s drought resource center shows homes without running water (green) and homes where large tanks have been installed as an interim solution (blue). Julia Lurie

East Porterville residents without running water have fallen into a tedious routine. Juana Garcia, a 49-year-old mother of five, lost water two years ago—in some ways, her living conditions remind her of those she left behind in Mexico when she moved to East Porterville in 1988. The change has been particularly challenging because she suffers from Lupus and arthritis, making it difficult to haul water to her home or make the trek to the public showers.

Garcia doesn’t speak much English, so her daughter, a talkative 11-year-old named Noemi, walked me through the daily routine. Dishes are washed in two buckets: one for soaking, the other for rinsing. Afterward, water is dumped into the toilet so it will flush. For showers, Garcia boils water that Johnson hauled in from the gas station (Garcia doesn’t have a car), or she takes her kids to the portable shower in front of the church. Teeth are brushed with bottled water; clothes are hand washed and air-dried unless a friend has time to take the family to the laundromat.

The trees in the backyard used to yield pears, lemons, and pomegranates, but they’re all dead now; any extra water is used to fuel the swamp cooler, which, Noemi explained, uses five gallons of water an hour—and it’s a necessity as temperatures routinely top 100 degrees. For dinner, Garcia makes things that require minimal water and won’t heat up the house—like microwave meals or sandwiches.

Juana Garcia washes grapes with bottled water. She soaks dirty dishes in soapy water before rinsing them to minimize water use. Gabrielle Lurie

Juana Garcia, 49, trails behind her kids, Noemi and Christopher Castro, 11 and 5, on the way to the public showers. Gabrielle Lurie

Amy Mcloan applies makeup outside the public showers. Gabrielle Lurie

An impressive coalition of local supporters have stepped up to help residents like the Garcias. At Iglesia Emmanuel, Pastor Roman Hernandez has been distributing crates of bottled water for months, and organizes services around the Central Valley to pray for rain.

Local nonprofit FoodLink doles out “Drought Relief” food boxes several times per week, targeted towards farmhands who have lost jobs as farmers let their fields fallow.

Granite Hills High School, which serves East Porterville students, opens its showers early so that students without water can use them. Many students come from families who are struggling financially because of lack of work; the number of students who eat free breakfast and lunch at school has nearly doubled over the past year.

Pastor Roman Hernandez prepares free bottled water for locals to pick up. Gabrielle Lurie

Residents line up to pick up emergency boxes of food. Julia Lurie

FoodLink, a local nonprofit, delivers staples to those for whom money is tight because of the drought. Julia Lurie

Luis Diaz, a junior at Granite Hills High School, has running water at home, but his parents, who work in the fields, have struggled to find work. Julia Lurie

A Land O’Lakes truck fills up outside Eric Borba’s dairy farm. Julia Lurie

Vicky Yorba, 95, stands beside the water tank in her front yard. Gabrielle Lurie

It’s tempting to blame agriculture for the disaster in East Porterville; after all, farmers’ increased reliance on groundwater is largely responsible for lowering the underground water table to begin with. But the reality, dairy farmer Eric Borba told me, is that “people wouldn’t be living here if it weren’t for ag.”

Many residents I spoke with said that while performing daily tasks without running water is challenging, the sentimental losses are the toughest to face: favorite trees that died, pets and farm animals that had to be let out into the streets. When Vicky Yorba, a 95-year-old, moved to East Porterville in the 1960s, she and her husband planted a garden of geraniums and roses together. “My favorite was geraniums,” she remembered. “I had all kinds of them.” Yorba’s husband died more than twenty years ago, but the plants lived until last year, when her well went dry. Now, they’ve been replaced by a plot of dirt.

Read the article – 

Here’s What I Saw in a California Town Without Running Water

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s What I Saw in a California Town Without Running Water

How Top GOP Donors Got Jeb Bush to Facilitate a Hurricane Katrina Cruise-Ship Boondoggle

by Myrna Posted on August 28, 2015

A quarter billion dollars later, the ships sat half empty. Then Florida Gov. Jeb Bush visits the Miami-Dade Emergency Operations Center the Friday after Hurricane Katrina passed through in August, 2005. Lannis Waters/Palm Beach Post/ZUMA Trailing Donald Trump in the polls by a widening margin, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is trying to use the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on Saturday to highlight his successes in crisis response. On Tuesday, his presidential campaign released a two-minute ad promoting Bush’s handling of hurricanes as governor. Bush has been widely praised for his response to Katrina, in contrast with the criticism his brother, George W. Bush, faced as president in addressing the disaster. But one thing Jeb Bush is not likely to mention on the anniversary is how he helped Carnival Cruise Lines—via a major GOP donor—land a quarter-billion-dollar federal contract to house people displaced by the hurricane. The fast-tracked contract sent $236 million to the Florida-based cruise company, but the ships sat half empty for weeks, according to the Associated Press, which wrote in 2006 that the deal “has been criticized by lawmakers of both parties as a prime example of wasted spending in Hurricane Katrina-related contracts.” Read the rest at Mother Jones. Original link –  How Top GOP Donors Got Jeb Bush to Facilitate a Hurricane Katrina Cruise-Ship Boondoggle ; ; ;

Excerpt from: 

How Top GOP Donors Got Jeb Bush to Facilitate a Hurricane Katrina Cruise-Ship Boondoggle

Posted in eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Top GOP Donors Got Jeb Bush to Facilitate a Hurricane Katrina Cruise-Ship Boondoggle

No One Is Ready for the Next Katrina

by Myrna Posted on August 27, 2015

Climate change is making catastrophic floods more likely, and US politicians are doing little to prepare. NOAA/Wikimedia Commons After the storm, after the flooding, after the investigations, the US came to realize that what happened to New Orleans on August 29, 2005 was not a natural disaster. The levee system built by the US Army Corps of Engineers had structural flaws, and those flaws were awaiting the right circumstances. In that way, what happened was all but inevitable. And just as the storm is not to blame, New Orleans is not unique in its vulnerability. The city endured a lot of tsk-tsking in the aftermath of Katrina, as if the storm was the climax to a parable about poor urban planning. Sure, the city sits below sea level, at the end of hurricane alley, and relies heavily on an elaborate (and delicate) system of infrastructure. But where the city’s geography is unique, its vulnerability is anything but. Just about every coastal city, state, or region is sitting on a similar confluence of catastrophic conditions. The seas are rising, a storm is coming, and critical infrastructure is dangerously exposed. The basic math of carbon dioxide is pretty simple: Generally, as CO2 levels rise, the air will warm. Warmer air melts glaciers, which drip into the sea—even as the water itself warms, too. Both cause the oceans to rise. Even if the entire planet stopped emitting carbon dioxide, Earth would continue to suffer the effects of past emissions. “We’ve got at least 30 years of inertia in terms of sea level rise,” says Trevor Houser, a Rhodium Group economist who studies climate risk. And even if the sea weren’t rising, the rate of urban growth will more than double the area of urban land at high flood risk, according to a study Global Environmental Change published earlier this year. But the sea is rising, at about .13 of an inch per year, for the past 20 years. (It was rising before then, too, but at about half the rate for the preceding 80 years.) Another recent study calculated that the world should expect about 4 feet of sea level rise for every degree Fahrenheit the global average temperature rises. This puts nearly every coastal city, in every coastal state, in danger of floods. Climate Central has an extensive project looking at sea level risk, if you’re curious about your city’s risk. Read the rest at Wired. Read article here –  No One Is Ready for the Next Katrina ; ; ;

Link – 

No One Is Ready for the Next Katrina

Posted in eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on No One Is Ready for the Next Katrina

Will New Orleans Survive the Next Katrina?

by Myrna Posted on August 26, 2015

Take a bird’s-eye tour of the $50 billion battle to save Louisiana. I’m driving down a dirt road in the vast tangle of coastal bayous that stretch south of New Orleans, so that Reggie Dupre can show me his pride and joy. “This is the little silver lining on the very dark cloud that was over Louisiana,” he says. In front of us, construction crews are shaping mounds of rock and dirt into a mile-long, 12-foot levy. On one side is a canal, crammed with boat traffic for the offshore oil drilling industry. On the other side is Terrabonne Parish, a rural community of commercial shrimp fishermen and oil roughnecks who rely on these waterways the same way a city kid like me relies on the subway. The levy dead-ends into a shiny new $25 million floodgate, the last line of defense against storm surges that accompany the hurricanes that frequently slam this coastline. Dupre is the director of the Terrabonne Levy and Conservation District, a county agency tasked with keeping the homes here above water. A decade ago—when Hurricane Katrina forced 1.5 million evacuations, killed nearly 2,000 people, and caused $100 billion in damage—Dupre was the parish’s representative in the Louisiana legislature in Baton Rouge. After the storm, he became a key architect of the state’s overhauled flood-control agenda, pushing through legislation to create a new state agency to manage coastal issues and working to steer tax revenue from oil drilling into coastal protection projects. Now he’s back home, overseeing projects like the one in front of us. Since Katrina, his office has built 35 miles of new levees. But the levees are just a small piece of the unprecedented transformation taking place along Louisiana’s coast. Dupre is also an evangelist for a new, broader ethos that has washed over the whole state since Katrina. Experts here agree that levees and floodwalls like this are only effective if they’re buttressed by natural barriers further out in the delta: The barrier islands and marshlands that are rapidly disappearing thanks to erosion, land subsidence, and sea level rise. Because of those forces—driven in part by a century-old practice of sealing the Mississippi River in its course and thereby starving the adjacent wetlands of nutrients and fresh water—Louisiana loses coastal land area equal to the size of a football field every hour. Before the storm, hurricane protection and coastal restoration were treated as separate, or ever competing, interests. Now, they’re one and the same. “Without Katrina, this wouldn’t be happening,” Dupre says. “We’ve gone from being the laughingstock to the model for the rest of the country.” In 2012, officials in the state’s new Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority—Dupre’s brainchild—released their most recent 50-year, $50 billion “master plan,” a sweeping document that encompasses everything from wetland restoration to elevating at-risk houses. Already, according to CPRA chair Chip Kline, the state has reconstructed 45 miles of barrier islands and restored nearly 30,000 acres of wetlands. These natural barriers slow storm surge before it reaches the levees, the first in what are known here as “multiple lines of defense.” There are also 250 miles of new levees, a two-mile storm surge barrier wall, the world’s largest pumping station (it can drain an Olympic-sized swimming pool in less than five seconds), and a host of other projects designed to control floods and stymie land loss. Kline says he’s confident that New Orleans is now safe from at least a 100-year flood (that is, a flood so severe that it has only has a 1-in-100 chance of occurring in any given year). Katrina was a 150-year flood in New Orleans. But given the realities of climate change, most experts think the city won’t be truly secure until it reaches the 500-year level. President Barack Obama agrees: Earlier this year he signed an executive order stipulating that any flood protection measures supported by federal money must meet a 500-year standard. Louisianans like Kline and Dupre contend that that standard is unreasonable and could hamper vital projects that are too expensive for the state to roll out on its own. Either way, the Louisiana coast is now a massive laboratory for the kinds of measures that coastal cities like New York and Miami will need to survive climate change. For Dupre, the stakes are clear: “If I’m not successful, my whole culture disappears.” There’s no better way to see the coast’s plight, and the scramble to save it, than from a bird’s-eye view. So Climate Desk hopped aboard a pontoon plane for an exclusive flyover. Check out the video above. More:   Will New Orleans Survive the Next Katrina? ; ; ;

See the original article here:  

Will New Orleans Survive the Next Katrina?

Posted in alo, eco-friendly, FF, For Dummies, G & F, GE, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Will New Orleans Survive the Next Katrina?