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Southern California’s Reservoirs Are Fuller Than You Think
On a recent trip to Wyoming, I was talking to one of the locals about the drought back home in Southern California. She had heard that it was so bad that people were going to communal showers to bathe....
View ArticleCould L.A. Become a River City?
Could Los Angeles become a river city?All the progress in revitalizing the Los Angeles River has presented the city with a special opportunity: to develop the communities along the river, as it makes...
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Can a Public University Fix a City’s Achilles Heel?
Can a university really help make its home city 100 percent independent on water and energy?In Los Angeles, we’re going to find out. UCLA, where I’ve spent almost 50 years on the faculty of the...
View ArticleL.A. Is Drowning in Its Own Water Pretensions
This time, “Chinatown” is fooling itself. Los Angeles has a long history of water deceptions, a point made famously by Roman Polanski’s 1974 neo-noir film. But the massive self-sabotage of the city’s...
View ArticleThe Ancient Maya Cosmology of Conservation
In the middle of the jungle in central Belize excavating an ancient Maya water temple, I’m at the edge of a sacred pool, praying to Chahk, the Maya rain god, for it not to rain. At least not until my...
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How Crop Circles Saved the Great Plains
If you live in the Great Plains, sooner or later you’ll get a question about those “crop circles” that can be observed from airplane windows during flights over the region. The answer is contained in...
View ArticleFrom Bakersfield, You Can See Forever
From the tunnel view of Yosemite Valley to just about any glimpse of the Golden Gate, California is famous for its extraordinary vistas. But if you’re looking for the state’s most thought-provoking...
View ArticleCalifornians Need a New Political Party That Can Keep Us Afloat
I got one of those calls again—they come every six months or so—from a Silicon Valley hotshot who wants to use his brain and his wealth to fix what ails California. This investor asked the same...
View ArticleThe Next Great California Water War Is Starting Underground, in the Mojave...
Can California regions regulate groundwater without destroying their businesses and communities? That’s the question being posed as regions and localities implement the Sustainable Groundwater...
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A California Painter Laments the Drying Landscape
As an outdoor landscape and seascape painter, I’m used to seeing places change over the years. I painted a stately cottonwood tree on an Owens Valley country lane in the fall of 2010, its golden crown...
View ArticleWhen the Colorado River Runs Dry
Even as she was going blind, my mom, ever the poet, delighted in sitting out among the palms and birds, and enjoying and visualizing the scene, as I irrigated my date gardens in the Coachella Valley of...
View ArticleWhat Can We Learn From the Failings of William Mulholland?
For much of my life I have been in conversation with a man who died 86 years ago. He was born in Dublin in 1855 and grew up poor, with a face bruised by the fists of his father. He ran away from home...
View ArticleYou Really Should Be Having a Glacier-Induced Meltdown
We’ve all heard the tragic stories of glaciers in peril: pieces of ice, the size of continents, breaking off of Antarctica or melting away in the Arctic Ocean near the North Pole, leaving polar bears...
View ArticleRiver Blues
Penelope Dullaghan is an artist and illustrator based in Indianapolis. She works in children’s publishing, editorial, and advertising. In her work she employs a range of mediums, including printmaking,...
View ArticleThe Colorado? Call It the California River
Why do we still call it the Colorado? Sure, the river begins in the Colorado Rockies. But in law and practice, the waterway making headlines is clearly the California River. And the first provision of...
View ArticleIs Puerto Rico a Global Model for Disaster Recovery?
When Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico on September 18, 2022, the U.S. colony had still not fully recovered from Hurricanes Irma and Maria, in 2017. Collapsed bridges had not been rebuilt, houses still...
View ArticleCould Cannabis Help the American West Solve Its Thorniest Environmental Issues?
The study of cannabis is a personal one for me. Outdoor cannabis production in the rural Western U.S. has its roots in back-to-the-land movements of the 1960s. That’s when counterculture groups began...
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A Water Rights Storm Is Brewing in the Foothills Above Glendale
[trinity_audio “male”]The Verdugo Wash is a small flood control channel that takes rainwater from the foothills above Glendale to the L.A. River, and 30 miles out to the Pacific Ocean.When you visit...
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