“In one of our conversations yesterday, we were talking about adaptive management and how everyone seems to be using the term differently, and the most cynical interpretation of a lot of the use of ‘adaptive management’ is promising to fix it later.” — Dr. Jay Lund, Delta Independent Science Board “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with bullshit.” — W. C. Fields Articles An Implementing Agreement at last Lost in translation A Water Bond soup with too many cooks Hits, runs, and an error Ask for a dome No barriers after all (updated correction 6/6/14) Every great campaign has an art movement An Implementing Agreement at last We finally have a draft Implementing Agreement (IA) released [...]

“Everybody in Vanity Fair must have remarked how well those live who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt; how they deny themselves nothing . . . .” — William Makepeace Thackeray Calling the water shots Behind the scenes planning by the water contractors who want the twin tunnels is bearing fruit with the formation of two new Offices in the Department of Water Resources (DWR). One of them, a new Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) Office in the Executive Division of DWR, will be responsible for that third of the plan that is actually supposed to help the ecosystem – Conservation Measures 2-22. It will be headed initially by Chief Deputy Director Laura King Moon, known to us for her [...]

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence. – Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species Articles Hunger and thirst Speaking of BDCP …. 2014 State of Our Rivers Symposium Hunger and thirst By Jane Wagner-Tyack UOP economist Dr. Jeffrey Michael reports in an April 7 blog post that between 2007 and 2012, despite the drought in 2009, San Joaquin Valley agriculture made a clear shift toward permanent crops. Over that period, acreage of field crops (like cotton, hay, grain, and alfalfa) increased by 2 percent. Acreage of fruit and nut crops (like almonds, pistachios and grapes, crops that can’t be fallowed in a dry year) increased by 21 percent. Meanwhile, acreage of vegetable crops decreased [...]

“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.” – Czeslaw Milosz Articles [—ATOC—] [—TAG:h2—]Water pokerWithout at all minimizing the hardships that many Californians may experience if drought projections for 2014 are borne out, we want to note that as of December 18, 2013, Southern California’s Castaic Lake reservoir is at 88% of capacity, and Southern California’s Pyramid Lake reservoir is at 97% of capacity.Central Valley reservoirs, by contrast – those serving California’s agricultural heartland – are alarmingly low. Most of these reservoirs lie behind dams built on rivers that used to sustain a complex natural environment, rivers on which fish have relied from time immemorial. And aquifers, the [...]