“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” – Milan Kundera Taking advantage of a crisis Most people except some overwrought San Joaquin Valley congressmen and the Speaker of the US House of Representatives realize by now that there’s no water for farming right now because THERE’S NO WATER. Even if we had twin tunnels today, there would be no water to put in them. Reservoirs serving agricultural users were in good shape earlier this year (and those serving Southern California urban users still are). But the Department of Water Resources and the Bureau of Reclamation pumped a lot of water out of reservoirs north of the Tehachapis this past summer, gambling that we would [...]

“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 [...]