Water Falls

July 25, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

This satellite image shows Colorado River-fed Lake Powell, the second-largest man-made reservoir (1963) in the United States, in 1999. Lake Powell Source: NASA/Earth Observatory

This 1999 satellite image shows Colorado River-fed Lake Powell, the second-largest man-made reservoir (1963) in the United States.
Source: NASA/Earth Observatory

A crucible for past, present and future examples of extreme climate developments, the western part of the United States – and California in particular – continues to suffer under extreme drought conditions.

Drought is nothing new in California. What’s new (or rather, not very old in geological terms) is a culture and economy built on water profligacy and the presence of 40 million people in California alone. Add in a couple more tens of millions from other western states that all rely on the shared Colorado River watershed, and a drought today looks very different than it did a century ago.

Lake Powell in 2014, showing a water loss that is both dramatic and unexpected.
Source: NASA/Earth Observatory

Many of the water rights in California were, however, assigned over a century ago and they are still in force today. Half of all waterway claims in California are in the hands of just 4,000 owners, and more importantly, the water use by these owners is completely unmonitored.

So, while the recently announced California water rationing and fines for overwatering are important steps in gaining some control over water waste, they will not affect some of the largest users in the state (and region).

They won’t have much real impact on those who can afford the fines or whose usage isn’t monitored in the first place.

More importantly, they don’t get to the heart of the matter, the fundamental flaw in how we use water.

Black plastic water drainage pipes line the cliffs of Malibu Beach, running from the gardens and topsoil of the properties above.
Photo: PK Read

Amid the talk of eight-minute lawn watering every other day, 500-dollar-fines for water waste and the dry, dry expanses of the famous California hills that should be golden at this time of year but are instead a dusty grey, we were surprised to see these water overflow pipes along the beach. Some were overflowing with what I can only assume was unrecovered excess garden irrigation water.

What a strange sight, the gardens following the erosion of cliffs and the ongoing supply of fresh water all the way down to the beach.

What a strange and outdated concept, this blithe assumption that water should be unlike any other key resource upon which we rely and in which we trade – arable land, forest, gold – and that it will never run out.

That we can just spill it as we please, never mind the consequences.

A cliff-top garden migrates down a cliff to the beach below, following the line of water. Unseen here is the large drainage pipe that was free-flowing water on a blistering day. Photo: PK Read

A cliff-top garden migrates down an otherwise rocky cliff to the beach below, following the line of water. Unseen here is the large drainage pipe that was free-flowing water on a blistering day.
Photo: PK Read

Beach Sandskrit

July 12, 2014July 12, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

We were walking on Malibu beach yesterday as the tide was going out.

It left behind a long tale of the previous few hours, written in seaweed and flotsam.

I didn’t count how many different types of seaweed left their notes on the sand, but from the number of red lobster shells in the receding water line, I’d say local birds, seals and otters have been feasting. And if there were no lobster claws to be seen, that’s because the California spiny lobster (Panulirus interruptus) doesn’t have any in the first place.

The high tide of our own past few hours was marked by an evening spent on a warm terrace with a good friend, and the Auchentoshan Triple Wood he pulled out to share with us.

As the name says, this Lowland whisky is matured in three different kinds of wood: Pedro Ximenez Sherry casks, bourbon casks and Oloroso sherry.

It has a combustibly sweet aroma, with a taste that echoes dark chocolate, applesauce, toffee and rum.

It was a delight, as was the day and the company.

One who knows how to read what's skirt in the seaweed.

One who knows how to read what’s skrit in the seaweed.

Floor of Sand, Roof of Water

July 9, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

From the new book Shorebreak.
Photo: Clark Little

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time (every possible minute) on the beaches of California. And one of my favorite activities was to run after the receding waves as far as I dared,, right up to where they were beginning another forward surge, and then turn and sprint back to safety. Or not, sometimes.

Getting away with nothing more than wet ankles counted as winning. Getting drenched or knocked over didn’t. Sure, it was a dangerous game. That’s what made it exciting.

One view I always wanted to see but never did (because I never dared or lost badly enough) was the dry sand beneath the roof of an oncoming wave. And here it is, courtesy of photographer Clark Little in his new book of waves, Shorebreak. Someone who dared to wait for the roof of water, and took a picture for the rest of us.

I worked as a translator on a film a few years ago that looked at the dry land beneath the waves, but in that case, the waves were frozen in icy forms. The film, Unter Dem Eis (Under the Ice) was a German-made documentary about the Inuit of the Canadian eastern seaboard and their tradition of gathering a bounty of winter mussels from beneath the frozen sea.

Gathering mussels Under The Ice, hastening before the sea returns.
Source: Context Film

The harvest was only possible for a few hours a year, on days of extremely low tide when the sea beneath the ice retreated enough to allow for a quick expedition.

It looks like walking under water, and in a way, it is. Or was. As the Atlantic Ocean warms and there are fewer days when mussels can be gathered without the ice roof collapsing, the tradition is fading.

Still, it’s a vision out of a dream, walking, or sprinting, on the floor of the ocean, however briefly.

Rethinking Country Mouse, City Mouse

April 21, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Excerpt from Long Scroll, pencil and ink on paper
Artist: Bruce Pollack

There was a period of my youth when my family lived ‘off-grid’ for the most part, in wood cabins on the forested coast of northern California. There were parts of that experience I didn’t like – hauling water by hand was certainly low on my list of preferences – but one aspect I liked very much was the lack of pressure to wear shoes.

I went barefoot as much as possible. Shoes were for the City. And the City, for me, was defined by any place that required shoes. It was an easy equation, with my own personal metrics.

There has always been a division between the City and the Country, but the two were once much closer. But as the world has moved to cities and food production has become globalised, it’s easy enough to live a life in a city these days without ever seeing a place that creates the food in the store.

A recent paper, City Regions as Landscapes for People, Food and Nature, is part of an ongoing discussion about how to reintegrate the City with the Country.

“There is a need to deepen our understanding of particular challenges to bringing rural and urban together in order to develop more resilient city region food systems across the urban rural continuum. The urban planner and policymaker need to think outside the urban box and think about their rural colleagues in terms other than just as a supply of goods and services including labor for urban markets. The rural planner may or may not be aware that their communities’ welfare is going to be increasingly interrelated to urbanization and the rural world has much more to gain and more to offer than merely the flows of people, goods and services.”

Urban agriculture is part of this thinking, but the picture is larger than that. At some point, maybe the thought transition between urban and rural can again be as natural as slipping a pair of shoes on and off.

Green Square, oil on linen
Image: Bruce Pollack

Branched Embrace

March 21, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

I spent a large part of my youth living deep in a forest that was relatively untamed, a temperate rainforest of bay laurel and Coastal live oak on the Inverness Ridge in California, part of the Point Reyes Peninsula north of San Francisco.

Dusk falls on Inverness Ridge

There are large stands of Bishop pine and Douglas fir on the same peninsula, much of which is a national park. I was spoilt for trees.

On the Point Reyes Peninsula

I’m not ashamed to admit that I like some forests better than others, but in the end, any forest is a place of life.

Today is the International Day of Forests. Still under siege, still under threat of deforestation, still the single largest refuge for biodiversity on land.

Bear Valley Park, Pt. Reyes Peninsula

Forests feel like home to those who grew up in them.

We are fortunate to live just a short walk from a forest of pine, oak and walnut trees here in France. There’s nothing quite like the sound of trees being amongst themselves, the creaks of branch against branch, the rustle of wind in the leaves. Between the forest and the sea, these sounds are home for me. They have embraced me for much of my life, a backdrop against which days are lived.

All photos P.K. Read

Almond Dilemma

March 7, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Almond plant.
Source: Franz Eugen Köhler / Wikipedia

I was in our local French supermarket the other day when I spied some packages of California almonds. Now, the usual almonds we get around here are from Turkey or Israel, and they taste just fine, but I grew up around California almonds in California, so in a moment of expat nostalgia, I bought a package of almonds from the other side of the world.

Of course I know California is the throes of its worst drought in 500 years. Of course I think about the sustainability footprint of sending snack foods aroundthe planet on planes. But our supermarket’s buyer has notoriously fickle tastes – this is the first time I’ve seen California almonds there, it may be the last.

Photo: Western Farm Press

California supplies 80% of the world’s almonds. exporting 70% of its crop to 90 countries (according to the Almond Board of California). Almonds are the state’s top crop export, with the trend increasing due to growing demand in India and China. Just last year, one year into the historical drought, articles were touting the almond boom, with vineyards being sold and ripped out to plant more almond trees. The revenue from almonds in 2012 reached $5 billion.

Meanwhile, almonds are relatively thirsty trees. In the 1960s, I remember driving by almond orchards that used flood irrigation, a profligate method that is exactly what it sounds like. According to almond growers, irrigation these days is more efficient and appropriate for what is essentially a very dry climate, even without the drought.

When I buy a bag of California almonds, or for that matter a pack of Peruvian asparagus, or Spanish strawberries, I’m not just buying the delicious and healthy crop that was produced elsewhere. I’m buying the water that was used to grow those products in very dry regions. Water that has, effectively, been packaged and shipped to me in the form of an almond or strawberry.

Pulling out almond trees, 2013. Tree crops, like almonds, are a long-term investment and must be watered every year, regardless of drought, to maintain the productivity of the tree – which can produce for up to 25 years.
Photo: AP/Scott Smith

Less than a year after the articles on the expansion of the almond industry, images of drought-impacted farmers ripping out their almond trees abound. Entire economies have been successfully built around these crops, and removing them would be devastating locally. Between the complexities of water politics, the weight of old water habits and the urgency for solutions brought on by the drought, the boom of California almonds may turn out to be short-lived.

Do I give up ever buying California almonds again, as I have with several other foods that I no longer buy due to their sustainability footprint? I find myself in a quandary precipitated by an impulse buy, and I’m not sure how to resolve it.

Almond blossom
Photo: Golona

Old Water Ways

February 19, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Satellite images of California.
Source: NOAA/Washington Post

These satellite images show winter snow levels in California in early 2013, when the state was already experiencing drought conditions, and in 2014, when the state is officially in the worst drought on record. Much of the annual fresh water in the state is the result of snow melt.

California is no stranger to the challenges of access to fresh water. The state was practically built on water conflict – too little in the south, enough in the north (or at least, until recently). Anyone who grew up there, as I did, knows about water scarcity – or at least they should, since it is one of California’s defining characteristics.

Now, with several counties and communities on the brink of running completely dry, drastic action is being called for. Desalination technology, an expensive proposition, is looking like the more affordable alternative to parched earth.

But none of this is new. People have known for decades which way the river flows. In the midst of this, there are California farmers using water imported from the Colorado River to grow hay for export to China, a place that has far outpaced its own water resources.

Based on data from the MODIS instrument aboard both the Terra and Aqua satellites, this map contrasts plant health from Jan. 17 to Feb. 1, 2014, against average conditions for the same period over the past decade.
Source: NASA Earth Observatory / Discover Magazine

Even with some of the most progressive environmental laws in the United States, water was always going to be the fly in the ointment for further expansion in the state. Climate change hasn’t helped matters.

Back in 1977, California went through a long drought, its worst before the current dry spell. I remember it well. The normally lush green hills of winter were the color of straw. By spring, the fire season had begun, months early. I used to drive by a local Marin County water resource, the Nicasio Reservoir. Usually it was full of glittering blue water, but by 1978 it was all cracked soil.

There was an old road that once ran through what is now the bottom of the reservoir. It was lost with the building in 1961 of the Seeger dam, a past path submerged beneath the sweet vision of plentiful water that dams and wet years always bring. The drought of 1977-79 – and the current drought – have exposed it again, a defunct road with neither a beginning nor an end.

Nicasio Reservoir, California. December 2013.
Photo: Alan Dep/Marin Independent Journal

Spherical Feast

November 12, 2013 / PK Read / Leave a comment

A giant ‘bait ball’ of anchovy, with two humpback whales approaching on the lower right.
Photo: Liz Vernand via GrindTV

Massive anchovy swarms off the coast of California have kept marine mammals and their observers busy for the past couple of months. It’s not so much that there are more anchovy than usual, it’s that there are more anchovy gathered in one place.

According to this article, anchovy movement can be due to a number of factors – plentiful plankton, mild temperatures – and this year, the anchovy stars aligned over Monterey Bay. Their presence, telegraphed far and wide via whale song, has set off a feeding frenzy of seals, whales, dolphins, and the press.

Northern anchovy
Photo: Monterey Bay Aquarium

Anchovies and other small fish are known as ‘bait fish’ or ‘forage fish’, and form a key element in the marine food chain for mammals and the larger fish that humans prefer to see on their dinner plates. Some have recommended that humans switch away from the larger fish, which are being hunted by vast fishing fleets, to these smaller forage fish for human consumption.

Currently, we fish bait fish for use as feed to the other animals we prefer to eat – pigs, chickens, salmon. The ratio of forage fish feed to salmon, however, is around 5:1. Not very efficient. But the smaller fish, which tend to be oily, just aren’t popular for human consumption.

Anyway, the whales do exactly what human fishermen when they come across a bounty like this – they keep fishing until they’re full, or the fish are gone.

Here’s a very cool short clip, created by Robert Hodgin for the Auckland Museum, of how a bait ball works (in this case, sardines).

Freshwater Wave

October 10, 2013 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Pacific Ocean
Photo: David Orias

Growing up in California, which has always been a place of regular droughts, one of the first things you learn is that water can be a precious commodity. One of the things you don’t always learn is how to use it wisely. There always seems to be either too much, too little, it’s just not in the right place at the right time, but ingrained habits of overuse are hard to put aside.

Water conflicts have been a part of life in California from the earliest days. The water from the northern lakes and reservoirs has been used to irrigate the agriculture industry, grow the cities and industry, provide power and drinking water. A state of over 30 million inhabitants, the 5th largest supplier of food in the world. Reclaimed water, i.e. treated wastewater, has already been in use for irrigation in some areas since the 1930s.

Source: California Sustainability Alliance

Over the past few decades, the water challenges have only increased as agricultural use pollutes groundwater, lakes run low, and the competition for the resource only becomes more fierce.

The state’s governor has just signed in a number of bills meant to address these problems, and has proposed consolidating all water issues under a single entity, a state Water Resources Board. One of the keys to ensuring long-term water access, according to Brown, will be the efficient and affordable recycling of wastewater into drinkable water.

Technically, of course, all freshwater on Earth is recycled water. The terms recycled and reclaimed water refer to wastewater that has been treated in a facility to meet a certain standard and directed towards specific uses rather than simply discharged into surface waters like rivers or oceans to let the hydrosphere take care of things.

Even though direct recycling of sewage into potable water without the intermediate step of depositing that water in a lake or reservoir is already being test-run elsewhere, I imagine it will require overcoming both technical and psychological hurdles in the United States.

At the same time, given the long history of water challenges in California and throughout North America, it’s a little surprising it’s taken so long to start having this discussion in earnest.

Torrey Pine

May 17, 2013May 17, 2013 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Trail through Torrey Pines forest
Photo: James Forte

I’m having one of those expat moments today, and find myself feeling a little homesick for my own native habitat of the California coast, so I thought I’d write about one of my favorite trees that grows only there. The rarest known wild pine tree in the North America is the Torrey Pine (Pinus torreyana), which grows exclusively on a small area of the coast north of San Diego, and in a small grove on one Santa Rosa Island, one of the Channel Islands.

The two existing habitats of the Torrey pine

Although it has been theorized that the tree’s range once extended up the coast as far north as Oregon, by the time the tree was described in 1858 by botanist John Torrey (for whom the tree is named), there were less than 300 individual trees found during the course of the Mexican-American Boundary Survey which had gathered the samples.

It’s a tree adapted to very harsh conditions in the wild. Slow-growing, it sends its tap roots exploring through the clefts and cracks of cliffs where there is very little dirt. A small seedling can have a 2-foot (60 cm) root, an adult tree of 60 feet (19 m) can have a tap root three or four times that length. The large pine cones take years to mature, and the tough pine nuts dropped on to the ground only gradually and over a period of years – these are too indestructible to be eaten by most birds, can be viable for up to ten years, and in an unprotected habitat, would best burst into germination only after being cracked by a fire. The tenacious adaptations of this tree to a dry, coastal environment are part of what make it so fragile in the wild.

The tree was named the Solitary Pine by early Spanish explorers, but during the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the pine rooted itself in local lore. Rather than being commercially and residentially developed as all of the neighboring lands were, this small coastal area found supporters who wanted to preserve the tree and its habitat. I have little doubt that without this intervention, the Torrey pine would be another extinct species we would read about but never see in the wild.

The Torrey pine is widely planted in southern California, but the ornamental and cultivated trees often look quite different from the preserved wild ones found in Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve. The cultivated trees are tall, straight and have rounded heads, while the wild trees are smaller, with the crooked, windswept forms that make them so memorable. At least, for me.

View from Torrey Pines reserve Photo: Norman Koren

View from Torrey Pines reserve. A great spot to observe marine wildlife – also along the migratory path of whales.
Photo: Norman Koren

Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve website

champagnewhisky

Never cry over spilt milk. It could've been champagne. Or whisky.

#california