LA Housing Plan ignores Water

I picked up a bit of information at Aquafornia today. The City of Los Angeles, following nearly a century of swallowing Mulhollands' Water now feels so comfortable in it's position that it can produce a Draft Housing Element for the General Plan that totally ignores the reality of water and the effect that a changing climate will have on it's supply. I'll quote the entire segment from today.

Los Angeles’ draft Housing Element ignores water issues, says the Westchester Parents blog: As water supplies are being sharply cut back and restrictions are being imposed on residents, the 225 page draft barely devotes a single page to the water supply system for housing. It begins by stating unconvincingly that the “water supply for new projects is generally adequate.” The entire section of the draft devoted to Los Angeles’s water supply is just four paragraphs and two bullet-points long while elsewhere, the document devotes a dozen pages to other forms of non-potable water such as grey water, storm water and waste water. The plan doesn’t safeguard the supply for current residents, says the blogger. Click here for more from the Westchester Parents blog.

Los Angeles Greens have shown more leadership and direction on Water issues than any other locals in the GPCA. They have officially endorsed the Sustainability Principles of the California Water Impact Network. I hope that they can organize some official push back on the LA Planning process so that the availability and distribution of water is more than an assumption, it is something that is calculated, planned for and that the distribution is both environmentally and socially just, considerations that have long been sacrificed on the altar of growth.

Nor any drop to drink

I am encouraged by the fact that the LA Greens have formally endorsed the Sustainability Principles that were put together by the California Water Impact Network. Maybe it is my own biases, but I take this as a sign that some parts of the Green Party are returning to the ecological base from which we started.

It is time that this refocusing has happened, not because it is just a pendulum swing from one focus to another, but because there is so little time to deal with it. I am no alarmist telling everyone to go watch Water World. It was not that good of a movie. But maybe it is time for some alarmist rhetoric concerning water.

There is always danger in being an alarmist. It is one quick way to lose credibility with the bad future just does not happen. Many of us lived through the controversies surrounding Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb. It did not happen as he predicted and now every alarmist position has the obvious problem of living down that history.

Still, the concerns with water are real and the alarmist views may be optimistic. We think of water and the delta as a California problem that we have to solve here. It is not. It is a global problem, as well documented in an Associated Press article by Brian Skoloff today.

An epic drought in Georgia threatens the water supply for millions. Florida doesn't have nearly enough water for its expected population boom. The Great Lakes are shrinking. Upstate New York's reservoirs have dropped to record lows. And in the West, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is melting faster each year.

Across America, the picture is critically clear — the nation's freshwater supplies can no longer quench its thirst.

The government projects that at least 36 states will face water shortages within five years because of a combination of rising temperatures, drought, population growth, urban sprawl, waste and excess.

There is no way that we can even begin to consider what to do about water unless we also consider the impact of a warming climate. The Natural Resources Defense Council has put together a survey of the Current Science on Global Warming and Western Water. The facts are pretty clear. Only those who would make a partisan issue of this predicament are going to deny what is happening. You only have to look at the web site of the Republican Caucus of the California Assembly. Assembly Republican Leader, Mike Villines, does not put a single environmental issue on his list of things to do. His only position on the water issue is to build more dams, a useless waste of money if they do not take a warming planet under consideration, yet he is willing to hold the rest of us hostage to a flawed plan.

I would hope that Greens all over this state take a look at the Sustainability Principles that I linked above. I would like to see every County Council endorse them. The connections between water, land use, wild fires and global warming define the situation that demand Green solutions. We need to find the ways to make them a reality.

LA Water News - Green speaks at Green Party

The Los Angeles Greens were privileged to host Dorothy Green, founder of Heal The Bay, at their monthly meeting last Wednesday, October 17. Ms. Green provided us with an eloquent overview of California's complicated, sordid history with water. From the dikes in the San Joaquin river delta near Sacramento to the vast aqueducts that diverted water hundreds of miles away to the L.A. basin, Ms. Green painted a portrait of water managed with mostly greed and short-term benefits in mind.

The results have often been devastating. The San Joaquin River used to host a sizable salmon run, but that run has been severely depleted, due in part to how the water was mismanaged. Agribusiness uses the biggest single percentage of our fresh water, and its four main crops -- cotton, alfalfa, rice, and irrigated pasture -- are not efficient, with either our water or our money, as they require subsidies to make them competitive in the global marketplace.

Ms. Green also observed that the storm drainage system in Los Angeles may be an engineering marvel, but it ends up taking away rainwater that would otherwise filter through the soil and into the ground water table. This runs counter to natural processes that could provide us with more clean drinking water.

Ms. Green treated us to a lengthy question and answer session, wherein she explained, among other things, the connection between energy use and water use; the sad state of the Salton Sea, the worst water accident in California; the myth of bottled water being healthier than tap water (it's often the same thing!); and how you can get involved in water management by running for posts in water management districts.

The L.A. Greens gained a lot of insight from Ms. Green, not least of which was learning that the term "blackwater" is not only the name of a mercenary-for-hire company, but also another word for water contaminated with sewage. Kind of explains a lot.

Derek Iversen

I am very grateful to Derek for this report. I added many links to further educate those who want to learn more. If you don't ready any other, read the opinion piece from the Atlanta Journal Constitution linked from "short-term benefits" above. It may be from Georgia, but it does mention the delta.

Rain

Well, we finally had some in Northern / Central California. However, that is not the reason I bring it up. The current water wars are keeping Sacramento all astir, if not all of the media.

Blogger Wu Ming has posted an intriguing essay on rain and water at the progressive blog Calitics.

I am not an idealist here; we cannot go back to the status quo ante, not with everything that has been built, not with all the people who now depend upon that infrastructure's maintenance. But we can at least admit that our insecurity with regard to the weather - putting aside for a moment the even greater threat of human-created climate change and its consequences for our civilization and ecosystem - is in large part a dilemma of our own making. We froze the landscape, we diverted the rivers, we remade the very lay of the land in service of the settling of California; and yet imperfectly, as the erratic swing of flood and drought reminds us, humbles us, from time to time.

Go read the whole thing, it is a short time well spent. In fact, Stockton Record Columnist Mike Fitzgerald called it "Amazing: a fresh take on the water crisis".

LA City Greens have Dorothy Green of California Water Impact Network (Cal-WIN) as the speaker at their next meeting (10/17). Even if you are not from LA, if you are in the area, go.