Eclipse of the Millennium: Travelogue

Day 1: Monday, 6 am, Southern California

I left on my solo adventure from L.A., and it was raining on the 405 Freeway, hard at times. After crossing the border I took the toll road for $6 to Ensenada, where I got gas around 10 am. It was cloudy on the coast, but the desert between Santo Tomas and Colonet was hot. It was cloudy again in San Quintin, but inland again between El Rosario and Catavina was warm desert with lots of cacti. A couple of guys with a truck waved me down and said they were out of gas--they siphoned some gas from my tank, and they helped themselves to a bit more than I had wanted them to have. At 4pm for $4 I ate dinner at Santa Inez. I spoke to some people from San Diego who suggested spending the night at Guerro Negro.

At 6:30 pm near Rosarito there was a big accident blocking the road on a curve. It involved a jackknifed truck and four other vehicles, one on its side. No one was hurt. There was an old dirt road that cut across the curve, and I went with three other vehicles across the shortcut, with no one passing anyone else the rest of the way to Guerro Negro.

Dam building comic

The California Water Commission is about to give away billions of taxpayer dollars to dam builders. At least, that is what could happen if it doesn't prioritize more benign storage projects that most Californians voting yes on Proposition 1 envisioned, such as groundwater storage projects. California has millions of acre-feet of groundwater storage already available, and public funds could help build the groundwater recharge facilities we will need in the future once our dams are sedimented in and crumbling. Unfortunately, the dam-building lobby is well-connected and clever at public indoctrination, so things might not go well for the public interest. We may end up with more expensive, dangerous, and environmentally-destructive dams siphoning water from our precious rivers and estuaries and drowning our beautiful river canyons and grasslands.

So here is a comic strip I made to clarify the politics of the issue.

The slick Environmental Impact Reports about to land on the CWC's desk will be more marketing materials selling new dams, and less informative unbiased documents useful to the public and decisionmakers. I hope they see through the propaganda and keep in mind Aldo Leopold's words:

"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."