Reservoirs

When thinking about where rain goes in a watershed, it helps to think of a watershed as a series of reservoirs. In my last blog post, I mentioned this concept--anywhere water fills up and spills can be considered a reservoir. A bucket in your backyard, a rain barrel, and a swale would be obvious ones. Less obvious would be the soil profile itself, and the surfaces of leaves on plants and trees--it takes a certain amount of rain to get these surfaces wet before they start dripping--over an entire watershed, that adds up to a lot of water. Especially a watershed with giant redwoods.

December 15th 2016 San Geronimo Creek Flood

12:30 pm 650 cfs

2:20 pm 1,250 cfs

4:23 pm: almost peak flow (the 3,000 cfs peak flow at the downstream gage was at 5pm)

Next day at 100 cfs: note high water marks on the fence

On December 15th, 2016, San Geronimo Creek flooded basements in San Geronimo and cars and houses in Forest Knolls. It was the largest flood since 2006.

Pushing the envelope

A primer for the incoming Trump Administration: How to extract the most natural resources possible, at a sustained yield, over the long term

Dear Mr. Trump,

You are into long term gains, right? Passing wealth onto your children? Leaving a legacy? Alright, let’s do this with America’s natural resources! Make America’s ecosystems and ecosystem-based economies great again!

Here’s how.

Don’t you hate stop-and-go traffic on the freeway? Don’t you wish it would be smoother, so it didn’t have to come to a complete stop?

Pushing the envelope to extract as many resources as possible as quickly as possible is like that. The closer to nature’s limits that you get is when you start building a bubble (that will burst at some point). If you speed up suddenly, you will have to slow down suddenly. Because nature is variable. But people want reliability. Businesses need predictability. So don’t tie your extractive economy to a variable indicator, or else you are going to have booms and busts.

How do you insulate extractive industries from natural variability? You back off. Don’t push the envelope. Set limits well below nature’s.

In Natural Resources Management 101 you learn that in order to maintain a sustained yield of natural resources, you only harvest the interest, and you leave the principal untouched. If you start tapping the principal, you start losing yield (and revenue). So don’t do that.

On private lands, this is called good stewardship. On public lands, or with public resources (like water and the oceans and the air) it requires laws and regulations (in addition to good stewardship and a conservation ethic). These laws and regulations are good for business because they bring stability and reliability and predictability. A free-for-all benefits no one.

Because so much of America’s economy is tourism, or nature-based (think hunting, fishing, birdwatching, river rafting, etc.), anything you leave on the table benefits the ecosystem and those industries. So by backing off and not pushing the envelope, you aren’t losing anything. And you are gaining reliability.

One example is in California’s Bay-Delta. Wet years leave more water on the table than we can extract, and as a result we now rely on those wet years to refresh the Bay-Delta and boost fish populations. If we were able to capture that water, as new dam proponents propose we do, we’d be killing off the only thing that is keeping our fisheries going. So we don’t want to build new dams—it isn’t good for the ecosystem or the economy (by the way, the dams are super expensive and usually funded with tax dollars, and managed by powerful bureaucracies that expand government forever—as a Republican you should be opposed to any new dams, which were a favorite socialist program of the New Deal). Unfortunately, bad hombres and nasty women keep proposing new dams, and suckering America’s politicians into buying them. These are huge liabilities. Huge.

The obvious question is: well, how do we know how far to back off? We can’t extract everything, and we can’t extract nothing. Where is the line we shouldn’t cross?

Well, luckily, there are many laws and regulations, based on scientific research, that give us a great starting point. Let’s use those whenever we can to maintain stability in our extractive economy. Unfortunately—especially in relation to private lands—often we don’t have strong laws to guide us. You mostly don’t need to worry about that at the federal level, unless you want to throw some incentives at scientific research, management experiments, and support state-level efforts to limit development. Because it is additional development that creates that bubble I was talking about.

The Great Recession was started by the housing bubble—inadequate regulations allowed investors to push the envelope too far. The collapse of the timber and fishing industries is no different.

People hovering around you like vultures will be telling you to remove as many restrictions on extractive industries as possible. These individuals trying to make a quick buck off of America are blind to long term gains. Don’t listen to them. Those establishment politicians got us into this mess, and now we have to make America great again. Let the professional land managers and scientists guide natural resources policy, and guide us to healthy ecosystems, a resilient economy, and prosperity. You’ve got professionals—use them! And trust them—especially when it comes to climate policy.

Don’t be afraid to buck the party line and think for yourself on this one.

Delta Smelt Comic

When you read sad, error-filled, misleading propaganda, sometimes all you can do is respond with humor:

Marin County: What it needs to do to recover Coho Salmon

When you have an ache, it doesn't stop you, but it affects your performance. When you have multiple aches, the impacts pile on and can be debilitating. Cumulative impacts on the  environment are like this--they add up until ecosystem processes stop functioning, or the cumulative noise and light pollution make you just want to move away. And California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) analyses have traditionally done a very poor job of analyzing and mitigating cumulative effects. If they had done a good job, our impacts on the environment would have been arrested at 1970 levels when CEQA was passed. Just imagine if we still had a 1970s level of development in California (ok, skip the beards and bell bottoms). In a state where so many impacts are already cumulatively significant, as a general rule, it just makes sense to mitigate any new impacts. It is the only responsible way to act. We typically don't do that, but in the case of Coho Salmon in San Geronimo Valley, the courts have ruled that we should. And Marin County is legally on the hook for doing it.

Somewhere West of Joshua Tree

There is a Vermillion Flycatcher in a parking lot
There is a boy on his bike at the beach looking up at the snowy mountains
There is an old man in a hospital wishing he could be hiking in the mountains
There is a woman giving food to a hungry and homeless man
There is a baby taking her first steps
There is a cat sleeping in a sunny window
There is a girl climbing up to her treehouse
There is a tearful couple saying goodbye at the airport
There is a dad stuck in traffic on his way home to his family
There is a mother and son who are reunited at the train station
There is an ocean breeze cooling a runner's hot back
There is the aroma of delicious food in a backyard
There is a family gathering around a table
There is a group of kids playing in a creek
There is a surfer catching her first wave
There is a boy exchanging a glance with a girl
There is a mother giving birth
A hopeful person is planting a tree
A caring person is picking up litter
A loving person is smiling to say hi

To Los Angeles in the 1840s

In my last update of my genealogy research from a little over a year ago, I had discovered several new exciting leads for who and where my great great grandparents were prior to appearing in the Los Angeles 1850 census. After examining the data again, and after discovering a new baptismal record in Mexico, I am now prepared to fully go with the hypothesis I raised a year ago.

I looked at this again because my sister wanted to join the Society of California Pioneers. The application required submission of a family tree, with the membership requirement that an ancestor have been in California prior to January 1, 1850. This requirement disqualified Henry Schwerin, because although some of his brothers arrived in 1849, he didn't arrive in San Francisco until January 1850. He missed the Society's deadline by a month. So that sends us back to our dad's side of the family, and the mystery of when my great great grandparents arrived in L.A.