My Backyard Looks Like Mt. Everest

I was skimming through a recent California Department of Water Resources publication when I came across a mislabeled photo of the Eastern Sierra. I pointed this out to a hydrogeographer colleague, and he immediately showed me two more water agency/organization examples of a geographically misplaced or mislabeled photo of the Eastern Sierra. If you want a dramatic mountain photo in California, you want a photo of the Eastern Sierra--but it may not always be the geographically appropriate match for your materials. It is kind of like putting a shot of Yosemite next to "I played in the playground down the street all day." Unless, of course, Yosemite is down the street. Below are the misplaced photos, as well as a Google Earth screenshot of where it actually is.

When Bad Roads are Good Roads

The first time I drove through Samuel P. Taylor State Park, it was a busy weekend about ten years ago.* The road was narrow and bumpy, and there were pedestrians and bicyclists and parked cars everywhere. It was vibrant. You could tell it was a place people wanted to be. It was also sketchy. I was driving a friend's old truck, and I had to be careful. I had to go slow.

Here is what it used to sound like to drive on, recorded last September. Click "play" to hear a sound that is gone forever--the sound of going to the beach, if you grew up in San Geronimo Valley.

California Utilities Still Freeloading on Independent Power Producers - Part III

What you've all been waiting for--part III of the ongoing saga. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I suggest reading Part I and Part II for background.

But if you want to skip the details, here is the quick summary:

Part I Recap
We operated a solar photovoltaic grid intertie with Net Energy Metering on our home from 2001-2011. The year we sold the house, 2011, we had a big surplus of generated electricity, since the house generated electricity all summer but no one was living there to use it. This electricity was worth $154.52. In December 2011, I was told we would only be paid only four cents per kWh for this valuable, renewable, distributed, peak-hours electricity, or a whopping $18.52. SCE (Southern California Edison) was 10 months behind in sending out letters, and when we got ours we should send it back saying how we wanted to be paid, and then in another 3 months we'd get our check.

Part II Recap
Two years later, in November 2013, we got the letter. After overcoming considerable confusion about what it was, and why it was being sent to us, and what we were supposed to do, I re-read part I (see link above), and then I filled out the form and sent it back.

Part III

Welcome to Part III! This may be the end...

In February, 2014, we got another envelope in the mail from SCE. I opened it. I laughed. What was inside? Nine double-sided pages of account statements. The first page said "Do not pay. Your account has a credit balance of $5.48.

Epic Water Conservation Tips for an Epic Drought

We need to step it up a little. If we are in the most severe drought on record, then we need some better tips than "turn off the water while you are brushing your teeth." Come on, everybody already started doing that during the 1976-77 drought! And "take shorter showers" is sooooo 80s! We all do that already too! Boring! Here are some alternative water conservation tips that you won't see in your water bill.

1. Drink more imported beer. That way you can be sure the water in the beer isn't from California. And whatever you do, don't eat almonds with your beer!
2. Don't eat your veggies. Agriculture consumes 80% of the water in California. In fact, if you stop eating and drinking altogether (except for imported beer), that would be best.
3. Don't reproduce. Even better, wait to have kids until the drought is over. Kids are messy and you need to use a lot of water to clean them up. They also like to play in the water.
4. Be obstructionist. Find the nearest new housing development or irrigated farm, and block its progress so that it isn't finished or irrigated until the drought is over. If you are rich, just buy it and bulldoze it and restore the natural habitat and put a conservation easement on it.
5. Stop doing the dishes. Just tell your husband/wife/parents/other that you are saving water. When you run out of clean dishes, use paper plates. Put the dirty dishes outside--they will get clean the next time it rains. You could even use them to be obstructionist (#4).
6. Stop mowing and watering your lawn. You had better things to do on Saturday anyway.
7. Buy a boat. Buy one for your neighbors too. But don't wash it. And only take it to reservoirs to recreate (every Saturday, instead of mowing your lawn). If we completely cover the surfaces of all our reservoirs with boats, we'll stop losing water to evaporation.
8. Stop driving. Fracking and oil refining use a lot of water. You bought a sailboat or a rowboat (#7) that you can just leave at the reservoir, right? And if you start riding your bike to work, make sure you don't start taking more showers. When people call you stinky, just call them a "water waster" back.
9. Stop buying technology. Silicon Valley was the fastest-growing area of the state last year. The 332,000 new residents added to California each year (see also #3) are using all the water you are saving (residents have to save 1% more water each year just to keep up). Even better, just move away--the rest of us would like a little more room.
10. Pass new laws. These, in particular. And add this one to the mix.

Disclaimer: Don't try these at home--they may have unwanted side-effects. But if any of them are compatible with your goals and lifestyle, then have at it! Even though these are tongue-in-cheek, many of them would actually save a lot more water than the tips most of us get in the mail from our water providers!

California Utilities Still Freeloading on Independent Power Producers - Part II

Two years ago, I wrote California Utilities Still Freeloading on Independent Power Producers, which you really should read because it is a riveting story about corporate greed. I left this opening for a sequel:

One small bright spot on the horizon: "If the CEC authorizes retroactive RPS certification of net surplus generators, the utilities may retroactively pay the renewable attribute adder to its eligible customers." Which means that I may get some additional compensation someday--maybe.

 That was two years ago. I had completely forgotten about being ripped off for $136 by Southern California Edison (SCE). The worst kind of pickpocket is one that is richer than you, and gets the government to hold you down while they do it.

The First Rain

The first rain of the season. The last day of summer. Tomorrow at 1:44 pm, the sun will be directly over the Earth's equator, marking the beginning of autumn, and the start of the cooler rainier season in California.

Yesterday there was some drizzle. But the rain didn't start until about 11 pm last night. About twelve hours later blue sky reappeared overhead in between the clouds, with Mount Barnabe reporting 0.7 inches and Woodacre reporting 1.3 inches. The clear plastic container in our yard, first used to dispense salsa, now normally used to collect raspberries and dig in the sand and pour water in the pool, collected close to two inches, but it has a convex bottom that is displacing water. When I turn it upside down (quicker than pouring it into another container, measuring both diameters, and adjusting the depth with a ratio), it is about 1.25 inches deep. That confirms my feeling that the Woodacre total looked more like what we got here, at the mouth of Larsen Creek.

The last time it rained--not counting foggy drippy days--was on June 25th, almost three months ago. A typical summer. About an inch of water fell from the sky that day. That was the first rain of the summer, and this day was the last. It has rained twice since the sun was at its furthest point north in its annual analemma.

The first rain of the rainy season is always magical, because something significant happens that hasn't happened for a quarter of a year. But today feels more special than usual. June was our wettest month since December (until now). Last fall was wet, but then it just stopped raining in January, depriving us of most of the rainy season's rain. This was the second of two relatively dry winters in a row.

So today's rain is a big deal. It isn't just the first rain to wet the dusty soil since June. It isn't just the first rain to wet the dry yellow grass on the hillsides. It isn't just the first rain to connect all the disconnected pools in San Geronimo Creek, where the fish and crayfish wait out the long, warm days of late summer. It is all these things, but it is more. It is the first September rain in a year where it is the most rain since December, following a dry year.

Last October's rain ended the 2012 dry season. That dry season also lasted since June, but was preceded by 15 inches that March (wet), 8 inches that January (almost average), and almost 3 inches in February (dry) and in April (wet).

If you look at the flow in San Geronimo Creek, which represents late-summer groundwater conditions, the flow this summer was only 1/2 to 3/4 what it was last summer. It has been dry.

And I am grateful for the rain.

Connectivity

Touch any water anywhere, and you are touching all the water on the planet. Aside from water locked in tanks and bottles and closed geologic formations, of course. But when I touch the water in the stream in my backyard, that water is touching every lake and river and ocean on the planet. Although they are all touching, the water bodies of the world are separated by chemistry (salinity, pH), temperature (ice), pressure (water vapor), and saturation of different media (our bodies, plants, soil, air). These barriers prevent aquatic organisms from swimming freely everywhere. For a microbe to swim from my finger, down my creek, through the ocean, up the Angara River, and into Lake Baikal, it would take a lot of time and success in surmounting a few of these barriers. But the same surface tension I can touch stretches all around the world to Lake Baikal and every other water body not separated by a physical barrier.

Air is another substance that is connected--again unless it is locked in tanks and bottles and impermeable areas. I'm breathing the same air as someone in Beijing--although luckily for me, the concentration of pollutants in the air varies spatially, and various processes remove pollutants from the air. But the substance is the same everywhere.

Life is also connected to all other life. The energy, nutrients, and water that pass through all life is shared and recycled over and over again, so that a molecule in one being eventually will travel through all other beings.

John Muir said it best:

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

Hike up a headwater stream that is dry, and think about the moist soil in the streambed that connects all the water molecules in it to all the ones that stretch all the way down to the ocean, and then up to all the other headwater streams in the world. They are all connected. Pick any two places on Earth, and there is a line of water molecules connecting them.