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The Los Angeles Board of Public Works has announced sustainable new rules for residential parkways. LA Times Greenspace reports that Los Angeles-area homeowners will now be allowed to plant drought-tolerant, turf substitute ground-cover plants in residential parkways without a permit. Previously, homeowners were only allowed to plant street trees and grass without a permit. Residential parkways......read more
In no place have the cataclysmic environmental effects of climate change been felt more strongly than southeastern Australia. There, a prolonged, 12-year drought has wrought havoc on local ecosystems and caused catastrophic damage to agriculture, which suffered record losses and sent rural communities into a tailspin. Enter Australian inventor Edward Linnacre, a Swinburne University......read more
It's tempting to attribute much of the recent dischord in North Africa and the Middle East to politics. And in the most direct sense, it's true. In Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and now Syria, the people have risen up against brutal and corrupt regimes. But dig a little deeper, and you find that the unrest is more broadly driven by drought and food shortages -- themselves linked to environmental shifts......read more
Here is the trailer for Last Call at the Oasis, the highly anticipated new documentary from Academy Award-winning director Jessica Yu. Inspired by Alex Prud'homme's book The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the 21st Century, the film is a thorough examination ofthe global water crisis, with a focus on industrial and agricultural pollution in America and the drying of the Southwest. Last......read more
In the arid American West, green grass lawns are as "natural" a part of the ecosystem as polar bears. Now California's drought is making well-watered lawns even less sensibles. Many homeowners are either replacing water-intensive grass with more suitable landscaping, or simply letting lawns turn brown. From The New York Times: With rainfall at below-normal levels for several years, and......read more
Felicity Barringer for The New York Times: FRESNO, Calif. — The small prefab office of Arthur & Orum, a well-drilling outfit hidden in the almond trees and grapevines south of Fresno, has become a magnet for scores of California farmers in desperate need of water to sustain their crops. Looking at binders of dozens of orders for yet-to-be-drilled wells, Steve Arthur, a manager, said,......read more
FOR California, there hasn’t ever been a summer quite like the summer of 2015. The state and its 39 million residents are about to enter the fifth year of a drought. It has been the driest four-year period in California history — and the hottest, too. Yet by almost every measure except precipitation, California is doing fine. Not just fine: California is doing fabulously. In 2014,......read more
By Erin Blakemore for Smithsonian Rainless skies. Dwindling water supplies. Dried-out plants. Droughts and water shortages threaten economies, food supplies and even lives. And with droughts unprecendented in the last 1,200 years underway and likely more to come, scientists have long been pushing to help farmers by making their crops more drought tolerant. In a new study,......read more
The humble cactus! Wellspring of tequila, source of nopales tacos, and … our ticket out of fuel and food insecurity? The secret sauce of these succulents is a nifty photosynthesis process unique to species like agave, prickly pear cacti, pineapple, and vanilla orchids, known as crassulacean acid metabolism, or CAM. Plants that rely on CAM require less water to survive......read more
California has imposed statewide water-use regulations for the first time as its three-year drought worsens. Yesterday, state regulators approved stringent new measures limiting outdoor water, which include $500 fines for using an outdoor hose without a shut-off nozzle. Meanwhile, hopes that the drought would break by autumn have been tempered. The National Weather Service’s Climate......read more
