Book Reflection-Dying of the Trees

Dying of the Trees by Charles E. Little

 The Take Home Message of Book was:

Trees dying at a rapid rate will only further the velocity at which more trees will die. And in fact something worse will happen where due to this effect trees may in fact end up becoming net producers of CO2 rather CO2 removers. Maintaining a decent oxygen rate in the atmosphere is important. It is currently at 21%. If it rose to 25% a lightening strike would like the earth ablaze. And if it decreased to 15% a fire could not even be lit.’

The more CO2 in the air- the more effects of climate change we see. One of the major examples of climate change from the book I saw out west was the destruction of pine trees by the burrowing pine beetle. Summers are now warmer and the beetles do not die off in the winter time. Now there are more beetles to eat the pine trees all year long. When we visited Rocky Mountain National Park and Yosemite National Park the mountains were covered in purple tree. At first you think it is beautiful the contrast of green and purple trees, but then you learn the purple trees are dead trees. After your eyes have been opened to the truth the mountains quickly lose their beauty.

Book Reflection- Water in California

Introduction to Water in California by David Carle

 This book is a very concise and easy beginner’s guide to water issues in California.

Insert annual map of rain fall in California.

Most growth in California takes place where there is little water. Massive projects have been put into place to get the water from the north, from the Sierra Nevada Mountains as well as the Colorado River to the arid central and south of the state.

There are 20,000 miles of rivers and streams in California from 60 major watersheds. Only one of the state’s major rivers systems, the Smith River on the North Coast, is completely free of dams. The book says that there are six major water delivery systems in California: four that I have talked about previously in the blog- The California State Water Project, Central Valley Project (federal), Colorado River delivery systems and the Tuolumne River/Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct. The other two are the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and Mokelumne Aqueduct to the East Bay. 

California State Water Projects pipelines and canals travel over 600 miles from north to south California. It is the largest state water project in the United States.

The Central Valley Project, which was sanctioned by Theodore Roosevelt and built by the Army Corp of Engineers during the Great Depression, is one of the largest water systems in the world. It stores over 17 million acre-feet of water or about 17% of states’ developed water which it delivers to 8 water districts.

The book mentions the infamous Colorado River Compact. The Imperial Irrigation district gets most of the allotment of water from the River in CA that includes the Coachella and All-American Canals. The book also mentions the Metropolitan Water District which provides 60 % of the water in this southern region of CA from Ventura to Mexico; the Colorado in the travels 242 miles  Colorado River Aqueduct to the MWD.

Remember the talk I mentioned in the blog about Harmonie Hawley and Water in the West while we visited the University of California. I talked about over-pumping of ground water in Orange County, CA.  Ground water is more evenly distributed in California than surface water. Ground water is a more local source of water- meaning less need for long-distance (very long) transport of water. There are 850 million acre feet of groundwater in CA, twenty times more than the surface water.  The Central Valley alone over-pumps 800,000 million acre feet of water a year. The entire state of California over-pumps 2.3 million acre feet of water per year.

Agriculture is another concern in California- the state produces about 55% of the entire countries produce. Nine million acre feet of farmland depend on irrigation from state and federal projects and each year about 15,000 acres of farmland is lost to urban sprawl. I got to see the vast amounts farmland in California as we visited the Dairy Farm in the Central Valley.

Honestly, it is impressive how much California has engineered their water. The report of snowfall in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains are of more concern than the local weather reports to Californians. Without massive water projects in CA only about 3 million people would live in southern California compared to the 18 million that live there today.

Book Reflection- Canaries of the Rim

Canaries on the Rim-living downwind in the west by Chip Ward

                This book is from the perspective of Mr. Ward and his personal battle with protecting the environment. He moves out west living in Utah and Nevada and while there is faced with many interesting environmental problems like a magnesium refinery with chlorine gas emissions through the roof, warhead missiles scattered among the desert,  and a former  nuclear test site just to name a few. He truly tried to act whenever he felt there was an environmental injustice forming commissions, signing petitions and doing his own scientific studies. It makes me feel that I too have the power to act when I feel the government or state or anyone isn’t treating the environment justly.

                The Cow got stuck in the Chimney:

                Cows poop in everyone’s drinking water and this is awful because cow poop has a protozoan, giardea, which causes dysentery. Cows are a “square peg in a desert’s round hole.” They “kick up dust, compact soils, breakdown surfaces that fix nitrogen into the soil, erode hill sides, and chew out stressed plants down to the nubs.” After gold rush, there was a cow rush out West. In 1863 there were 97,000 cows grazing parched Santa Barbara County in California.

In this chapter of Ward’s book he is obviously talking about the negative effects cows have had on the environment. While out west, we saw first a dairy farm and learned that cows eat about 100 pounds of food each day and drink up to 1-2 tubs of water per day; cows add a huge strain onto the environment. If we ate less meat, produced less cows, and used the farmland that would have fed a cow to feed people we could end hunger in the United States.

We out west also visited methane digester which is a type of energy system where you capture the methane released from cow poop and use the methane to generate electricity. If nothing else cows in Southern California can be looked at as an energy source.

Landing on the Rim of the Great Basin:

                The Great Basin is considered a “wasteland”- a redundant landscape of mostly dry desert and small mountain ranges-it was looked upon as an obstacle to westward expansion.

I can see why people say the Great Basin located in Nevada as a wasteland. It is a huge hot, dry piece of land. While in Las Vegas, I was on top of the Stratosphere looking over the city. You could see the lights of the city expand below you and then abruptly stop in the distance. Was there an ocean out there in the distance, why did the lights of the city just suddenly stop? Well, it is because Las Vegas is built in a desert, which is no ocean, its desert. Also when we were in Reno, Nevada I could not get over how windy it was. It is so windy because again a big city in a desert just in northern not southern Nevada. There are no obstacles to block the wind just open land so therefore Reno is very windy.

Cowboys in Gas Masks:

There are 1,140 of those are uranium mines in Utah according to the book. We were graced with visiting one uranium mine while we were outside Moab, Utah. The mine we visited thankfully was being cleaned up by the Department of Energy but it still was right on the edge of the Colorado River so who knows if any of the radioactive material touched the water supply.