Time for some vote-inspired beaver writing. This one from our friends who never realize they’re writing about beavers.
How do we cope with demands for water as we enter an era of scarcity?
Urban water systems in California and elsewhere face a time of reckoning, warns Richard Luthy, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.
Groundwater aquifers are being depleted and rivers are drying up, even as demand for water keeps climbing. Yet cities can no longer meet society’s thirst by importing more water from far away. Luthy, however, is optimistic. As director of the National Science Foundation’s ReNUWIt effort—short for Re-Inventing the Nation’s Urban Water Infrastructure—he helps to develop alternative sources through wastewater recycling, stormwater capture and desalination.
“We will have to make big investments, just as we had to make big investments a century ago in dams and aqueducts,” he says. “But with good decisions, we should be in good shape.”
Wait, I know this one. Shhh don’t tell me the answer, I can guess.
California has a long-standing “Public Trust Doctrine,” which holds that we have to protect the “common heritage” of streams, lakes, rivers and marshlands. Following a 1983 case about how Los Angeles was diverting water from Mono Lake, the California Supreme Court ruled that “common heritage” meant protecting recreation, aesthetic values and the ecology. The decision meant people had to leave more water for ecosystems and for fish.
Put all this together, and it means that we need to set aside more groundwater for our aquifers and more surface water for our rivers, streams and lakes—even though the state’s population and economy are still growing. These aren’t just challenges for California. The same issues are arising in the Southwest, in Texas, in parts of Florida and in Atlanta. We are experiencing it first, but we’re hardly alone.
I’m thinking of this animal that stores water better than we do and does it in a way that benefits a whole lot of critters. Can you guess what I’m thinking?
Of course his recommendation has nothing to do with beaver. It involves reusing water and installing recycling plants to collect grey water. Never mind your endearing rodents that would raise the water table and keep valuable resources on the land. They don’t matter.
Which brings us to measure 3.
California Proposition 3, Water Infrastructure and Watershed Conservation Bond Initiative (2018)
If you’ve been paying attention you’d know that the Nature Conservancy supports this and the Sierra club opposes it. My friends on the waterboard and the urban streams support it and say its essential to the work to protect salmon, the SF Chronicle and East by Express says its a give away to agriculture interests who should invest money to solve their own water problem.
What’s a beaver supporting ecologist to do?
Feel free to write or post your thoughts and advice. I can’t imagine that any water measure that divides the conservationists into two camps can ever pass anyway, so it might be moot.
