Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

The City of the Future: Can Los Angeles Reinvent Itself All Over Again?

June 18, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
downtown-la

This post originally appeared on OnEarth, a Pacific Standard partner site. In the summer of 1998, my wife and I left Brooklyn and gamely headed west to Los Angeles, as disaffected New Yorkers are wont to do, in search of the proverbial greener grass. We found it right away in front of the quintessentially L.A.–style rental house we had been dreaming of: a cozy 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival, complete with a yard and a bounteous garden. One day shortly after we moved in, I found myself standing in this garden with a flowing water hose in my hand. I happily made my way from the brilliant ... Read More

More like this: Politics
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Consider the Crawdad

September 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Procambarus clarkii

Recently dubbed the “ultimate survivor” by British biologists, the Louisiana red swamp crawdad and its globe-trotting adventures have made it the poster crustacean for pluck in the face of adversity. As legends go, the American export, a Gulf Coast native, first landed in Africa in the 1960s. Despite harsh conditions, food scarcity, and fierce predators, the swamp crawdad thrived—and today boasts progeny across the continent. In these challenging social and economic times, the crawdad’s superior coping skills have caught the attention of scientists the world over. Herewith, the ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Findings, Science & Environment
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Texas, Tom and Jerry, and a Thirsty Planet

May 15, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
GRACE satellites, artist view

Every now and then, Byron Tapley steps outside with a pair of binoculars and trains them toward the late afternoon sky, hoping to catch a glint of sunlight reflecting from a pair of minivan-sized satellites he has nicknamed Tom and Jerry. Tapley has good reason to be proprietary: he leads the team of scientists who launched the twin satellites in 2002. Working in tandem, the satellites orbit the earth from pole to pole every 90 minutes, recording tiny variations in the earth’s gravitational field caused by the movement of vast amounts of water. The two spacecraft have provided compelling ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Could Water Bring Jobs Back to the U.S.?

May 8, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Waterpic

Have you gotten the memo yet? You can stop worrying about peak oil: the United States is sitting on centuries of natural gas and Canada is full of tar sands. But then there is water. No less than Morgan Stanley Smith Barney declared “peak water” the challenge of the century last December in a report upholstered with authoritative graphs showing the heating of the world and the shrinking of water resources. Words almost failed report writers as they declared, “Water may turn out to be the biggest commodity story of the 21st century, as declining supply and rising demand combine to create ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
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California Farms Get Testy Over Water Quality

March 15, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

The world’s most pervasive groundwater pollution problem – nitrate in drinking water – is under scrutiny in the richest farming region of the United States. This week, a report for the California Legislature revealed that 250,000 people living in Central California, including four of the top five agricultural counties in the U.S., are currently at risk for nitrate contamination in their drinking water. Many of them are among the poorest Californians. Nitrate, in this instance, is a byproduct of nitrogen fertilizer. In drinking water, high concentrations of it can interfere with the ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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How Rube Goldberg Would Have Watered the West

March 2, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
ps-super-soaker2

Los Angeles has always been short of water, and rarely more so than in the 1940s. In that decade, wartime industries boomed and the city’s population grew to nearly 2 million people. Water use shot up 59 percent. Construction engineer Sidney Cornell had a unique idea to fix the city’s water woes: hydro-cannons. The October 1951 issue of Mechanix Illustrated magazine included a drawing by legendary futurism illustrator Frank Tinsley that showed Cornell’s plan in action. As the magazine described, man-made geysers would shoot water from “the mouth of one into the funnel of the ... Read More

More like this: Environment, May-June 2012, Time Machine
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San Francisco Bay Model Is Flush With Life

December 30, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
San Francisco Bay Model

Earlier this month, Janice Sinclaire reviewed the history of the San Francisco Bay Model, a mammoth physical representation of the estuary at California’s Golden Gate in which water sloshed around emulating the 24-hour tidal flow. While still open to tourists, it was dried out in 2009, but this week, we learned the model is up and running once again. The U.S. Corps of Engineers built the hydraulic model in the 1950s to test out a proposal to rebuild San Francisco Bay to better serve commerce and national security, a plan of almost Stalinist hubris that the finished model in part shot ... Read More

More like this: By The Way ..., Science
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The Fitness of Physical Models

December 5, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Fitness of Physical Models

Ranger Thomas Downs leads a group of visitors to a point above San Pablo Bay in Sausalito, California. Gesturing toward the Pacific Ocean, he clearly enjoys himself as he exclaims, “There's the Golden Gate Bridge!” The kids in the group grin at a California gray whale breaching in the distance. The four main bays that make up the San Francisco Bay estuary can all be seen from here: San Pablo, Suisun, Central and South Bay. The entire San Francisco Bay, including its famous bridges, is visible, and the whale is spectacular. This view is possible from only one vantage point on Earth: ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Texas’ Thirst for Dams Bucks National Trend

August 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Texas Bucks National Trend in Push for Dams

When Richard Donovan saw the Lufkin Daily News on Dec. 14, 1998, a front-page story took him completely by surprise. It showed three proposed dams slicing across his beloved Neches River, a 416-mile, sediment-rich waterway in East Texas, where he grew up catching catfish on trotlines. The newspaper depicted Fastrill Dam across the upper Neches, Rockland Dam in the middle and Town Bluff Dam — which already existed but would be raised — on the lower river. That can't be, Donovan thought. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had listed the upper Neches as a "priority one" conservation area ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Solutions to Water Supply Issues Surface in the West

May 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

It's easy to grow disillusioned in the face of so many grim statistics and pessimistic forecasts about the ramifications of the West's relationship with its water supply. But, as with so many of our challenges, the biggest barrier, according to international water expert Peter Gleick, is the need to overcome antiquated — in this case, 20th-century — water conservation thinking. As Gleick has written and lectured about frequently, the philosophy of water managers during the last century was, "Whatever we need, we'll build it." During those decades of unbridled industrial expansion, there ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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