- Author: Faith Kearns
Casey Walsh is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses in part on ways water, land, and labor have been organized to produce commodities in arid areas. He wrote a socioeconomic and cultural history, Building the Borderlands, of irrigated cotton agriculture in northeastern Mexico. He has also been increasingly involved in the politics of groundwater management in California, which will be the subject of a second interview. This interview takes a deeper look at his newest book on the cultural, political, and economic dimensions...
- Author: Faith Kearns
Watering holes can be hard to come by in the high desert of northeastern California. Pronghorn, deer, cattle, and wild horses are all visitors to the springs and ponds scattered across the often dry grasslands. The number of wild horses has jumped quickly in recent years, bringing a host of water-related challenges, and no small amount of controversy.
Laura Snell, a livestock and natural resource advisor with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, knows the controversy well. She's been monitoring frequently visited water sources in the area for a couple of years. Her research shows that at times more than 70 percent of animal visits to springs are by wild horses, with...
- Author: Faith Kearns
For the majority of Californians, water appears effortlessly when and where you need it. It shows up in your faucet and flows out of your backyard hose with just the turn of a handle. And, it leaves just as predictably – rinsed down your kitchen sink drain, flushed down your toilet. However, the outgoing water is often full of things like fats, oils, and greases (also known as FOG waste) that can lead to problems in local sewer systems and beyond.
One of the biggest challenges in addressing FOG waste is rendering visible the largely invisible connection between household wastewater and city infrastructure. Claire Napawan, a...
- Author: Faith Kearns
On a long dammed river in northwestern California, researchers are determining how many Chinook salmon and steelhead trout could live upstream of the dam if given the means to pass. The endeavor has meant intensive field work in some of the most remote parts of the state.
The Eel River watershed is the third largest contained completely within California. It once had the state's biggest Chinook salmon run. Historic estimates of salmon and trout populations are upwards of one million fish running the river and its tributaries annually as they migrated from the Pacific Ocean and back to spawn. Current estimates are at between one and three percent of these historic populations.
The reduction in...
- Author: Mohammad Safeeq
California's recent drought was the worst in memory. However, in a relatively quick turnaround, this year the state's water infrastructure is full and water managers are battling the wettest winter on record in quite some time. Now, by many accounts, the drought is over for much of the state.
The uniquely wet winter of 2016-2017 has highlighted a key issue surrounding our surface and ground water storage infrastructure: We could have stored this abundant water, not in new reservoirs, but right under our feet. The cycles of drought and flood will continue in California; in order to survive the droughts we have to move winter precipitation to groundwater storage in greater quantity and more...