{"id":7232,"date":"2015-04-11T06:50:12","date_gmt":"2015-04-11T11:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7232"},"modified":"2015-04-11T06:50:12","modified_gmt":"2015-04-11T11:50:12","slug":"the-silver-lining-in-the-california-drought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7232","title":{"rendered":"The Silver Lining in the California Drought"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Silver Lining in the California Drought<\/a><\/h3>\n

Denial, it\u2019s been said, is not just a river in Egypt.<\/p>\n

It runs, of course, through each of us. But Californians have displayed quite a dose of it as a record-breaking drought rolls through its fourth year.<\/p>\n

It was just last week, propelled by\u00a0the lowest snowpack<\/a>\u00a0in the Sierra Nevada in recorded history, that Governor Jerry Brown announced mandatory water-use cutbacks averaging 25 percent for the state\u2019s 400 municipal water utilities.<\/p>\n

With only\u00a0one year of water supply left<\/a>\u00a0in the state\u2019s surface reservoirs, and rampant\u00a0depletion of groundwater<\/a>, the world\u2019s eighth largest economy and the nation\u2019s premier producer of fruits and vegetables is in some trouble.<\/p>\n

Scientists have determined that this drought, which began in 2012, may be the worst the state has experienced\u00a0in 1200 years<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet cities still use potable water to irrigate grass along road medians. The Santa Fe Irrigation District in southern California, which, despite its name, supplies not farms but some 19,300 people, tallied residential water use in February 2015 of\u00a0345 gallons per person per day<\/a>\u20144.5 times the state average for that month and\u00a0up<\/em>\u00a030 percent from two years earlier.<\/p>\n

The state\u2019s water use in February 2015 was only 2.8 percent lower than it was in February 2013, which,\u00a0according to<\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/em>, officials called an \u201calarming trend.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clearly, the\u00a0governor\u2019s urging a year earlier<\/a>\u00a0for voluntary water-use reductions of 20 percent had come to little effect.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, some 44 percent of California\u2019s 9 million acres of crops are flood-irrigated. That means far more water is applied to the land than the crops require. While some of it seeps down to groundwater, recharging depleted aquifers, it can pollute those aquifers with farm chemicals. Some of the irrigation water simply evaporates into the dry air.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Silver Lining in the California Drought Denial, it\u2019s been said, is not just a river in Egypt. It runs, of course, through each of us. But Californians have displayed quite a dose of it as a record-breaking drought rolls through its fourth year. It was just last week, propelled by\u00a0the lowest snowpack\u00a0in the Sierra […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[20,101,220,4208,3973,4732,866,4628],"class_list":["post-7232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-agriculture","tag-california","tag-drought","tag-groundwater","tag-jerry-brown","tag-sierra-nevada","tag-water","tag-water-restrictions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7232"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7233,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7232\/revisions\/7233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}