Masumoto Family Farm sits on the Kings River watershed and has historically drawn its irrigation water from two sources: “ditch water” that originates as snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountain range upstream, and water pumped from the ground. Despite relying on the Kings River for a “significant amount” of the water they use to irrigate,
Steadily and alarmingly, humans have been depleting Earth's soil resources faster than the nutrients can be replenished. If this trajectory does not change, soil erosion, combined with the effects of climate change, will present a huge risk to global food security over the next century, warns a review paper authored by some of the top
Soil is the foundation for everything we’ve built — all agriculture and civilization must grow from healthy soils. And we’re heading straight for some hard limits, beyond which soils will no longer support us. Or, as UC Berkeley soil scientist Ronald Amundson and his colleagues put it in this paper, “Soil is the living epidermis
With California’s growing cap-and-trade program yielding a budgetary bonanza, lawmakers and interest groups have ample ideas for how to spend the money. Floating proposals as the pivotal period for budget negotiations begins, they say they want to fund port improvements, pay for heavy-duty trucks and ferries, nurture urban rivers, sponge up carbon in soil and
Despite increasingly aggressive clean air and fuel standards, years of drought are taking a toll on California's air quality, the American Lung Assn. says in a new report. The portion of California’s Central Valley from Fresno to Madera was the most polluted region in the nation on any given day in 2013 with microscopic particulates,
For Dems, Tom Steyer San Francisco activist Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate Super PAC said Monday that the billionaire Democrat will wage a campaign to put Republicans on the “hot seat” about climate change and spend “what it takes” for an aggressive new high-tech war room to track — and attack — GOP candidates in 2016.
For more than a century, California has been the state where people flocked for a better life — 164,000 square miles of mountains, farmland and coastline, shimmering with ambition and dreams, money and beauty. It was the cutting-edge symbol of possibility: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, aerospace, agriculture and vineyards. But now a punishing drought — and
A 25 percent cutback in urban water use – as Gov. Jerry Brown imposed last week – is less a hardship on California residents than an adjustment to a new reality. Droughts like the one gripping California now are inevitable, though climate change makes their frequency and severity unpredictable. We need to change the way
This is the summer that California’s relationship with water – often wasteful – will undergo permanent change. That was the message delivered Thursday by the state’s top water officials, days after Gov. Jerry Brown ordered the first-ever mandatory statewide cutbacks in urban water use. Faced with an epic water crisis prompted by years of drought,
Governor's media release: http://www.gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=18906 The California Assembly approved a $1 billion plan Thursday to bring immediate relief for communities hit hardest by the drought and to move long-term water projects along more quickly. Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders announced the plan last week, and it now heads to the governor for final approval. The