Mud-Larking, a new exhibit of color photos by Sally Mack from the Guadalcanal Village wetlands restoration site on Mare Island (northern CA) created over the years 2003 – 2008, will be presented by the Water Resources Center Archives library, 410 O’Brien Hall, on the UC Berkeley campus.

As a slang term, mudlark refers to a person who scavenges in river mud for items of value. This exhibit illustrates the value of mud as a photographic subject. The plants, water, and reflections at the river’s edge, which comprise the remainder of the exhibit, could not exist without mud. Larking reflects Sally’s attitude when taking these pictures.

If you go on Thursday, January 28, 2010, 5:00-7:00 pm, a wine and cheese reception will greet you.

The exhibit will be on display from January 28 through June 30,2010. The library is open to the public weekdays, 9 am – 5 pm.

For more information on the library go website.

In an ambitious move, planners of the Chicago region have compiled a plan to provide for the region’s water needs through 2050. The first plan of its kind for the region, the Northeastern Illinois Regional Water Supply/Demand Plan covers 11 counties and a population of over 8 million that is projected to grow to 12.1 million by 2050.

The plan is a preemptive step for a region that is not yet under serious threat of water scarcity. In comparison to many other parts of the US, Chicagoland, which gets the vast majority of its water from Lake Michigan, has an abundant water supply. Yet it has taken steps to ensure that its people will be well taken care of and Lake Michigan ecosystems will not be put under unnecessary pressure in coming decades. It’s an admirable move, one that all regions of the US, those in California in particular, should take note of.

Find more information here.

Peter Gleick may have to move over as water’s reigning public figure. With the release of his new 496 page book, Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, Stephen Solomon is now in position to that up that mantle himself. His lengthy survey of the role water has played in human society is timely: with global populations rising exponentially, water is poised to replace oil as the world’s most important natural resource.

To Solomon, water scarcity is an issue of social justice, national security. He sees freshwater scarcity and climate change as inextricably linked. When played out in the midst of climate change, what  begins as water crisis, Solomon explains, ends as catastrophic.  In his mind, it’s time to take America’s water productivity seriously, while our water per-capita numbers remain far greater than other global industrial powers like China.

What he advocates as a potential solution to mis-allocation of water resources is a shift to free market regulation. In Solomon’s opinion, in order for water to be accessible for “sensible things,” all subsidies for agriculture and other privileged sectors have to be taken out of the equation. He also calls for comprehensive enforcement of pollution laws, to rectify the roughly 40% of our nation’s drinking water currently contaminated due to lax EPA enforcement of the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act.

While Solomon’s findings are well-researched and on target with current projections of increasing water scarcity, his reliance on the free market to regulate water allocation strikes me as potentially problematic. First off is the issue of food production — while agriculture may not produce as large of a percentage of wealth as the percentage of water it consumes, citizens of the planet still need to feed themselves. We can’t continue to think of food production merely in terms of profit. Secondly, it is questionable whether the free market is the best place to fairly auction off water resources. As we have seen over the past two years, common sense and equity, two factors that must play in to the way we deal with water in the future, do not govern the free market.

For more information on Solomon’s book and his thoughts on global water issues, check out his interview with Grist.org reporter Jonathan Hiskes.

(All quotes taken from above-mentioned interview)

Join The Watershed Project! This Monday, January 18th is Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service. Instead of the taking the day off, we encourage volunteers of all ages to take the day on! Join the Watershed Project on the Richmond Shoreline.

Give back to your community, meet your neighbors and become
the community that Dr. King envisioned.

9 am to 12:30 pm
Shimada Friendship Park on the Richmond Shoreline
Click Here for more Info!

As Linda Hunter, our executive director at The Watershed Project, said in a recent email, “One good thing about the recession” is the expansion of East Bay parks land. As more land once planned for development has been put on the market, the East Bay Regional Park District has been increasingly buying it up.

Read the full article here.

A week ago, 60 Minutes aired a segment entitled ‘California: Running Dry.’ Like many media pieces of late that have focused on California’s water issues, this segment looked at the many ways in which dwindling water supplies are affecting our state. Rather than talk about potential solutions, however, the majority of its 13 minute running time was given over to background on the ‘fish vs farms’ tensions that have long divided our state’s agricultural and environmental interests.

California has long been torn over water. Like Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, once said “Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting.” California’s history as the nation’s bread basket has been built on fights over water. We know that our burgeoning urban and agricultural water needs are growing faster than our water supplies. We are well aware that we are running out of fresh water. We don’t, however, know which are the best long term solutions to these problems.

Hopefully soon 60 Minutes and other media sources will seek to focus on potential solutions to rather than the backgrounds of these longstanding problems.

Check out the program and see what you think.

Most of us, particularly those in the Bay Area, get tasty, clean water straight from our taps. Thanks to major public health successes of the past, American deaths from water borne infections now rarely happen. Cities are required to treat water by law and we have long believed those laws to be enough to safeguard us from harm. Nowadays, that belief is faltering.

As yesterday’s front page of the New York Times declared, outdated laws on water safety may be resulting in seriously contaminated municipal drinking water. Part of a longer series investigating toxic waters, reporter Charles Duhigg’s article details the serious decline of America’s water and sewage systems.

To give a brief recap, the article focuses on the failings of the EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Act. Created in 1974, the Act made less than one hundred contaminants illegal in municipal drinking water systems when it was first put into effect. As the years have passed, the number of chemicals and manufacturing by-products prevalent in American society has increased to over 60,000, much more than existed when the Safe Drinking Water Act was initially approved. Unfortunately, the Act has not been sufficiently revised to meet these changes.

Check out the lengths the city of Los Angeles went to safeguard their residents from legal carcinogens in their drinking water here. Their efforts, which went so far as to cover a reservoir in the LA neighborhood of Silver Lake with black plastic balls, beg the question — how toxic can water be and still be legal? How much can we citizens stand in terms of poor water quality?

If your interest is piqued beyond Duhigg’s article, listen to him talk to Fresh Air’s Terri Gross about these issues here, The conversation is a good one.

Even though it has been raining in the Bay Area since last night, California as a whole is facing increasingly dire water woes. While many of us have been aware of this fact for some time, new findings based on data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) serve to bolster what we already know.

According to data found by GRACE and reported by Tom Laskawy for Grist.org, “aquifers for California’s primary agricultural region—the Central Valley—and its major mountain water source—the Sierra Nevadas—have lost nearly enough water combined to fill Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir,” since October 2003. Combined, California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin drainage basins have shed more than 30 cubic kilometers of water in the last six years, with the bulk of the loss occurring in the agriculturally focused Central Valley.

With water losses like these, agricultural centers have come to rely on ground and surface water from other places. Groundwater tables are consequentially pumped for irrigation purposes, causing water tables levels to decline, land subsidence to increase, and other unsavory developments, like water shortages, to occur.

As California, one of the world’s biggest economies and the main supplier for much of America’s food, falls deeper into water purgatory, the consequences seem to be growing. Perhaps it’s time to look more closely at rainwater catchment? Among other things….

Check out Laskawy’s full article here.

For those out there who don’t know, green infrastructure is a good thing. In straightforward language, it’s a storm-water management technique that preserves the natural hydrology of an area to help reduce storm-water runoff from hard surfaces. In practical application it translates to using techniques like green roofs, rain gardens, and porous pavement. Implementation of these technologies decreases storm-water runoff and water pollution by capturing rain where it falls. It helps clean up our waterways and our beaches, reducing the disease-causing pathogens that get dumped into the water and making it safer to swim.

In addition to increasing water retention, etc., green infrastructure provides other important services. As Rebecca Hammer, a Beagle Fellow in NRDC’s water program, writes on her blog, facets of green infrastructure “create green spaces and opportunities for urban recreation, prevent people from dying of heat-related illnesses, save heating and cooling energy costs, generate green landscaping and construction jobs, cleanse pollutants from city air, reduce levels of urban crime and violence.… The list goes on and on.”

Lucky for us, events of yesterday gave green infrastructure some much needed legislative support. Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.), Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-Mo.), and Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-Oh.) introduced a bill that will help spread the use of green infrastructure in communities across America. In the words of Rebecca Hammer, “This bill does three things to promote green infrastructure approaches:

1. It establishes up to five “Centers of Excellence” for green infrastructure: a small group of research institutions across the country that will get federal support for research on green infrastructure that is relevant to the region in which the center is located. These centers will serve the very important function of coordinating information, so that any community that wants to implement green infrastructure can have the data it needs to get started.
2. The bill also establishes a green infrastructure program at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It’s crucial that EPA start to incorporate green infrastructure into all of its permitting and enforcement programs so that regulated entities have incentives to take the leap to these new and sometimes unfamiliar techniques.
3. Last but not least, the bill creates a grant program that will give communities around the nation – especially low-income communities and ones with raw sewage-discharging combined sewer systems – the resources they need to undertake their own green infrastructure projects. These projects will make the grant recipient counties, cities, and towns into better places to live for all their residents.”

Dubbed the Green Infrastructure for Clean Water Act of 2009 by its creators, the bill is a large step in the right direction. Check the official blurb on the bill and the rest of Rebecca Hammer’s excellent blog post. And stay tuned on happenings with green infrastructure!

Check out some great news about our neighbors to the north, distributed by the good people at the Product Policy Institute:

So Ontario and Quebec, the two provinces in central Canada with the largest populations and largest economies, are adopting exciting new policies. With these new approaches, industry pays for product waste and municipalities primarily deal with organics, which they are required to compost.

We emphasize: individual companies of every size will be held legally responsible for the end-of-life management of their products and packaging, even if they form a collective for efficiency.The programs are very similar and include things like landfill bans and extra disposal fees, a huge move toward full European-style Extended Producer Responsibilty (EPR) and a massive investment in municipal composting ($650 million over five years in Quebec), with new standards proposed for Ontario.