Adventures in Onionism

The California legislature released some details on the proposed water bill. I can't honestly claim to know enough to properly evaluate this proposal, but I'm pretty skeptical--I don't want the state to spend more on projects like this unless they're willing to raise taxes to pay for it it, and I don't want new dams. I like that urban users will be forced to conserve, but I'd like to see that agricultural and industrial users have to do the same.

I won't make a pun using the word "dam" instead of "damn," but I am stoked about this story. Four dams are coming down on the Klamath . UPDATE: This story seems to be part of a series. A few days ago there was bad news about possible future construction . I heard about a new long distance trail, the Bigfoot trail , from a friend named Squatch (because he's so into bigfoot stuff). I've looked into a route like this before, because there is public land all the way from Clearlake, CA to the Oregon border through Mendocino, Shasta-Trinity, and Klamath National Forests. However, it seemed like a lot of roadwalking and real danger of running into pot farms. Normally I discount that danger (and all other "dangerous" outdoor things like bears) but maybe not in this region. For years I've been dreaming of an AZ-UT-ID border to border route. I mostly kept it to myself, even though I knew it had been done before. I just didn't know it had been d...

I finally finished reading Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water . If you have not read this book, you absolutely must. I guess people that have both never been west of the Mississippi and don't care about the environment probably won't be interested (but then, why would you reading my blog?), but everyone else must read it. It's pretty dense at times, so it took me a long time to get through it, but that's basically because it's very well researched and thorough. Summary: William Mulholland and LA stole (legally, mostly) all the water from the Owens Valley, the Colorado River has been thoroughly violated, and the Bureau of Reclamation (in competition with the Army Corps of Engineers) built way too many dams using absolutely fraudulent cost-benefit calculations and now sell the water to corporate farms (that are far larger than the legal size-limit to be allowed to purchase the water) for $7.50 an acre-foot ( far less tha...