I’m a property manager for a mom-and-pop company that owns several residential buildings in San Francisco. In April of 2007 one of our buildings, a twenty-one unit, early 20th century Victorian in the Lower Haight, saw its water usage more than double over a two-month span, going from approximately 70,000 gallons to 168,000 gallons of water consumption.

In the midst of our guilt (we ... read more >>

Elizabeth Royte, author of Bottlemania, The Tapir’s Morning Bath, and Garbage Land, Garbageland102 has recently started a blog, Waste, Water, Whatever. ... read more >>

California’s drought, now in its third year, is getting plenty of attention – both in-state and beyond its borders. This attention is deserved because in 2009, reduced water supplies are affecting our cities, farms and natural environment. ... read more >>

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today joined U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar for an aerial tour of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta where they discussed the challenges faced by California’s water system. Following the aerial tour, the Governor and Secretary Salazar announced $260 million in economic stimulus projects from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act) to help ... read more >>

Last week, I gave a guest lecture to a UCB class on human rights.

Here are the audio [48 min 17MB MP3] and my slides [PDF] from the talk.

I spent most of my time talking about some for free, pay for more; corruption in the developing world; and the uselessness of highminded ideals that fall to lowbrow power games. My favorite tidbit is this contrast between ideals and reality in the Soviet ... read more >>

As part of the federal stimulus plan, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar offered California $260 million on Wednesday to patch the Central Valley’s decrepit water-delivery system and protect its threatened fish.

He also offered his good offices as a mediator in the fierce battles to come over how water will be allocated, and to whom.

“There is a lot of passion around these issues,” Mr. Salazar ... read more >>

Here is a great link to a video + written testimony of a House Resources Committee hearing on California's current drought. It is long (~2:40hr), but you get to meet lots of important people in the California water picture and hear different points of view on the current drought.

0:00 - 1:00hr Testimony from local congressman about effects on their districts and what they think should be d ... read more >>

Water scarcity means big growth for companies that purify, transport, and distribute the world's most essential resource, but a global recession that has halted new projects and put off price hikes means water investors will have to wait for the boom years.

Water, cheap and indispensable, has long been prized as a stable investment in both good and bad times.

But as the population grows, ur ... read more >>

This paper demonstrates a practical application of coupling a hydrodynamic model with a wave model for the calculation of storm tide elevations in the St. Johns River (Northeastern Florida). Hurricane Floyd (1999) is chosen as the storm of interest due to its track which paralleled the northeast coast of Florida without making a direct landfall on the St. Johns River. The advanced circulation (AD ... read more >>

As drought forces families in America's West to shorten their showers and let their lawns turn brown, two Depression-era government programs have been paying some of the nation's biggest farms hundreds of millions of dollars to grow water-thirsty crops in what was once desert.

Records obtained by The Associated Press show that the federal government handed out more than $687 million in subsidi ... read more >>