Here are 181 Candidates to Seriously Consider On October 22, 2014 the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences identified 181 dams in California that are “high-priority” candidates for reallocating water flows, to protect the health of related watersheds and sensitive species—in keeping with the state constitution’s “beneficial use of water” section, the public trust doctrine, […]
Road Trip! Sunny Dreams Part 1 No sooner do we stop complaining about the summer’s heat than we start grousing about the chill in the air—minding not so much the nippiness itself as anticipating the toe-numbing cold that comes later, hitched to the memory. Such ingrates, we Californians. Deciding where to go and what to […]
Any place is more than just material objects, landscapes, and homescapes. Things carry names as part of the history of a region. Names give meaning to the raw data of dirt, streams, weeds, and animals in a particular place, and especially to the integration of things. Layers of namescapes cover any landscape. Common names like […]
Following Hwy. 1 north from Mendocino County leads to Leggett and the junction with Hwy. 101. The big attraction here is the Drive-Thru-Tree Park, as schlocky as it sounds, but for some reason we humans just love driving through trees. They carved this car-sized hole in the Chandelier Tree in the 1930s, and for a […]
Dust off the backpack, get new laces for those hiking boots. This is the place. California’s isolated “Lost Coast”—virtually uninhabited and more remote than any other stretch of coastline in the Lower 48—has been found. Here steep mountains soar like bald eagles, their domes tufted with chaparral, a few redwoods tucked behind the ears, and […]
It’s not as if there are no redwoods before you get to Humboldt and Del Norte Counties. Stranded stands of coast redwoods can be found along the Central Coast, in protected, wetter areas as far as the southernmost reaches of Big Sur. But here, along the North Coast, is where the tribe truly thrives. They […]
The war of politics and power waged on behalf of Mono Lake and its water has been so contentious, convoluted, and long-running, and has involved so many public agencies and public hearings, so many lawsuits and compromises, that the simple facts are virtually impossible to separate from the details. Central to the saga, though, is […]
David Zetland Part 3: But Whose Community? Who Should Decide Among Competing Needs, and How? In his new book Living with Water Scarcity, David Zetland offers a brief yet astute description of what have become universal water allocation conflicts: “Go anywhere in the world and you’ll find two opposing sides to a water allocation. A […]
David Zetland Part 2: Valuing Water as the Good It Is, Not the Good It Was As discussed previously, economist David Zetland wants us to understand the difference between water scarcity and water shortage. Water scarcity, he says, is a perception. We worry that there may not be enough water to meet our needs, the […]
© Up the Road 2011
Cows 1, Bear 0
This Fall, out at my ranch on Rock Creek, I had a beautiful crop of apples on my heritage apple trees. These old trees have been growing since the 1800s. I had dreams of applesauce and visions of apple jelly, until one morning when I found my apple trees stripped bare. Their limbs were pulled […]