Tag Archives: water

The cost of building the perfect wave

The cost of building the perfect wave

Surf pools’ proponents frequently point to the far larger amount of water golf courses consume to argue that opposing the pools on grounds of their water use is misguided.  PSSC, the first of the area’s three planned surf clubs to open, requires an estimated 3 million gallons per year to fill its pool; the proposed […]

Day Zero still looms over Cape Town

The private sector is not necessarily waiting for the city to remedy its water woes. The wine industry, for example, was hit exceptionally hard by the drought. Since then, many vineyards have established state-of-the-art water management systems designed around the concept of self-sufficiency. Tactics include reusing treated wastewater, collecting rainwater, and using elaborate irrigation systems […]

How we drained California dry

Not a year after my grandfather arrived, the raisin went bust. The Armenian and Japanese farmers had planted so many grapes to dry into raisins that Sun-Maid couldn’t sell half of them. Who would buy the other half became a question of such wonderful theater, tragic and comic, that even Fresno’s sage, William Saroyan, would […]

How rising groundwater caused by climate change could devastate coastal communities

“In the Bay Area there’s so much legacy contamination under the ground from military use, from the Silicon Valley tech booms—it left a lot of nasty stuff,” says Kris May, a coastal engineer and climate scientist who founded Pathways Climate Institute. “And what often happens is we put low-income houses in those areas after they’re […]