Never Thirst

Summer Solstice 2010

2010-06-25T14:34:00.000-07:00

Due to my commitment to lecturing at San Jose State University for the past 10 months, this blog has been reduced, for the time being, to a semi-annual salute to Earth's position in its annual cycle around the sun - the midway points of extreme posture toward our life-giving sun, days we call the Solstice. On this Solstice, in the northern hemisphere of the planet, the days are the longest, in the southern half of the Earth, the nights are the longest. On these days, Earthlings everywhere gather, as we complement each other with the same honoring ceremonies across the planet. It's a good time to remember and honor our Mother planet, who holds all our ancestors before us. We also celebrate the commonality of all peoples and all life on the planet.

These ceremonies predate what we call civilization, as people studied the stars for at least a millennium before science ever began to evolve in human consciousness and give us understanding of planetary physics and celestial movement. Today we can enjoy visualizing the entire universe through YouTube or any medium available for watching spectacular graphics and knowledge packaged by the best videographers available.

That wouldn't be me, with my 10-year old Olympus digital camera, but I will share some of the Summer Solstice ceremony in which I had the honor to attend, hosted and produced by Sergio Martinez and Angelica del Gato this past Sunday. They live along Coyote Creek also, about 300 feet upstream, on the bank next to the William St. bridge. Their home is the farmhouse where the Ferrari family lived and tended the orchard, which was here before becoming 8 duplexes. I'm in great awe and appreciate the great deal of work to organize and prepare their yard and the food for all the celebrants lucky enough to join them in this celebration of life at this significant place on our planet's journey around the sun.

The shaman for part of the ceremony spoke of the Aztec calendar and counting system based on 2o instead of 10, as most of the modern world uses for metrics of time and space, except for astrophysicists, who use light-years. My reading of Mayan and Aztec culture's had informed me that these cultures used 20 instead of 10 for the simple reason that we have 20 fingers AND toes, and they're what we first used to count with. And coincidentally, this year in the world's business calendar, it happens to be the year we call 2010. Sounds like a perfect year to bring together the old mezzo-American calendar and the modern world we are living in today.

For a great ride through time and space. I recommend viewing a segment of the Universe series from the History Channel called Beyond the Big Bang. We are truly star dust in awe of stardust.
Blessed Be!

Rounding Out the Circle of the Solar Trip we call 2009

2009-12-26T10:50:00.000-08:00

Hello my fellow Earthship mates.

I have been so absent from blogger land these past four months because I can only do so much key board time until repetitive motion cripples my upper right side. All I need is a good voice command typing program under my solstice bush.

But I have been on my keyboard a great deal during the last four months in order to create 27 seventy-five minute multimedia presentations for the class I taught last semester at San Jose State University. The course was titled Water Policy in The Western United States and was taught in the Environmental Studies Department and known through the SJSU catalog as EnvS 129. All the lecture notes, course syllabus (called greensheets, even though they're not when they are printed on paper), quizzes & the final exam are published in this google-powered web site for the world to use as it will: http://sites.google.com/site/envs129/

I have received much encouragement from friends, colleagues and the students themselves in regard to my teaching this past semester. I am also honored and challenged to teach a second course in the Spring 2010 semester on the more numeric side of water resources called MANAGEMENT. This course is listed as EnvS 128 and requires prerequisites of Statistics and basic Chemistry. I consider that the students will arrive with brains exposed to the type of discipline required in those courses.The web site for EnvS 128 is now "under construction" with as minimal of a footprint that I can MANAGE

But I am not there to teach students to be engineers. There is another college a few feet (and clicks) away which trains minds to conduct water engineering work. Most of the students come to the these courses in the College of Social Science to learn how they can help in building a sustainable future, but they certainly won't be ALL part of an engineering team to physically build parts of a water system.

Every student does, however, participate in using and paying for the water infrastructure components that are proposed and built by engineers and marketed and funded with the great influence of business and government. What they need to know is the language of the engineers, so they can engage in critical thinking and PARTICIPATE competently during the public review process, where many powerful self-interests are often poised and ready to override the public good and public trust of the environment and build some public (WATER) work that is going to have serious negative impacts and , in the long run, threaten our species and the sustainability of the ecosystem, which weaves together all our species.

My deepest ethics about water resources are succinctly expressed in this seven-minute student video, titled Rain Dance The film maker is named Amanda Levensohn and she certainly would have received an A+ if she were doing this work in one of my classes.

Seven Elected Water Board Bill Passes State Senate

2009-08-28T15:56:00.000-07:00

The Santa Clara Valley Water District Board was successful in bulldozing its way through the legislature and managed a nearly unanimous vote on AB 466(Cot0), with Senator Simitian of Palo Alto being the only No vote.

Lobbying against the bottomless bank accounts of the Golden Spigot (as Scott Herhold of the SJ Mercury likes to call it) would have been a wasted effort to appear at the hearings in Sacramento to try to stop this effort. But I continued to post a better alternative in my blog and posted a link to Senator Simitian web site to send him comments. At least one of the County's Sacramento delegation is awake and understands bad politics when he sees it.

For the record, the following is the Legislative Analyst's description of the impact of the new bill and the record of votes in the Assembly and the Senate:

THIRD READING

Bill No:  AB 466
Author:   Coto (D)
Amended:  6/30/09 in Senate
Vote:     21

   
SENATE LOCAL GOVERNMENT COMMITTEE  :  5-0, 6/17/09
AYES:  Wiggins, Cox, Aanestad, Kehoe, Wolk

SENATE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE  :  Senate Rule 28.8

ASSEMBLY FLOOR  :  73-0, 5/14/09 - See last page for vote


SUBJECT  :    Santa Clara Valley Water District

SOURCE  :     Santa Clara Valley Water District

DIGEST  :  
This bill changes the composition and
representation of the Santa Clara Valley Water District
Board effective December 3, 2010, expands a district
exemption from special fees, and makes other governance
changes.

Senate Floor Amendments  of 6/30/09 clarify when District
directors' terms start.

ANALYSIS  :

I.  Board of Directors  .  A seven-member board of
directors governs the Santa Clara Valley Water District
(District), reflecting a compromise that combined the
former Santa Clara Valley Water Conservation District,
the former Santa Clara County Flood Control and Water
Conservation District, and two other water districts.
The former Santa Clara Valley Water Conservation
District had an elected five-member board.  The Santa
Clara County Board of Supervisors was the ex officio
board of the former Santa Clara County Flood Control
and Water Conservation district.  The two other water
districts had their own elected boards.  The District's
current seven-member board has five elected members;
one from each supervisorial district.  The county
supervisors appoint the two other directors who must be
voters within the two former water districts.  When the
District wants to reduce the board to five elected
members, the Legislature eliminated the appointed
members of the District's board of directors effective
on January 1, 2010, by enacting AB 2435 (Coto), Chapter
279, Statutes of 2006.

This bill repeals the statutes which will reduce the
size of the District's existing seven-member board of
directors to five elected directors on January 1, 2010.
        
This bill enacts a new governance scheme:

1.     Until December 3, 2020, the board consists of:

A.     The two appointed directors who served on
     the board on December 31, 2008.

B.     The five elected directors.  The two
     directors who were elected in 2006 serve until
     December 5, 2010.  The three directors who were
     elected in 2008 serve until December 7, 2012.

2.     Starting December 3, 2010, the board of
     directors consists of seven elected directors.

This bill requires the board of directors to adopt by
June 30, 2010, a resolution that creates the seven
electoral districts.  Voters elect directors by these
electoral divisions to four-year terms for four
designated seats in November 2010 and the three other
seats in November 2012.  The District's elections and
the directors' terms must follow the Uniform District
Elections Law. The board must reapportion the
electoral districts by November 1 of the year following
each decennial census.  The bill renumbers the current
provisions for filling board vacancies and recalling
directors.

II.  Compensation  .  The District's directors receive $100
for each day's service, but not more than $600 a month,
plus actual and necessary expenses.  State law requires
local governments to adopt reimbursement policies and
disclose payments (AB 1234 [Salinas], Chapter 700,
Statutes of 2005).  This bill requires the District to
place quarterly expense reimbursement reports on the
board's agenda and to determine if the reimbursements
comply with the board's policies.  This bill prohibits
a member of the District's board of directors from
seeking or accepting compensated employment with the
District while a director, and for one year after the
director's term of office.

III.  Governance  .  This bill requires the District's board
by July 1, 2010, to adopt lobbying regulations that
include registration, reporting, and disclosure
requirements.  This bill prohibits directors from
contacting the District's staff on behalf of contract
bidders.  This bill prohibits the District's board from
authorizing severance pay when an appointed employee
leaves voluntarily.  This bill requires the District
board's minutes to include a public report of actions
taken in closed sessions under the Brown Act.

IV.  Reports.  The Ralph M. Brown Act requires local
governments to post their agendas, including brief
general descriptions of each item, at least 72 hours
before their regular meeting.  The Brown Act provides
that writings which are distributed to a majority of
the legislative body are public records and must be
made available upon request without delay.  With five
specific exceptions, this bill requires that reports
prepared by the District's staff that recommended
action by the board at a regular public meeting or
public hearing must be available to the public at least
six days before the meeting or hearing.  This bill
declares that this requirement does not require public
release of documents that the California Public Records
Act exempts from disclosure.  If a staff report's
recommendation changes because of direction from a
director, the report must disclose that revision.

V.  Special Taxes  .  When the District levies special taxes
that are subject to a 2/3-voter approval, it may charge
minimum uniform rates based on land use category and
size.  When levying these special taxes, the District
can exempt residential parcels that are owned and
occupied by taxpayers who are 65 years or older (AB 88
[Alquist], Chapter 63, Statutes of 2001).  This bill
also allows the District to exempt residential parcels
that are owned and occupied by taxpayers who qualify as
totally disabled under the federal Social Security Act.

VI.  District Budgets  .  By June 15, the District's board
must meet to consider its proposed budget and hear
public comments.  At the same meeting, this bill
requires the board to review its financial reserves and
its reserve management policy.
      
Comments

More than 40 years after the district took over the
County's flood control duties, local officials continue to
discuss how the District should operate.  Since the
enactment of AB 2435 (Coto), local officials have continued
to debate the District's governance.  This bill is the
result of the latest round of discussions about how to
improve the District's accountability, transparency, and
responsiveness.

FISCAL EFFECT  : Appropriation: No; Fiscal Com.: Yes  Local:  Yes

SUPPORT  :   (Verified  7/1/09)

Santa Clara Valley Water District (source)
Association of California Water Agencies
California Special Districts Association
Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce
San Jose/Silicon Valley Branch of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People


ASSEMBLY FLOOR  :
AYES:  Adams, Anderson, Arambula, Beall, Bill Berryhill,
     Tom Berryhill, Blakeslee, Block, Blumenfield, Brownley,
     Buchanan, Caballero, Charles Calderon, Carter, Chesbro,
     Conway, Cook, Coto, Davis, De La Torre, De Leon, DeVore,
     Duvall, Emmerson, Eng, Evans, Feuer, Fletcher, Fong,
     Fuller, Furutani, Galgiani, Gilmore, Hagman, Hall,
     Harkey, Hayashi, Hernandez, Hill, Huber, Huffman,
     Jeffries, Jones, Knight, Krekorian, Lieu, Logue, Bonnie
     Lowenthal, Ma, Mendoza, Miller, Monning, Nava, Nestande,
     Niello, Nielsen, John A. Perez, V. Manuel Perez,
     Portantino, Price, Ruskin, Salas, Silva, Skinner,
     Solorio, Audra Strickland, Swanson, Torlakson, Torres,
     Torrico, Tran, Villines, Yamada
     NO VOTE RECORDED:  Ammiano, Fuentes, Gaines, Garrick,
                        Saldana, Smyth, Bass


AGB:cm  7/1/09   Senate Floor Analyses

                     SUPPORT/OPPOSITION:  SEE ABOVE
UNOFFICIAL BALLOT
MEASURE: AB 466
AUTHOR: Coto
TOPIC: Santa Clara Valley Water District.
DATE: 08/27/2009
LOCATION: SEN. FLOOR
MOTION: Assembly 3rd Reading AB466 Coto By Maldonado
(AYES  32. NOES   1.)  (PASS)


AYES
****

Aanestad Alquist Ashburn Benoit
Cogdill Corbett Correa Cox
Denham Ducheny Dutton Florez
Hancock Harman Hollingsworth Huff
Kehoe Leno Liu Lowenthal
Maldonado Negrete McLeod Pavley Romero
Steinberg Strickland Walters Wiggins
Wolk Wright Wyland Yee


NOES
****

Simitian


ABSENT, ABSTAINING, OR NOT VOTING
*********************************

Calderon Cedillo DeSaulnier Oropeza
Padilla Price Runner

                **** END****

(BY)Pass the SALT

2009-08-28T14:45:00.000-07:00

The State's favorite water fight is brewing up again as a package of legislation moves through the Legislature. The sole intention of this package is to fix the Delta watering hole, with its six million acre feet of straws sucking on it's life giving sustenance.

The San Jose Mercury News ran this recent story. And then STAND BACK and watch the vitriol begin.

My response is one familiar to those who have read other posts on this blog:

In addittion to defending the veracity of Dr. Meral's op-ed piece, I commented:

It is the Delta farmers and boaters that are trying to mislead us again. If you really want to end agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley, stop this vital piece of plumbing from being built.

If the canal was built 25 years ago, as the State Legislature and Governor Jerry Brown agreed, 50 million LESS tons of salt would have been deposited on the farmlands as millions of acres were irrigated with salty water from the aqueducts.

With sea level rising, this rate of salinization will increase and the Central Valley farmlands will become permanently destroyed even sooner without the east Delta bypass channel in place. This may serve farmer/speculators well as salted lands are converted to cheap housing and strip malls.

It's shameful to watch and even encourage the loss of such a huge agricultural resource, after billions of federal and state dollars were invested in dams, pumps and canals to grow enough food and fiber to feed much of the US and several other countries. Farming uses 80% of the State's developed water.

The Canal is really about saving farming not about SoCal vs NoCal. Please educate yourselves and save us from making the same mistake twice. There won't be a third chance!

San Jose Goose News

2009-07-16T12:23:00.000-07:00

For the third year in a row, those humans with drips on their hats, have brought in harassing canines to attack us while our nesting process is in high mode. While we carry out our genetic mandate to PRO-create, these humans continue to show no regard for our place in the universe, here and now.

Our ancestors flew these paths for thousands of generations. We have always found these wetlands on the way to and from the salty water between the mountains. Each return, we find more habitat is gone and hot black sticky pebbles cover many former water areas. This valley has a bad case of humans.

The humans also must have water to live. Water goes where they want it, and they seem to use water much more often than there are days of rain. The valley is wet everywhere, all the many days between rains. What wetlands we find, we must use. We must create our next generation, as we share the prime directive of all species that contain the spirit of life.

The humans say they want to prevent our unused nutrients from entering the water. But this water has already flowed off the upland streams and through their encampments. The water is then collecting human unused nutrients and shiny floating colors on the top. We have tolerated this unfresh water because there is just not any better alternatives. The people encampments are everywhere there is water flowing into the lowlands.

The editors of Goose News wants to believe that these humans can learn, if we actually are able to get their attention. At the next inter-species congregation, Goose News proposes that a coalition of bird species begin forming word spelling formation groups. Goose News will go from being just another blog, to the spelling of words for humans, and in the actual airways of our home here in this valley.

Father Goose,
The Head of Goose News and

Mother Goose,
the Neck that turns the Head, and Chief Avian Letter-form Designer

A Meandering Demo(n)-stration on Coyote Creek

2009-06-05T13:39:00.000-07:00

On Monday, June 1, the Santa Clara Valley Water District held a "Open House" in the Olinder School Cafeteria to discuss their flood control options with the surrounding neighborhoods. About 100 people showed up over a four-hour period to be given docent-guided explanations of the dozens of wall maps, charts and graphs depicting the 10 or so options that had so far been considered by the engineering staff of the Water District.

Many folks showed up to voice their protest about any plans that included removing homes from the creek banks or putting levees around the park to enhance its function as a flood detention basin. In a separate post, I describe why William Street Park and much of the Coyote Creek park chain was developed for the dual purposes of flood detention and recreation.

Purely by coincidence, the next day, the Water District conducted what may have appeared as a demonstration of what it would look like to remove a house along the creek. The pics and video below was taken by me on Tuesday. What you see is the pile of sticks which used to be the Jaffe home on the 300 block of South 17th Street in downtown San Jose on the west bank of Coyote Creek.

The story of why this home was demolished began a few weeks after the January 25, 1997 flood on the Coyote Creek. After the flood stage had passed, the Water District began releasing water from Andersen Reservoir, located 20 miles upstream, for the next six weeks or so. Once they reached the elevation of their "rule curve" someone ordered the valve closed at the dam and the water level in the creek downtown dropped 2-3 feet almost instantaneously. Without the water column as a buttress, the saturated banks did what gravity demands and began flowing out into the river and everything above it collapsed.

Another home next to and south of the Jaffe's completely tipped dangerously toward the river, and was soon red tagged and eventually demolished also. There was also some bank failure in the back yard of the home north of the Jaffe home as well. The slippage of the bank unfortunately occurred in the middle of the Jaffe home, so part of the house remained habitable for the time being.

Law suits were, of course, filed against both the District and the City. The District used the immediate defense that the sewer in front of these homes was damaged and leaking and was therefore the cause of the bank failure, not the operation of the reservoir. After I was deposed by the attorney for the home owners, the water District's attorney was not too happy that I supported the theory that the bank slipped due to "draw down failure." In response, they shopped around for someone to write them a report refuting this theory and found a Stanford professor that would back them up, for a considerable fee, of course.

The District won the case but never felt too good about it, apparently, for in about 2006, the District offered to buy the Jaffe's home and remove it, as they have now done. This bring the total to five lots on the west bank of Coyote Creek now restored by the Water District to undeveloped parcels between the William Street bridge and the San Antonio Street bridge. The term used by the District (and others) for homes that back up to the creeks is called "encroachment."

Prior to 1950, before the construction of Andersen Dam, large setbacks from the creek banks were the rule, and streets such as Arroyo Way and Brookwood Drive did not exist, in respect for the need for such setbacks. The City General Plan today includes a 100 ft. setback for new subdivisions, but is seldom enforced, especially if the developer claims they will lose many buildable lots that the City should buy in order to "create" the setback.

The District, for years, has been encouraging Cities and the County to not create subdivisions that allowed homes to back up against the creek banks. Streets were encouraged or at least tolerated, even when floodable, as the District could use these paved surfaces for maintenance, while building homes that backed up to the creeks blocked access and created a continuous source of complaints and often litigation.

In 2000, the voters approved a parcel tax by over a two-thirds margin to fund the "Clean,Safe Creeks and Natural Flood Protection Program." This would generate funds for a period of 15 years to begin several flood control projects throughout the County. One of these projects is the Mid-Coyote Creek planning study, which began near the end of 2007 and has progressed to the state which was on display at the Olinder Cafeteria on Monday.

Yesterday, our District 3 Council member, Sam Liccardo, notified the neighborhoods that a task force would be appointed from all the neighborhoods surrounding the mid-Coyote Creek, between East Hedding St. upstream to Hwy. 280. Over the course of the next year, alternatives will be evaluated and recommended for consideration by the District. Congress member Zoe Lofgren also sent a letter to the neighbors that stated that no project would move forward without her endorsement and that of the neighborhood.

Tomorrow, the Water District will conduct a bus tour for those that signed up on the Monday or Wednesday "open house." The tour will start at Andersen Dam and move downstream, following the virtual flood wave through the reservoir and the creek channel below, heading eventually to South San Francisco Bay. This will hopefully help some of the neighbors visualize the daunting task upon the Water District staff to route a flood wave up to 17,000 cubic feet per second through this highly developed metropolis. It will also be a great opportunity to compare the benefits of flood detention to the less popular and more expensive alternatives of channelization.

But even if most of the flooding can be prevented using the existing reservoirs and other detention facilities like Laguna Seca in Coyote Valley and Lake Cunningham next to Eastridge, the meandering of the river bed through downtown neighborhoods will continue to claim homes built adjacent to Coyote Creek and, in time, we will see a repeat of yesterday's demolition and the demonstration of the forces of the earth, constantly at work in this naturally meandering stream bed.

Another challenge for Henry Waxman: Salt of the Earth

2009-05-06T12:00:00.000-07:00

While Henry Waxman takes on climate change from the federal helm, his home state of California is slowly but surely losing its primary resource: Agriculture

The San Joaquin Valley is the California poster child for desertification through salinization of its soils as a result of using water from the Federal Central Valley Project. This water contains 2 million tons of salt, applied through out each successive irrigation season.

The oceans are the planetary depository for salt. The continents have been contributing salt to the oceans since rain began to fall from the atmosphere. Humans add their piece to the salt flow with their activities, greatly accelerating the salt flow from certain watersheds.

Industrial agriculture adds enormous salt loads to the receiving waters upstream of the ocean and re-distributes salt downstream through irrigation projects, mainly financed by the federal government.

Twenty five years ago, the State was prepared to build a canal around the eastern edge of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and thereby reduce this salt load by half and further restrict pumping if salt levels were too high to deliver water during droughts. That essential piece of plumbing was then called the Peripheral Canal and these have become the most dreaded two words in Sacramento.

In response to the State, certain large agricultural interests financed a campaign to stop the Peripheral Canal with a referendum to reverse the state legislative actions which authorized the Department of Water Resources to build the final link in this massive water system. Most support to kill the canal came from the Delta farmers and cotton empires of the Salyer and JG Boswell, built mostly in Tulare Lake and surrounding wetlands. Read excerpts from The King of California here.

With the success of this one ballot measure, San Joaquin Valley farmers fired the poison dart that would steal this 100 year effort by the US Bureau of Reclamation to reclaim these arid lands for production of food and fiber to supply our nation and much of the world. Over the past twenty-five years, the farm lands have been laced with 50 million tons of salt delivered with the irrigation water, twice as salty as it would have been if the Peripheral Can had been built.

It is while these lands are still a viable agricultural resource that we need to act.

I'd like to see California push toward more sustainable agriculture by lowering the salt content of the irrigation water in the San Joaquin Valley rather than watch the land owners salt it in and then develop the salt flats with urbanscape. This means we build the peripheral canal and design it for considerable sea level rise.

Congress should act soon to simply halt all water rights if land use conversion removes it from its agricultural purposes, even if it is due to loss of productivity due to soil pollution. This will create a major shift in protecting our national agricultural resources by making all farmers perpetual stewards of the land, in exchange for a government-developed supply of water.

This proposal would bring the ag lobby to arms like you've never seen it, but it will be good to force them to show their hand (and strong arm behind it!)

George Miller is one of the few members of Congress who could kick off something like this. Congressman Henry Waxman in Southern California could be his strong ally. Senate allies will probably have to come from outside California, as our incumbent Senators Feinstein and Boxer are already owned by the ag lobby.

When the Peripheral Canal was stopped 25 years ago, I started calling the San Joaquin Valley the new Metropolis of SacroBake, home to 30 million future California residents, unable to grow even a backyard garden in this newly created desert, wondering where their next water will come from: the sky or the good graces of the water managers who control any water coming from the ground or aqueducts and still able to pass the health standards set for salinity? Listen to NPR audio track on California Delta Faces Salty Future.

The world may yet mark us down as one more society that crumbled because of mismanaged irrigated agriculture and a self-imposed victim of too much Salt of The Earth.

Letter to Senator Joe Simitian re Electing Santa Clara Valley Water District Board of Directors

2009-04-18T23:17:00.000-07:00

Please read the letter and if you agree,
please email Senator Simitian through this link:

Senator Joseph Simitian
State Capitol
Sacramento, CA 95814

Dear Senator Simitian:

Recently, the Board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District has asked Assemblyman Joe Coto to carry a bill through the State legislature to amend the District Act as it pertains to electing the Board of Directors as representatives of our community. I respectfully request that you consider introducing a separate bill in the Senate or request substantial amendment of Mr. Coto’s bill. The local delegation of state legislators from Santa Cara County should seize this opportunity to apply the democratic process to management and protection of our local watersheds.

For the past forty years, the Water District board of directors has had five elected directors and two directors appointed by the Board of Supervisors, coupled with budget approval by the BOS, after the District Board review and adoption. This system had a severely distracted Board of Supervisors giving approval to a budget they hardly ever glanced at, let alone vetted for policy compliance and economic or environmental prudence. I called this system the Dilution of Democracy, which involved the appointment of a supervisor's “friend” to either of the two at-large seats on the Water Board to sit as full voting members with the five elected directors.

These appointments were made by alternating north /south appointments between the members of the Board of Supervisors. The boundaries for the residence requirement for the South County appointed seat had about 5-10% of the county’s population while the other seat included the remainder of the County, but actually excluded some cities with Hetch Hetchy contracts. Last year the County finally relinquished this hold on the Water District and the District Act was amended in Sacramento to remove the two appointments and eliminate the BOS budget approval requirement.

It is these two vestiges of old political inertia, scheduled to end on Dec 31, 2009, that has the District Board expressing their desire to keep the number of Board members at seven, using new seven yet-to-be-gerrymandered districts of equal numbers of eligible voters. I believe we deserve and can create a political body that has more practicality than simply preserving the number seven for the available seats on the board of directors.

I hope you will agree that the Water District’s Board, first of all, should represent the very nature of the flow of water, and should be organized by watershed. This is not a new idea for the Water District. When I was first elected to the Board in 1972, there were five separate taxing zones in place, representing the major watersheds in the county: East (Coyote, Silver-Thompson, Penetencia Creeks), Central (Guadalupe/Los Gatos/Alamitos), North Central (Calabasas, San Tomas, Saratoga) Northwest (Baron, Matadero, Stevens & San Francisquito) and South (Uvas/Llagas/Pajaro).

In order to establish the basis for equal representation, each of these watersheds would have to again become separate taxing entities for which watershed activities could be assessed per watershed and not subsidized by other zones with a “revenue surplus.”

The water supply function of the Santa Clara Valley Water District is basically run as a business for the benefit of the entire county. Other water supply wholesalers also operate within the county borders, namely San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, and four regional water recycling programs operated within Santa Clara County. This makes for a very complex approach for getting water to people, through their many water retailers, comprised of both municipal and private/investor-owned utilities.

Since the watersheds probably do not have equal populations, each watershed council should have weighted voting when they meet to manage the Water Utility Enterprise as the “Water Supply Board.” A major benefit of this approach is that watershed boundaries cannot be gerrymandered. They are created by nature and will remain the same, regardless of changes in land use and population.

As the Water Utility Enterprise is run as a business, each watershed council represents the resident-shareholders of each watershed, so each council would have a vote in proportion to its population, using the well known and accepted corporate model. This should take care of the equal representation requirement of the government code. The weighted vote for each watershed can simply be adjusted after each 10-year census.

As these Watershed Council members come together as Water Supply Board, still wearing their watershed hats, if you will, they will be more apt to balance the needs of both the human inhabitants AND the instream/riparian needs within the community. This is a somewhat parallel concept to the city councils acting separately as the Redevelopment Boards while still being elected council members.

Watershed Councils should be elected in open, non-partisan, consolidated primary elections with runoffs in the next general election. Appointments to fill vacancies should be required to gather at least 10% of the registered voters’ support in their electoral Districts and should do so using electronic communications appropriate to the current community standards, sort of like getting fans on Facebook, for example.

As the District is an essential service provider to the cities and the County government, these organizations should have a stronger voice in advising the Water District. A water commission currently exists that includes an elected member of each city, the County BOS and a Water Board member. This group should meet at least quarterly, and more often under drought or flood emergencies, and should be required to read and formally comment on the Water District budget before the Board takes final action to approve its annual or two-year budget.

Other advisory committees should be encouraged by the State’s enabling legislation. Agricultural subsidies, if allowed, should apply to ALL water applied for irrigation of a food crop, not just for commercial food and fiber. Water subsidies for food crop irrigation should be passed on through retailers to consumers. Just as individual home water banks were created during the '86-'91 drought, home/food water banks can be similarly created and monitored through efficient and modern electronic means and be an essential tool for emergency drought management, during a state- or locally-declared emergency.

I am hoping that we can construct a body that works as well as nature, so our politics reflects both the force and delicacy of nature and the human spirit.

Thank you for your consideration of this progressive approach to structuring the Water District’s governance. I will be happy to meet with you or your staff at your earliest convenience.

Never Thirst!

Patrick T. Ferraro, Former Director
Santa Clara Valley Water District. (1972-1995)

Reader comments welcome. Send Senator Simitian your comments.

An Earth Day Celebration that will give us our watersheds forever.

2009-04-18T11:11:00.000-07:00

Dear Water Brothers and Sisters in the Valley of ValleyWater.org

This Earth Day, the political stars are in alignment. It's a day Sacramento politicians can use to demonstrate that our democratic, of-the-people powered, government can craft for our county, a political system that moves us continuously forward toward local watershed stewardship and a more integrated governance structure, in respect for this most precious element, WATER.

Specifically, a hearing is scheduled on Earth Day, April 22, in Sacramento to consider a bill authored by Assemblyman Coto, D-SanJose. The current status of the proposed legislation, AB 466 today, is linked here and printed at the end of this post below:

The bill, as drafted, allows the Water District Board to create seven new political boundaries from which, seven water directors would be elected to the governing Board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District.


I have proposed a more natural alternative.
Within a letter to Senator Joe Simitian,
a natural governance structure was offered for
how we elect our local water policy directors.

Please read the letter in the linked post above
and,if you agree, please follow the links to
tell Senator Simitian that you would like him
to ask for changes in AB 466. Tell him you want a
bill to allow us to elect local water directors

by watersheds rather than 7 gerrymandered political districts.

CURRENT BILL STATUS



MEASURE :  A.B. No. 466
AUTHOR(S) :  Coto (Coauthors: Beall, Fong, Ruskin, and Torrico)
 (Coauthors: Senators Alquist, DeSaulnier, and Maldonado).
TOPIC :  Santa Clara Valley Water District.
HOUSE LOCATION :  ASM
+LAST AMENDED DATE  :  04/15/2009


TYPE OF BILL :  
                Active
                Non-Urgency
                Non-Appropriations
                Majority Vote Required
                State-Mandated Local Program
                Fiscal
                Non-Tax Levy

LAST HIST. ACT. DATE:  04/16/2009
LAST HIST. ACTION   :  Re-referred to Com. on  L. GOV.
COMM. LOCATION :  ASM LOCAL GOVERNMENT
HEARING DATE :  04/22/2009

TITLE :  An act to amend Sections 13.2 and 20 of, to add Sections
 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 7.9, 7.10, 7.11, and 8 to, and
 to repeal and add Sections 7, 7.1, and 7.3 of, the Santa
 Clara Valley Water District Act (Chapter 1405 of the
 Statutes of 1951), relating to the Santa Clara Valley
 Water District.

Spring Loose, Down the Rabbit Hole

2009-04-09T16:00:00.000-07:00

The Spring celebrations continue across every culture throughout every continent in the Northern half of planet Earth. The Persian New Year of Iran is celebrated as Narouz. The Jewish descendants of Abraham hold Seder and remember again their end of slavery in Egypt. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, the Jewish festival of Purim is probably adopted from the Persian New Year. Christians celebrate the equinox with new life from death, nature's familiar cycles, projected so closely onto their new age rabbi, Jesus, the Christ.

Easter is the Spring celebration I grew up enjoying. Even after my spirituality evolved from the Jesuit (Society of Jesus) school variety into an Earth-based connection to the divine, we continued to celebrate Easter with egg hunts with our young children.

Today, I wish people of any culture the universal greeting of Happy Spring as we continue to ride our beautiful planet on this annual path around the Sun.

San Jose Gets Back to its Roots

2009-04-05T16:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, April 4, 2009, the Master Gardeners brought us back in time as they sold heirloom chilies and tomatoes at the San Jose History Park. While this location was not as earthy as the previous sales' location at Emma Prusch Park at Story & King, having the plant sale at the History Park was a fitting and timely reminder that this used to be called the Valley of Heart's Delight, as it grew and processed millions of tons of produce which fed much of the nation.

Today we feed the world information and communication technology, beginning with the silicon chip, which eventually became our new delight and namesake. Laptops, PC's, cell phones and digital storage devices have replaced canned tomatoes, fresh cherries and locally-grown eggs and meat products.

But despite all this advancement in technology and economic benefits, we still require food on a fairly regular basis. A strong message is creeping across our mass consciousness that we need to grow our food locally. As Michael Pollan suggests:" We need to (at least) shake the hand that feeds you."

People are joining Community Supported Agriculture (CSA's) and at least meeting each other in neighbor's homes where shares are divided and bagged for pickup.Our community gardens all have long waiting lists. A big boost was Michele Obama digging up part of the White House lawn on the Spring Equinox and planting an organic garden.

But on this weekend, hundreds of people showed up and quickly filled the adjacent parking lot and whisked off thousand of Chili pepper and tomato starts. Spring gardeners, being energized by the warm sunshine, actually also parked and walked along Coyote Creek for several hundred yards from the Happy Hollow parking lot to the History Park.

I bought just 5 starts from the Master Gardeners, including a had-to-have chili pepper called Neapolitano. I then ventured out to observe what wares and plants other vendors were selling. The old town square gazebo's nearby even had an old gent lecturing on the essential nature of water to gardening, I didn't think that I should intervene with a political discussion of managing mandatory water rationing and, at the same time, planting food that requires three to five feet of irrigation during the summer growing season.

A couple brave Water District employees also were present in a nearby kiosk to answer questions. I would have loved to hear all those conversations as well. But I was certainly not going to reduce, in any way, the enjoyment of so many eager gardener-citizens out on a Spring Saturday morning. Instead, I am hereby quietly rejoicing as I watch as the people of San Jose bring our community back to its roots.

Tap Water

2009-03-26T10:41:00.000-07:00

My friend, Niki, in Houston sent me this link this morning, of two white 'mercan woman selling glass bottles sporting a label with a picture of a tap and the words tap water.
$12.95 plus shipping, with $2 going to UNICEF.

Below is my response:

Niki,

When I watched this, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

But then I noticed they allowed posting of comments so I did:

" I'll send $2 to UNICEF directly and skip the the considerable carbon footprint of shipping me a glass bottle with the unnecessary and silly label. Are you people just putting me on?"

I thought they would quickly delete my comment. Instead, they posted a comment on my blog.

So I guess they really do have the heart to help people everywhere have safe drinking water through the Tap Project. So click through and make a donation today.

Never Thirst!

Water on my mind.

2009-03-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

Today, the San Jose Mercury News featured a story about water rationing by Paul Rogers, to which I posted this reply.

I also drafted a letter to Senator Joe Simitian that asks him to author a bill to create a water board elected by watersheds.

Please read the letter and if you agree, please email Senator Simitian through this link:

Senator Joseph Simitian
State Capitol
Sacramento, CA 95814

Dear Senator Simitian:

Recently, the Board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District has asked Assemblyman Joe Coto to carry a bill through the State legislature to amend the District Act as it pertains to electing the Board of Directors as representatives of our community. I respectfully request that you consider introducing a separate bill in the Senate or request substantial amendment of Mr. Coto’s bill. The local delegation of state legislators from Santa Cara County should seize this opportunity to apply the democratic process to management and protection of our local watersheds.

For the past forty years, the Water District board of directors has had five elected directors and two directors appointed by the Board of Supervisors, coupled with budget approval by the BOS, after the District Board review and adoption. This system had a severely distracted Board of Supervisors giving approval to a budget they hardly ever glanced at, let alone vetted for policy compliance and economic or environmental prudence. I called this system the Dilution of Democracy, which involved the appointment of a supervisor's “friend” to either of the two at-large seats on the Water Board to sit as full voting members with the five elected directors.

These appointments were made by alternating north /south appointments between the members of the Board of Supervisors. The boundaries for the residence requirement for the South County appointed seat had about 5-10% of the county’s population while the other seat included the remainder of the County, but actually excluded some cities with Hetch Hetchy contracts. Last year the County finally relinquished this hold on the Water District and the District Act was amended in Sacramento to remove the two appointments and eliminate the BOS budget approval requirement.

It is these two vestiges of old political inertia, scheduled to end on Dec 31, 2009, that has the District Board expressing their desire to keep the number of Board members at seven, using new seven yet-to-be-gerrymandered districts of equal numbers of eligible voters. I believe we deserve and can create a political body that has more practicality than simply preserving the number seven for the available seats on the board of directors.

I hope you will agree that the Water District’s Board, first of all, should represent the very nature of the flow of water, and should be organized by watershed. This is not a new idea for the Water District. When I was first elected to the Board in 1972, there were five separate taxing zones in place, representing the major watersheds in the county: East (Coyote, Silver-Thompson, Penetencia Creeks), Central (Guadalupe/Los Gatos/Alamitos), North Central (Calabasas, San Tomas, Saratoga) Northwest (Baron, Matadero, Stevens & San Francisquito) and South (Uvas/Llagas/Pajaro).

In order to establish the basis for equal representation, each of these watersheds would have to again become separate taxing entities for which watershed activities could be assessed per watershed and not subsidized by other zones with a “revenue surplus.”

The water supply function of the Santa Clara Valley Water District is basically run as a business for the benefit of the entire county. Other water supply wholesalers also operate within the county borders, namely San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, and four regional water recycling programs operated within Santa Clara County. This makes for a very complex approach for getting water to people, through their many water retailers, comprised of both municipal and private/investor-owned utilities.

Since the watersheds probably do not have equal populations, each watershed council should have weighted voting when they meet to manage the Water Utility Enterprise as the “Water Supply Board.” A major benefit of this approach is that watershed boundaries cannot be gerrymandered. They are created by nature and will remain the same, regardless of changes in land use and population.

As the Water Utility Enterprise is run as a business, each watershed council represents the resident-shareholders of each watershed, so each council would have a vote in proportion to its population, using the well known and accepted corporate model. This should take care of the equal representation requirement of the government code. The weighted vote for each watershed can simply be adjusted after each 10-year census.

As these Watershed Council members come together as Water Supply Board, still wearing their watershed hats, if you will, they will be more apt to balance the needs of both the human inhabitants AND the instream/riparian needs within the community. This is a somewhat parallel concept to the city councils acting separately as the Redevelopment Boards while still being elected council members.

Watershed Councils should be elected in open, non-partisan, consolidated primary elections with runoffs in the next general election. Appointments to fill vacancies should be required to gather at least 10% of the registered voters’ support in their electoral Districts and should do so using electronic communications appropriate to the current community standards, sort of like getting fans on Facebook, for example.

As the District is an essential service provider to the cities and the County government, these organizations should have a stronger voice in advising the Water District. A water commission currently exists that includes an elected member of each city, the County BOS and a Water Board member. This group should meet at least quarterly, and more often under drought or flood emergencies, and should be required to read and formally comment on the Water District budget before the Board takes final action to approve its annual or two-year budget.

Other advisory committees should be encouraged by the State’s enabling legislation. Agricultural subsidies, if allowed, should apply to ALL water applied for irrigation of a food crop, not just for commercial food and fiber. Water subsidies for food crop irrigation should be passed on through retailers to consumers. Just as individual home water banks were created during the '86-'91 drought, home/food water banks can be similarly created and monitored through efficient and modern electronic means and be an essential tool for emergency drought management, during a state- or locally-declared emergency.

I am hoping that we can construct a body that works as well as nature, so our politics reflects both the force and delicacy of nature and the human spirit.

Thank you for your consideration of this progressive approach to structuring the Water District’s governance. I will be happy to meet with you or your staff at your earliest convenience.

Never Thirst!

Patrick T. Ferraro, Former Director
Santa Clara Valley Water District. (1972-1995)

Reader comments welcome. Send Senator Simitian your comments.

O'Brien, O'Bama, O'FerrarO, again

2009-03-17T12:58:00.000-07:00

Today is Saint Patrick's Day, so we're all Irish and join in wearing of the GREEN. just like our Earth Mother in Spring.

The Earth is so green right now, right here in San Jose and much of the northern hemisphere. Here in Norte California, we might call her Madre del Norte.

Many cultures celebrate the Spring equinox as their new year. This past weekend I spent two days of celebration with the Aztec, Zuni and many other native American cultures to celebrate their new year. I was so honored to see three hundred festively garbed dancers in circle on the campus of Hispanic University lead by their chieftains and drummers through ritual moves that represent centuries of tradition which honor our Earth Mother.

Now two days later, the rest of the hemisphere can also celebrate the spring as we join our western European earth family members to celebrate around one of their folk heroes, St Patty.

I loved the wonderful singing video about President Obama's Irish roots, which gave great pleasure and tickled everyone who's name name started with O'. This reminded me about a St Patty's Day about 30 years ago when Danny O'Brien put his maniacal energy to work organizing the first ever, (that we're aware of) St Patrick's Day parade through the streets of downtown San Jose.

When Dan was in high gear, everyone around him got involved with his madness of the moment. He got his neighbor Don to get his antique car out of storage and into the parade. And he got me to be the rear guard for the parade using one of my twelve-ton bobtail moving vans. The truck's one decoration was a large GREEN O in front of the Ferraro Van Lines lettering on the side of the truck. The parade was televised on the 6:00 News on Channel 11, KNTV. My dear friend and anchorwoman, Maggie Scura, just cracked up when she had to read O"Ferraro from the teleprompter during the news piece.

Today, I found one of those O's that we taped to the side of the truck. I hung it by our front door, on the same hook that we hang our solstice wreath in December. Later when I went downtown, I taped it where my rear window on my GEM would be, if it had one. Not too many people would know the historical significance of a plastic O, cut out from the bottom of a green plastic garbage can, but it sure tickled me, as nowadays my friends are starting to call me trash man, as I join other trash warriors in removing our rafts of litter from our local creeks.

What better tribute to Mother Nature than for us to gather together on the Spring Equinox, March 21st, to remove the fugitive emissions of our over-packaged consumerism from the habitat of the fish, foul and other creatures who are inhabitants our urban riparian corridors.

This is more hard work than ceremony, but as much of our love for the earth does change our spiritual rituals, it certainly changes our politics, as well. I prefer to only fly the earth flag, except maybe for the 4th of July parade, when I'll ADD a small version of the stars and stripes. My astute and word-smithing mate, Cari, calls this matriatism.

Blessed Be
and Happy St. Patrick's Spring Celebration.

Leave Only Hand Prints

2009-03-02T14:17:00.000-08:00

Hikers into wilderness areas know well the golden rule "Leave only footprints" as they pack in and out all sorts of packaged food and camping gear which they have deemed necessities for their sojourn. But here in the city, we hardly think twice, or even once, about the trail of human-made excretia that we leave behind us as we conduct our daily lives in crowded urban conditions.

But as this city gets more crowded, a wonderful thing also happens. Our deep earth-born spirit needs to reconnect with the natural and many folks are finding their way back to nature right here in Silicon Valley, without having to leave on a remote hiking trip into the Sierra Nevada mountains or beyond. While we have paved over nearly 400 square miles of this fertile valley's top soil, we fortunately have not paved over all the local creeks and rivers flowing to South San Francisco Bay and Monterey Bay.

It is in these natural creeks that we can observe the cycles of carbon and water in full operation. We see aquatic organisms, from the microscopic to the avian and terrestial critters that live among us in these verdant strips teeming with life. And we also see the hand of humans, sometime in complete conflict or disregard for those living systems, which did not evolve with these human interferences in their habitat.

We build bridges over rivers, of course. Concrete abutments displace creek bank areas which then preclude tree growth and the reduces water shading of a continuous canopy. We build diversion structures to remove flow from the rivers for flood control or water supply. The most drastic thing that we do to creeks, however, is connect storm drain from streets, highways, and parking lots, allowing unfiltered and rapidly drained rain runoff to be discharged directly into our local creeks, rivers and bays.

Urban storm water runoff is a stew,laced with droppings from our cars and our homes, our commerce and even our farming operations. Fuels, hydraulic fluids, fertilizers and pesticides, fine copper dust from our brake pads, and mercury from mine tailings left in upper Almaden Valley 150 years ago are all sources of pollution that finds its way into our local creeks. Most of this takes a water chemist to identify, and, with local monitoring programs being funded, we are more aware of how serious this kind of pollution is impacting the sustainability of the ecosystems of our local waterways.

But the pollution of the local creeks that is most evident to Joe and Jane Citizen is TRASH. As local residents flock more and more to creekside trails and parks, they become quickly disgusted when they see trash on otherwise beautiful creek banks and water surfaces. Neighborhood organizations, hiking and bicycle clubs and schools are adopting a much more proactive stand in fighting back against the endless flow of trash that is reaching our creeks.

Last week, my Naglee Park neighbors started to mobilize to remove a trash raft in the vicinity of the East San Antonio Street bridge, and began to warm up with picking up trash in Williams Street Park over the weekend. I volunteered to pick up trash on the east bank of Coyote Creek, up and down stream of the William Street.

With rain in the forecast and Water District trucks already dispatched to pick up our haul on Monday, I got a jump on the trash picking on Friday. I started at my home and began scouting below the eucalyptus grove opposite the Water District's Outdoor Classroom, located off Williams Street, just down stream of the William St. bridge.

About 100 feet upstream of my lot line, I found a private garbage dump for the tenants of the duplexes south of my home on Brookwood Drive. My son and I loaded about a half ton of trash into my pickup truck and bagged another half ton and piled it back on the other side of the fence, which so conveniently block these tenants view of their trash pile.

I then contacted the owner by phone and suggested that the solid wooden picket fence be replaced with chain link so that the trash won't seem to just "go away" when someone throws it over the fence. I also called the property manager and asked for some help in hauling this mess to the scheduled pick up location at the William St. bridge abutment, but no one ever showed up, but we proceeded anyway.

This morning, in a light drizzle, I drove my pickup truck to the bridge and unloaded my first load near the north side of the east bridge abutment. My neighbor, Sergio and I also carried five heavy bags across the bridge that were collected along the west bank by Sarabelle Hitchner and Sharon Knopf on Saturday morning. Then the Water District crew showed up and we went into high gear, loading first the remaining mess which, on Friday, Nick & I had pulled through the fence behind the two duplexes just south of my home, and then returned to load all the pile stacked near the William Street bridge. I would guess this entire load weighed one to one and a half tons, and will add to the incredible statistic of the tons of trash removed each year by the Water District crews and volunteer trash warriors.

I was happy to see a sign a sign on the truck designating it as assigned to the Coyote Watershed, the largest watershed in the county, at 320 square miles, with over 100 sq.mi. of paved urbanscape below the Andersen Dam near Morgan Hill.

Paul and Dennis are two Water District employees
who don't have trouble sleeping at night, as they spend their days doing real work, loading their Sterling Compactor with tons of trash removed day after day from creeks throughout Santa Clara County.

The pictures in this blog post were taken by my wife, Cari, and the one at the end is a hand print left by one of the Brookwood kids that have grown up in this wonderful neighborhood. I thank her for helping to document some of my most satisfying water-related action in which I have participated during the last four decades of living near Coyote Creek in downtown San Jose. I am also very encouraged by the neighborhoods response to the call for more attention and mitigation of the creek trash problem.

Blessings & thank you Creek Trash Warriors. The ducks and their colleagues living in the creek appreciate your efforts.

Water Brother From Another Mother

2009-02-25T15:10:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had the honor of speaking to a California History class in the California History Center on the De Anza College campus in Cupertino, California, the real heart of Silicon Valley and home to Apple Computer. The class is taught by my friend of many years, Anne Hickling.

Ann also lives along a riparian corridor as I do. Only she actually grew up in this family home, so, except for her college years, she has spent her entire life as a critter of a local creek.

Ann also takes great pride in her devotion to the study of history and actively sharing her journey of that quest with her students at De Anza College. Yesterday, I was invited to share my thoughts on the water development history of California and Silicon Valley. Paying homage to the screenagers in the classroom (all of us) Ann recorded a video still of the State map which showed rainfall patterns, watersheds & rivers, and engineered aqueducts. The other image in the room was not a hologram but me actually there talking.

In a classroom filled with students, some are there for credit and/or grades, on that paper chase for a degree and a better salary somewhere else. But some people in the room flip open a 'Learning Switch' and actually let some information lodge in that part of the brain where you suddenly connect it as part of your life. You must pay attention to this for your own survival and well being. One or two students did seem to reach this point during the lecture, and Ann is always excited to be learning more about her State and Valley water history and hearing an updated political review of current water management issues.

I explained why I thought the Water District should have a new governance structure that is based on watersheds. This reminded Ann of a poet and philosopher named Gary Snyder. As part of her thanks for my lecturing to her class, Ann sent me the following e-mail which included a great piece about Gary Snyder that deserves to be archived here, as today I realized Gary Snyder is truly a Water Brother From Another Mother:

Hi Pat-

Thank you for the good telling of the story today. It was very good for them to hear it from you.

And thank for the wood smoked mozzarella pizza and conversation.

I think I remember Cari having done a Gary Snyder line in calligraphy... So I send this article I found:

The Wild Mind of Gary Snyder

By Trevor Carolan

For the nineties, the celebrated Beat rebel advocates "wild mind," neighborhood values and watershed politics. "Wild mind," he says, "means elegantly self-disciplined, self-regulating. That's what wilderness is. Nobody has a management plan for it."

Asked if he grows tired of talking about ecological stewardship, digging in, and coalition-building, the poet Gary Snyder responds with candor: "Am I tired of talking about it? I'm tired of doing it!" he roars. "But hey, you've got to keep doing it. That's part of politics, and politics is more than winning and losing at the polls."

These days, there's an honest, conservative-sounding ring to the politics of the celebrated Beat rebel. Gary Snyder, though, has little in common with the right wingers who currently prevail throughout the western world.

"Conservatism has some very valid meanings," he says. "Of course, most of the people who call themselves conservative aren't that, because they're out to extract and use, to turn a profit. Curiously, eco and artist people and those who work with dharma practice are conservatives in the best sense of the word-we're trying to save a few things!

"Care for the environment is like noblesse oblige," he maintains. "You don't do it because it has to be done. You do it because it's beautiful. That's the bodhisattva spirit. The bodhisattva is not anxious to do good, or feels obligation or anything like that. In Jodo-shin Buddhism, which my wife was raised in, the bodhisattva just says, 'I picked up the tab for everybody. Goodnight folks...' "

Five years ago, in a prodigious collection of essays called The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder introduced a pair of distinctive ideas to our vocabulary of ecological inquiry. Grounded in a lifetime of nature and wilderness observation, Snyder offered the "etiquette of freedom" and "practice of the wild" as root prescriptions for the global crisis.

Informed by East-West poetics, land and wilderness issues, anthropology, benevolent Buddhism, and Snyder's long years of familiarity with the bush and high mountain places, these principles point to the essential and life-sustaining relationship between place and psyche.

Such ideas have been at the heart of Snyder's work for the past forty years. When Jack Kerouac wrote of a new breed of counterculture hero in The Dharma Bums, it was a thinly veiled account of his adventures with Snyder in the mid-l950's. Kerouac's effervescent reprise of a West Coast dharma-warrior's dedication to "soil conservation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, astronomy, geology, Hsuan Tsang's travels, Chinese painting theory, reforestation, Oceanic ecology and food chains" remains emblematic of the terrain Snyder has explored in the course of his life.

One of our most active and productive poets, Gary Snyder has also been one of our most visible.
Returning to California in 1969 after a decade abroad, spent mostly as a lay Zen Buddhist monk in Japan, he homesteaded in the Sierras and worked the lecture trail for sixteen years while raising a young family. By his own reckoning he has seen "practically every university in the United States."

As poet-essayist, Snyder's work has been uncannily well-timed, contributing to his reputation as a farseeing and weatherwise interpreter of cultural change. With his current collection of essays, A Place In Space, Snyder brings welcome news of what he's been thinking about in recent years. Organized around the themes of "Ethics, Aesthetics and Watersheds," it opens with a discussion of Snyder's Beat Generation experience.

"It was simply a different time in the American economy," he explained when I spoke to him recently in Seattle. "It used to be that you came into a strange town, picked up work, found an apartment, stayed a while, then moved on. Effortless. All you had to have was a few basic skills and be willing to work. That's the kind of mobility you see celebrated by Kerouac in On The Road. For most Americans, it was taken for granted. It gave that insouciant quality to the young working men of North America who didn't have to go to college if they wanted to get a job.

"I know this because in 1952 I was able to hitch-hike into San Francisco, stay at a friend's, and get a job within three days through the employment agency. With an entry level job, on an entry level wage, I found an apartment on Telegraph Hill that I could afford and I lived in the city for a year. Imagine trying to live in San Francisco or New York-any major city-on an entry level wage now? You can't do it. Furthermore, the jobs aren't that easy to get."

The freedom and openness of the post-war economy made it possible for people such as Snyder, Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lew Welch and others to disaffiliate from mainstream American dreams of respectability. And as Snyder writes, these "proletarian bohemians" chose even further disaffiliation, refusing to write "the sort of thing that middle-class Communist intellectuals think proletarian literature ought to be."

"In making choices like that, we were able to choose and learn other tricks for not being totally engaged with consumer culture," he says. "We learned how to live simply and were very good at it in my generation. That was what probably helped shape our sense of community. We not only knew each other, we depended on each other. We shared with each other. "And there is a new simple-living movement coming back now, I understand," he notes, "where people are getting together, comparing notes about how to live on less money, how to share, living simply."

When Gary Snyder points something out, it generally warrants attention: his thinking has consistently been ahead of the cultural learning curve. Nowhere is his prescience more obvious than in "A Virus Runs Through It," an unpublished review of William Burroughs' 1962 The Ticket That Exploded.

Snyder regarded Burroughs' portrait of a society obsessed with addiction and consumerism, "whipped up by advertising," as an omen. He concluded that Burroughs' "evocation of the politics of addiction, mass madness, and virus panic, is all too prophetic."

"We were very aware of heroin addiction at that time," Snyder explains. "Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Holmes and their circle in New York became fascinated with the metaphor of addiction in the light of heroin, smack. Marijuana was not an issue, but the intense addictive quality of heroin, and the good people who were getting drawn into it, and the romance some people had for it, was a useful framework for thinking about the nature of capitalist society and the addiction to fossil fuels in the industrial sector. It was obvious."

Many of Snyder's original arguments addressing pollution and our addiction to consumption have by now become mainstream: reduced fossil fuel dependence, recycling, responsible resource harvesting. Others remain works-in-progress: effective soil conservation, economics as a "small subbranch of ecology," learning to "break the habit of acquiring unnecessary possessions," division by natural and cultural boundaries rather than arbitrary political boundaries.

As an ecological philosopher, Snyder's role has been to point out first the problems, and then the hard medicine that must be swallowed. Snyder has become synonymous with integrity-a good beginning place if your wilderness poetics honor "clean-running rivers; the presence of pelican and osprey and gray whale in our lives; salmon and trout in our streams; unmuddied language and good dreams."

"My sense of the West Coast," he says, "is that it runs from somewhere about the Big Sur River-the southern-most river that salmon run in-from there north to the Straits of Georgia and beyond, to Glacier Bay in southern Alaska. It is one territory in my mind. People all relate to each other across it; we share a lot of the same concerns and text and a lot of the same trees and birds."

Raised in the Pacific Northwest, Snyder grew up close to the anthropomorphic richness of the local Native American mythology, the rainforest totems of eagle, bear, raven and killer whale that continue to appear in school and community insignias as important elements of regional consciousness. It is unsurprising that they-and roustabout cousins like Coyote-have long been found at the core of Snyder's expansive vision.

Literal-minded rationalists have had difficulty with Snyder's Buddhist-oriented eco-philosophy and poetics. His embrace of Native Indian lore only further ruffled orthodox literary imagination, and in the past his poetry was criticized as being thin, loose or scattered.

As Snyder readers know, the corrective to such interpretations of his work is more fresh air and exercise. Regarding Buddhism, his take is offered simply and efficiently. "The marks of Buddhist teaching," he writes in A Place In Space, "are impermanence, no-self, the inevitability of suffering and connectedness, emptiness, the vastness of mind, and a way to realization."

"It seems evident," he writes, offering insight into the dynamics of his admittedly complex world view, "that there are throughout the world certain social and religious forces that have worked through history toward an ecologically and culturally enlightened state of affairs. Let these be encouraged: Gnostics, hip Marxists, Teilhard de Chardin Catholics, Druids, Taoists, Biologists, Witches, Yogins, Bhikkus, Quakers, Sufis, Tibetans, Zens, Shamans, Bushmen, American Indians, Polynesians, Anarchists, Alchemists, primitive cultures, communal and ashram movements, cooperative ventures."

"Idealistic, these?" he says when asked about such alternative "Third Force" social movements. "In some cases the vision can be mystical; it can be Blake. It crops up historically with William Penn and the Quakers trying to make the Quaker communities in Pennsylvania a righteous place to live-treating the native peoples properly in the process. It crops up in the utopian and communal experience of Thoreau's friends in New England.

"As utopian and impractical as it might seem, it comes through history as a little dream of spiritual elegance and economic simplicity, and collaboration and cooperating communally-all of those things together. It may be that it was the early Christian vision. Certainly it was one part of the early Buddhist vision. It turns up as a reflection of the integrity of tribal culture; as a reflection of the kind of energy that would try to hold together the best lessons of tribal cultures even within the overwhelming power and dynamics of civilization."

Any paradigm for a truly healthy culture, Gary Snyder argues, must begin with surmounting narrow personal identity and finding a commitment to place. Characteristically, he finds a way of remaking the now tired concept of "sense of place" into something fresh and vital. The rural model of place, he emphasizes, is no longer the only model for the healing of our culture.

"Lately I've been noticing how many more people who tend toward counterculture thinking are turning up at readings and book signings in the cities and the suburbs," he says. "They're everywhere. What I emphasize more and more is that a bioregional consciousness is equally powerful in a city or in the suburbs. Just as a watershed flows through each of these places, it also includes them.

"One of the models I use now is how an ecosystem resembles a mandala," he explains. "A big Tibetan mandala has many small figures as well as central figures, and each of them has a key role in the picture: they're all essential. The whole thing is an educational tool for understanding-that's where the ecosystem analogy comes in. Every creature, even the little worms and insects, has value. Everything is valuable—that's the measure of the system."

To Snyder, value also translates as responsibility. Within his approach to digging in and committing to a place is the acceptance of responsible stewardship. Snyder maintains that it is through this engaged sense of effort and practice-participating in what he salutes as "the tiresome but tangible work of school boards, county supervisors, local foresters, local politics"-that we find our real community, our real culture. "Ultimately, values go back to our real interactions with others," he says. "That's where we live, in our communities.

"You know, I want to say something else," he continues. "In the past months and years Carole my wife has been amazing. I do my teaching and my work with the Yuba Watershed Institute, but she's incredible; she puts out so much energy. One of the things that makes it possible for us and our neighbors to do all this is that the husbands and wives really are partners; they help out and trade off. They develop different areas of expertise and they help keep each other from burning out. It's a great part of being a family and having a marriage-becoming fellow warriors, side to side."

In 1968, Snyder stated flatly that, "The modern American family is the smallest and most barren family that has ever existed." Throughout the years his recommendations concerning new approaches to the idea of family and relationships have customarily had a pagan, tribal flavor. These days he calls it community.

"I'm learning, as we all do, what it takes to have an ongoing relationship with our children," he says. "I have two grown sons, two stepdaughters, a nephew who's twenty-seven, and all their friends whom I know. We're still helping each other out. There's a real cooperative spirit. There's a fatherly responsibility there, and a warm, cooperative sense of interaction, of family as extended family, one that moves imperceptibly toward community and a community-values sense.

"So I'm urging people not to get stuck with that current American catch-phrase 'family values,' and not to throw it away either, but to translate it into community values. Neighborhood values are ecosystem values, because they include all the beings.

"What I suspect may emerge in the political spectrum is a new kind of conservative, one which is socially liberal, in the specific sense that it will be free of racial or religious prejudice. The bugaboo, that one really bad flaw of the right wing, except for the Libertarians, is its racist and anti-Semitic and anti-personal-liberty tone.

"A political spectrum that has respect for traditions, and at the same time is non-racist and tolerant about different cultures, is an interesting development. I'd be willing to bet that it's in the process of emerging, similar in a way to the European Green Parties that say, 'We're neither on the left nor the right; we're in front.'

"One of the things I'm trying to do, and I believe it's the right way to work," he says, "is to be non-adversarial-to go about it as tai chi, as ju-jitsu. To go with the direction of a local community issue, say, and change it slightly. We don't have to run head-on. We can say to the other party, 'You've got a lot of nice energy; let's see if we can run this way' "

Yet as anyone involved in community activism learns, amicable resolutions are not always the result. "Sometimes you do have to go head to head on an issue," he agrees, "and that's kind of fun too. 'Showing up' is good practice."

Snyder remembers a fight some four years ago over open pit mining. "I was the lead person on this one, to get an initiative on the ballot that would ban open pit mining, or at least put a buffer zone around any open pit mine. The mining companies from out of town spent a lot of money and did some really intense, last minute, nasty style campaigning, so we lost at the polls.

"But not a single open pit mine has been tried in our county since then. We understand from our interactions with these people that we won their respect. They were smart enough to see that they may have won it at the polls, but we were ready to raise money and willing to fight. That's standing up."

With the growing importance of community coalition-building, Snyder says he is finding it increasingly useful to narrow down his ideas about bioregionalism, or his notion of a practice of the wild, to a shared neighborhood level.

"That's why I talk about watersheds," he explains. "Symbolically and literally they're the mandalas of our lives. They provide the very idea of the watershed's social enlargement, and quietly present an entry into the spiritual realm that nobody has to think of or recognize as being spiritual.

"The watershed is our only local Buddha mandala, one that gives us all, human and non-human, a territory to interact in. That is the beginning of dharma citizenship: not membership in a social or national sphere, but in a larger community citizenship. In other words, a sangha; a local dharma community. All of that is in there, like Dogen when he says, 'When you find your place, practice begins.' "

Thirteenth-century master Dogen Zenji is a classical Asian voice which Snyder has discussed frequently in recent years. "There are several levels of meaning in what Dogen says. There's the literal meaning, as in when you settle down somewhere. This means finding the right teaching, the right temple, the right village. Then you can get serious about your practice.

"Underneath, there's another level of implication: you have to understand that there are such things as places. That's where Americans have yet to get to. They don't understand that there are places. So I quote Dogen and people say, 'What do you mean, you have to find your place? Anywhere is okay for dharma practice because it's spiritual.' Well, yes, but not just any place. It has to be a place that you've found yourself. It's never abstract, always concrete."

If embracing the responsibility of the place and the moment is his prescription, a key principle in this creative stewardship is waking up to "wild mind." He clarifies that "wild" in this context does not mean chaotic, excessive or crazy.

"It means self-organizing," he says. "It means elegantly self-disciplined, self-regulating, self-maintained. That's what wilderness is. Nobody has to do the management plan for it. So I say to people, "let's trust in the self-disciplined elegance of wild mind". Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking, brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness."

This is Gary Snyder's wild medicine. From the beginning, it has been devotion to this quality that has served as his bedrock of practice, his way of carving out a place of freedom in the wall of American culture. In his omission of the personal in favor of the path, he exemplifies the basics of the Zen tradition in which he was trained. The influx of trained Asian teachers of the Buddhadharma to the West in recent years has raised questions about whether the first homespun blossoming of Beat-flavored Buddhism in the fifties actually included the notion of practice. As one who was there and has paid his dues East and West, Snyder's response is heartening.

"In Buddhism and Hinduism, there are two streams: the more practice-oriented and the more devotional streams," he explains. "Technically speaking, the two tendencies are called bhakta and jnana. Bhakta means devotional; jnana means wisdom/practice. Contemporary Hinduism, for example, is almost entirely devotional-the bhakta tradition.

"Catholicism is a devotional religion, too, and Jack Kerouac - s Buddhism had the flavor of a devotional Buddhism. In Buddhism the idea that anybody can do practice is strongly present. In Catholicism practice is almost entirely thought of as entering an order or as becoming a lay novitiate of an order. So that explains Jack's devotional flavor. There's nothing wrong with devotional Buddhism. It is its own creative religious approach, and it's very much there in Tibetan Buddhism too.

"Our western Buddhism has been strongly shaped by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Asian intellectuals," he notes. "D. T. Suzuki was an intellectual strongly influenced by western thought. And the same is true of other early interpreters of Buddhism to the West.

"We came as westerners to Buddhism generally with an educated background," Snyder continues. "So we have tended to over-emphasize the intellectual and spiritual sides of it, with the model at hand of Zen, without realizing that a big part of the flavor of Buddhism, traditionally and historically, is devotional.

This is not necessarily tied to doing a lot of practice, but is tied to having an altar in the house-putting flowers in front of it every day, burning incense in front of it every day, having the children bow and burn incense before it. The family may also observe certain Buddhist holy days such as the Buddha's birthday by visiting a temple together, and so forth.

"With that perspective in mind, it isn't so easy to say, 'Oh well, Jack Kerouac wasn't a real Buddhist.' He was a devotional Buddhist, and like many Asians do, he mixed up his Buddhism with several different religions. So it's okay; there's nothing wrong with that. You can be a perfectly good Buddhist without necessarily doing a lot of exercises and sitting and yoga; you can be equally a good Buddhist by keeping flowers on your altar, or in winter, dry grass or cedar twigs..

"There's a big tendency right now in western Buddhism to psychologize it-to try and take the superstition, the magic, the irrationality out of it and make it into a kind of therapy. You see that a lot," he says. "Let me say that I'm grateful for the fact that I lived in Asia for so long and hung out with Asian Buddhists. I appreciate that Buddhism is a whole practice and isn't just limited to the lecture side of it; that it has stories and superstition and ritual and goofiness like that. I love that aspect of it more and more."

Snyder says that at age sixty-five, he's "working like a demon." For the past ten years he has taught creative writing at the University of California, leading workshops and participating in the interdisciplinary "Nature and Culture" program. This year will also mark the arrival of his long-awaited sequence of forty-five poems called "Mountains and Rivers Without End," portions of which have appeared intermittently since Jack Kerouac first dropped word of it in The Dharma Bums.

"I realized I wasn't going to live forever and that I'd started a lot of parallel projects, with lots of interesting notes to each one, so it - d be a pity not to put all that information to good use. Once 'Mountains and Rivers' is done I won't have to write anything further. Anything after that is for fun. Maybe I won't be a writer anymore. Maybe I'll clean out my barn."

Aging and health are not at issue with Snyder. He works at keeping in good condition and several months ago spent three weeks hiking in the Himalayas with a group of family and friends

"We trekked up to base camp at Everest, went over 18,000 feet three times, and were seven days above 16,000 feet," he says with obvious relish. "Everybody was in pretty good shape and I only lost four pounds in a month, so I'm not thinking a whole lot about aging."

Snyder's recent journey provided him with insights into the questions of karma and reincarnation, which eco-philosopher Joanna Macy believes may hold special relevance for North Americans. She argues that deeply ingrained American frontier values such as individualism, personal mobility, and independence may contribute to the idea that, "If this is our only one-time life, then we don't have to care about the planet."

"The concept of reincarnation in India can literally shape the way one lives in the world," Snyder notes, "and many Tibetans also believe in reincarnation quite literally. So in that frame of mind, the world becomes completely familiar. You sit down and realize that 'I've been men, women, animals; there are no forms that are alien to me.'

"That's why everyone in India looks like they're living in eternity. They walk along so relaxed, so confident, so unconcerned about their poverty or their illness, or whatever it is, even if they're beggars. It goes beyond just giving you a sense of concern for the planet; it goes so far as to say, 'Planets come and go' It's pretty powerful stuff. It's also there in classical Buddhism where people say, 'I've had enough of experience.' That's where a lot of Buddhism in India starts-'I want out of the meat wheel of existence,' as Jack Kerouac says.

"An ecosystem too, Snyder concludes, can be seen as "Just a big metabolic wheel of energies being passed around and around. You can see it as a great dance, a great ceremony. You can feel either really at home with it, or step out of the circle."

"We are all indigenous," he reminds us. So it is appropriate that in relearning the lessons of fox and bluejay, or city crows and squirrels-"all members present at the assembly"-that we are promised neither too little, nor too much for our perseverance. This poet, who for so many now reads like an old friend, invites us to make only sense. After all, in recommiting to this continent place by place, he reckons, "We may not transform reality, but we may transform ourselves. And if we transform ourselves, we might just change the world a bit."

The Wild Mind of Gary Snyder, Trevor Carolan, Shambhala Sun, May 1996.

Read more about Gary Snyder on Wikipedia.

Water District Should Go With The Flow

2009-02-20T09:20:00.000-08:00

The electoral process has indeed brought many people the Audacity of Hope that our new president has opened for us. This hope is not just about electing a president. The hope lies in giving us the power to be the communities that we want to be, rather than what's forced upon us by "The Powers That Be." It's true: "All politics is local." So we should put our primary political power into local politics, and reduce the major distraction of "What can our country do for me?" Even our proud mayors flew back to DC with our tin cups in hands.

A major local political opportunity is opening right now in Silicon Valley. And that is how we use democracy to manage our water and protect the watersheds that carry our water to us and the environment. The Water District Board is asking Assemblyman Joe Coto to carry a bill through the State legislature to amend the District Act as it pertains to (s)electing the Board of Directors as representatives of our community.

The Water District Act is the enabling legislation that is created in Sacramento to be applied to how this agency is run here in Santa Clara County, from Palo Alto and Milpitas, throughout San Jose and south to Gilroy and the Pajaro River. Its drainage flows to two important regional watersheds, Monterey Bay and the San Francisco Estuary. It serves sixteen land use agencies and offers services as a water wholesaler and watershed stewardship, and augments the community's earth science education component to both students and adults through their outreach programs.

Water is essential to life and the quantity and chemistry of this element is so directly related to the quality of each of our lives and the community at large. Ironically, it has been that term "at large" that has been applied historically to enable the Dilution of Democracy for the past forty years here in the Valley of St.Claire and her Silicon descendants. In 1968, a newly formed organization was created in Sacramento in order to merge the competing public agencies, all trying to manage the waters of the County. Those were in fact the County government and the four, yes four, water conservation Districts that had been created to capture local winter storm runoff and recharge the water during the rest of the year into the groundwater basins or deliver it in pipes or canals.

There is an adage that you should never watch law or sausage being made, but we historically have been willing to put up with the usually compromised results from either process. But not anymore! People are much more scrutinizing of what they eat and, maybe more importantly, how their (s)elected representatives are behaving, especially when it comes to spending our money, and measuring more closely what value we receive for that money. This blog and all our other methods of connectedness are the new tools we bring to the democratic process so we can finally become a real democracy.

So I hope to begin, using my Blessed Unrest, a real dialogue within Silicon Valley to create a new water District Board of Directors that reflect today's needs and expectations for this 21st Century, very interconnected community.

The Board, first of all, should represent the very nature of the flow of water, and should be organized by watershed. This is not a new idea for the Water District. When I was first elected to the Board in 1972, there where five separate taxing zones in place, representing the major watersheds in the county: East(Coyote Creek), Central (Guadalupe/Los Gatos), North Central (Stevens Creek/Permanente) Northwest (Baron, San Francisquito) and South (Uvas/Llagas/Pajaro).

In order to keep the equal representation in place, each of these would have to again become a taxing entity for which watershed activities could be assessed per watershed and not subsidized by other zones with a "budget surplus."

The water supply function of the Santa Clara Valley Water District is operated as an enterprise, basically run as a business for the benefit of the entire county. Other water supply wholesalers also operate within the county borders, namely San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, and four regional water recycling programs operated within Santa Clara County. This makes for a very complex approach for getting water to people, through their many water retailers, comprised of both municipal and private/investor-owned utilities.

Since the watersheds probably do not have equal populations, I propose that each watershed have weighted voting when they meet to manage the Water Utility Enterprise as the "Water (supply) Board."
Another benefit is that watershed boundaries cannot be gerrymandered. They are created by nature and will remain the same, regardless of changes in land use and population.

As the Water Utility Enterprise is run as a business, each watershed council represents a resident-shareholder, so each council would have a vote in proportion to its population, using the well known and accepted corporate model. This should take care of the equal representation requirement.

As these Watershed Council members come together as Water "Supply" Board, still wearing their watershed hats, if you will, they will be more apt to balance the needs of both the human inhabitants AND the in stream/riparian needs within the community. This is somewhat parallel concept to the city councils acting separately as the Redevelopment Boards while still being an elected council member.

Watershed Councils should be (s)elected in open, non-partisan, consolidated primary elections with runoffs in the next general election. Appointments to fill vacancies should be required to gather at least 10% of the registered-voters support in their electoral Districts and should do so using electronic communications appropriate to the current community standards, sort of like getting fans on Facebook, for example.

As the District is an essential service provider to the cities and the County government, these organizations should have a stronger voice in advising the Water District. A water commission currently exists that includes an elected members of each city, the County BOS and a Water Board member. This group should meet at least quarterly, and more often under drought or flood emergencies, and should be required to read and formally comment on the Water District budget before the Board takes final action to approve its annual or two-year budget.

Other advisory committees should be encouraged by the State enabling legislation but the micro-managing should stop there. Agricultural subsidies, if allowed, should go toward ALL water applied for irrigation of a food crop, not just for commercial food and fiber. Water subsidies for food crop irrigation should be passed on through retailers to consumers. Just as individual home water banks were created during the '86-'91 drought, home/food water banks can be similarly created and monitored through efficient and modern electronic means and be an essential tool for emergency drought management, during a state- or locally-declared emergency.

For the past forty years, the District board of directors has had five elected directors and two directors appointed by the Board of Supervisors, coupled with a budget approval by the BOS, after the District Board review and adoption. This system had a severely distracted Board of Supervisors giving approval to a budget they hardly ever glanced at, let alone vetted for policy compliance and economic or environmental prudence. The Dilution of Democracy, of which I speak, occurred through the appointment of a supervisor's "friend" to either of the two at large seats on the Water Board. These appointments were made by alternating north /south appointments between the members of the board of supervisors. The heavy politicking this brought forth was never pretty to watch or stomach. Last year the County finally relinquished this hold on the Water District and the District Act was amended in Sacramento to remove the two appointments and eliminate the budget approval requirement.

It is as these two vestiges of old political inertia are to end on Dec 31, 2010, that the District Board has cleverly disguised their desire to keep the number of Board members (s)elected to seven, using new yet-to-be-gerrymandered districts of equal number of eligible voters. I believe we deserve and can create a political body that has more practicality than simply preserving the number seven for the available seats on the board of directors. I am hoping that, using the communication tools we have available, we can construct a body that works as well as nature, as our politics reflects both the force and delicacy of nature and the human spirit.

Navigating the Mighty Coyote Creek in San Jose

2009-02-18T15:34:00.000-08:00

Advocates at Earthjustice today called on Congress to fix the Clean Water Act by eliminating the legislative loophole restricting the US EPA to only protect "Navigable Waters,"

Bush's Supreme Court had given his administration the legal basis to ignore water pollution at thousands of wetlands, streams and lakes and groundwater basins. A new bill has been introduced, called the Clean Water Restoration Act, which removes the word "navigable" and replaces the words "waters of the United States".

I noticed the Santa Clara Valley Water District has now begun to refer to the Coyote Creek as navigable. We are certainly witness to the flotilla of canoes launched under the smiling blessings of Admiral Spillman and her crew of trash photographers and recovery personnel. The next trash raft attack is scheduled for the weekend of March 1 if you care to join the war on creek trash.

But I have had personal knowledge that the Coyote Creek is navigable, acquired in the best possible manner, when Dan O'Brien and I ran the river at twilight one crazy evening in the winter of 1978. Dan & I were then young bucks in our early 30's, and tended to do outrageous stuff on a mere suggestion.
We were sitting on his deck at 311 Brookwood, Dan playing his guitar, watching a flood wave crest through the river as the sun was just about to set. Dan started playing "Dueling Banjos," the theme song from that infamous movie, "Deliverance". This adventure movie put running rapids into a whole new category. It also gave dam builders a slight reduction in the number of activists trying to stop dam building. Large dams usually inundate and destroy miles of rapids available for adventurous folks to challenge the river with their rafting skills.

But it didn't deter us when our testosterone-filled brains decided we needed to get to Mel Cotton's Sporting Goods store before they closed so we could purchase a six-foot inflatable raft and a couple of paddles. The good news is we made it to the store on time. The bad news was that the sun had already set by the time we got the raft home and inflated and were ready to launch our maniacal selves into the river at flood stage.

But the rain and river gods and goddesses wanted us to run the river this evening, as low clouds from the current storm hung low enough over the valley so that they effectively reflected enough street light on the creek that we could see where we were going. Beside getting the boat, our only other preparation was that we also told Dan's neighbor, Don Mathias, what we were up to and asked if he'd be willing to come get us if we were to survive this mad adventure.

So off we went down the river. The inflatable raft was sea worthy enough, although we would soon find out that only luck would keep us from getting flushed out of the creek and into San Francisco Bay. For the next two hours we paddled hard to steer the raft down the river, moving at about 10-12 feet per second, stopping again and again to portage around downed trees lying completely across the water.

The most beautiful memory of all this came as we passed one large tree growing near the bank that had about 25 white herons roosting for the night. Most of them saw us coming and took flight and flew around us as we passed their lodging and then resettled in to the tree as we floated by. Crazy humans!

Just as we were passing the Flea Market near Berryessa Road, we punctured the raft on one of the million twigs and branches we had floated by in the last three miles of the floodway, and this proved that the gods and goddesses were watching out for us during our nutty urban river rafting adventure.

We climbed out of the river soaked and covered with dirt and debris and knocked on the door of the San Jose Meat Company that was opposite the creek from the Flea Market and asked to use their phone to call Don for a ride. I think the people working that shift would not have dared to say no to these two wild men standing dripping at their door. I just hope we didn't contaminate any sanitary areas that we walked through to use the phone. (This is one more reason why cell phones were invented, so crazies don't show up at your door to ask to use the phone.)

While waiting for our ride, I walked across Berryessa Road and looked downstream at the river. Upper Penetencia Creek has its confluence with Coyote right below this bridge, and the flow downstream was greatly increased on north side of the road. But since agriculture fields still existed in this historically floodable area instead of floodable urbanscape like it is today, the street lights that had illuminated our evening rafting trip were non-existent downstream of the confluence and all I saw was white water disappearing into a black abyss.

I realized if we had rafted under that bridge, we might have been carried all the way to the bay, probably under rather than on the water. But instead, I am here on this bright and shiny Wednesday watching the sun set across the Coyote and glad I am still here to be a witness to the fact that Coyote Creek is indeed a navigable waterway, and right here in the middle of downtown San Jose.

I also hope this story brings a smile to my dear water brother Dan O'Brien, who is undergoing spinal surgery today, repairing damage done to his younger self, either playing basketball or doing crazy shit like I have just described here.

Blessed Be!

No Trash Dumping, Flows to the Creek

2009-02-16T16:29:00.000-08:00

Some of my neighbors in the Campus Community in downtown San Jose recently posted a picture of a trash raft floating on the water surface in Mid-Coyote Creek, somewhere near the San Antonio Street bridge.

I posted a terse response to chide the comment that we should wait to see if the raft would move downstream before doing anything about it. The author was rightly miffed that I suggested her intentions might be indifference to the problem rather than waiting for a safer time to remove the raft.

After apologizing and giving a short history of the ignorance of this problem, I resolved to dedicate this blog post to pollution prevention of trash in our creeks. Consider this an extension of the work I did for my last eight years at the Water District as a contract employee running the Silicon Valley Pollution Prevention Center.

In my own personal experience, plastic bags are the number one candidate for eliminating a serious source of creek trash. Walking along the creek one day in William Street Park, I picked up 22 plastic bags that had blown into bushes along the creek from tables, trash cans and ignorant park users. This is not a new problem. In 1995, the Pollution Prevention Center started giving seminar attendees high quality canvas tote bags silk screened Take Me Shopping.

A few months ago, I found a web site dedicated to getting the Clorox Corporation to start recycling the plastic-cased Brita brand water filters. Threatening to embarrass this major corporation for its lack of producer responsibility and product stewardship, this month Clorox set up a nationwide network to collect and recycle their filters, keeping this item from the landfills. Clorox contracted with a program called Gimme5 to collect the filters along with other # 5 plastics like is used in tooth brushes and prescription bottles. Collection kiosks are being set up in participating Whole Foods stores, which unfortunately does not include those in San Jose yet. (Call your local store and request they participate ASAP.) In the mean time, you can mail your filters and other #5 plastic directly to the recycling company.

One of the activists working on the Brita filter recycling is named Beth Terry of Oakland, CA, who has a blog called Fake Plastic Fish. In her post about the successful campaign on the Brita filter recycling, she includes this sample letter for folks to send to their local newspapers:

Editor:

Plastic waste is a serious environmental problem. It is made from fossil fuels and does not biodegrade, lasting virtually forever and wreaking havoc in the natural world.

Fortunately, a new program called Gimme5 is attempting to deal responsibly with some of our plastic waste. Customers can return used #5 (polypropylene) plastic containers as well as Brita pitcher water filters and used Preserve products to select Whole Foods markets or mail them back to Preserve for recycling. Full details of the program are at http://www.preserveproducts.com/gimme5/.

I am not personally associated with Preserve, Whole Foods, or Brita, but as an individual attempting to live responsibly on the planet, I highly recommend this program.

Sincerely,

YOU!

Read more about the successful campaign to get Brita filters recycled here. There is a great amount of information on Fake Plastic Fish regarding reduction of plastic consumption and its fugitive emission into the environment. I recommend spending some time reading Beth's posts to examine ways to reduce many types of plastic consumption.

In northern Santa Clara County, the cities, County and the Water District have formed a joint program to manage the regional storm water permit issued for the watersheds draining into South San Francisco Bay, called the Santa Clara Valley Urban Runoff Pollution Prevention Program. In 1995, during the formative stages of this program, our discussions focused on the impossibility of treating all the storm water runoff generated in the South Bay watersheds, leading to the current name for the program. However, as the program has essentially failed to implement the necessary public education and local ordinances to actually PREVENT pollution, the current mandates for storm water inlet treatment devices are now the focus of the program as it relates to trash. Read more: Trash Evaluation and Management Fact Sheet (2nd Edition) With current budget shortfalls at the cities, funds to implement this approach are going to be a challenge and success is dubious.

For this reason, local action needs to re-focus on pollution prevention, which relies on attacking the source of the problem. Producer responsibility and product stewardship will be the key to reducing the flow of trash into our cityscape and the creeks. Carbon taxes or cap and trade approaches may assist this effort, but local governments are going to have to hang tough and resist the lobbying that is sure to come from the Chamber of Commerce. Activists that now are willing to endanger themselves pulling trash from the creeks must also pressure city officials to pass ordinances to reduce the flow of trash from business establishments into our streets and creeks.

Splitting Infinity or Splitting Darwin

2009-02-05T14:46:00.000-08:00

Last November I saw a production of Splitting Infinity at the Rep in San Jose. It was a most interesting stage play regarding the human difficulty of accepting both science and religious belief in God. The play worked, in that it stirred deep emotional responses from the cast, the director and the audience. I was lucky to attend the final performance which included a 30-minute talk-back with the cast after the show. The group from the audience most offended were Christian Scientists, whose beliefs were portrayed in the script as unacceptable, by today's standards of common decency.

Today the Economist published an article on Darwin, with an interesting chart of where on earth there is belief in Evolution. The chart speaks volumes about where humans are best educated and cared for by their localities. The conclusion drawn by the author from this information is insightful: " In countries where food is plentiful, health care is universal and housing is accessible, people believe less in God than in those countries where their lives are insecure. A belief in God, and rejection of evolution, they suggest, is most valuable in those societies that are most subject to Darwinian pressures."

Now that the value of of wealth in America has been split in half as well, I would predict that Darwinian pressures are certainly going to kick up a notch or ten in the not too distant future. It will be interesting to watch and see how this theory above plays out in the actual world stage.

It's already begun in London.To celebrate Darwin's 200th birthday, London buses carried a message: "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." The Christians are responding with their own campaign. The sign companies are loving it, all the way to the bank.

Fear of FEMA, Revisited

2009-01-05T13:11:00.000-08:00

FEMA certainly became a four-letter word during the response to the flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Since Dubya and his cronies were so focused on war profiteering and oil security, the greatly neglected and negated domestic federal programs became too obvious when FEMA flubbed and frustrated all humanitarian efforts to rescue and resuscitate the poor people of the sunken city of New Orleans.

But FEMA was a four-letter word in Silicon Valley as far back as 1983. And the cussing was coming mostly from the City of San Jose officials who suddenly found themselves as defendants in a law suit following the flooding of the Town of Alviso after it was filled with ten feet of water when the Coyote overflowed its banks behind Agnew State Hospital.

The flooding victims in Alviso filed claims and eventually a law suit asking for $300 million in damages for "inverse condemnation" (the taking of private property without due process/compensation.) As the City's insurance did not cover this cause of action, a great amount of effort went into the City's defense against these claims. However, once FEMA realized that the Alviso plaintiffs had an excellent case against the City for causation of the 1983 flood, FEMA decided to subrogate all its claims and emergency costs expended due to the flood and joined in the lawsuit against the City.

The causation was tied to a letter sent to the Water District in 1971 by San Jose's Public Works Director, Tony Turturicci, refusing to create an adequate set back from the banks of the Coyote Creek while constructing the 12-foot levees of the sludge drying beds and lagoons for the Water Pollution Control Plant. By constructing the levees directly adjacent to the low flow channel of Coyote Creek and opposite the old Milpitas sewage treatment plant, the outflow capacity of the creek to the Bay was reduced to about 1500 cubic feet per second (CFS). The 1% flood was calculated at the time at about 15,000 CFS. Any flows greater than 1500 CFS would back up in the river, raising the flood tide and dumping the excess overland to flow directly into Alviso.

On April 1, 1983 a late season storm fell over the Coyote Watershed and caused the Andersen Reservoir to spill about 5500 CFS, dumping into the lower Coyote Creek. Within 24 hours, 8,000 acre-feet of water was sitting in the town of Alviso, flowing in from the west bank of the river behind Agnew State Hospital at a rate of about 4000 CFS. This volume of water was almost half of the storage capacity of Lexington Reservoir and exceeded the capacity of most of the Water District's upstream water conservation facilities. These numbers probably gave the plaintiff's attorneys the idea to file an inverse condemnation suit, as the Town of Alviso was now serving as a large reservoir of "fresh" water, separated from the Bay only by the salt pond levees adjacent to Alviso.

The lawsuit was finally settled for $13 million, with FEMA taking $3 million from the pot to refund their expended emergency costs and the flood insurance claims it had paid to any victims that actually had flood insurance.

The notion of FEMA subrogating its costs against a City, whose residents had purchased flood insurance, seemed like bad faith on the part of this federalized insurance company. I contacted Don Edwards, our Congressional representative, and asked him to investigate if this was allowable under the Flood Insurance Act passed by Congress. His investigation revealed that Congress had, in fact, directed FEMA to operate this federal flood insurance program in the same manner as private insurance, by minimizing costs and recovery of claims through subrogation when appropriate.

Today, FEMA holds flood insurance policies on thousands of properties throughout Santa Clara/Silicon Valley, where homes and businesses have been constructed in flood plains and bypass channels of our local streams and rivers. Some of those properties are homes adjacent to Coyote Creek in downtown San Jose. The flows through the reach of Mid-Coyote, as the Water District classifies it, have already been augmented by up to 2,000 CFS by a 1974 diversion of seven square miles of the Upper Silver Creek watershed into the Coyote Creek, eight miles upstream of its natural confluence, which is opposite Watson Park near Empire Street.

Today, the Santa Clara Valley Water District is designing a flood "protection" project for the Mid-Coyote that would block flood waters from exiting into its natural bypass channels in order to protect homes that have been built there with the blessings of the City of San Jose, FEMA, and the deadly silence of the Water District. One of the benefits listed by the project team is the alleviation of the homeowners located in the bypass channels from having to continue to pay flood insurance premiums, once the bypass channels have been blocked by levees.

While protecting these homes from flooding, the flood water that is prevented from flowing into its natural bypass channels will add another 2000 CFS of water to the main channel of the creek, greatly increasing the velocity and bank erosion of the roaring river at flood stage. Many large eucalyptus trees and other large riparian trees can be expected to fall and form dams at the bridges, and possibly take homes right off the bank, such as those built on the banks downstream of William Street.

It seems that a 35-year old flood diversion channel, built then to protect a new cash register for the City of San Jose called Eastridge, coupled with a flood channelization project that forces even more water into the main channel of the river, in order to protect other homes somewhat remote from the river, is a pretty good case for inverse condemnation of the adjacent creek-side homeowners. Surely these properties will be damaged to a much greater degree when the extra 4000 CFS flows though the main channel of the river, instead of down their natural courses of the Silver Creek to its confluence with Coyote Creek.

The question I raise at this point is this: Should the City of San Jose again fear FEMA and their subrogation lawyers when the next flood occurs in San Jose, and claims are paid by FEMA on homes damaged by the flood that will someday pass through the mid-Coyote?

Bottles, Bottles Everywhere, Just to take a Drink

2008-12-09T13:38:00.000-08:00

In case you've been living under or in a rock for the last year or so, the ubiquitous plastic water bottles that grew into the hands of many affluent humans during the last decade have quickly become Politically Uncorrect (PU) and most of us are seeking better ways to carry a small convenient container of drinking water around with us. I recently bought six stainless steel bottles from a small company named Nubius Organics in Santa Cruz. We will use these at home and while strolling around the 'hood.

Today I read a bolg post by Mellissa Byer, ranting about a new bottled water called Tap'dNY, which is, as the name implies, botlled municipal New York City tap water. What set off Ms. Byer was the claim on the label that "No Glaciers Were Harmed in the Bottling of this Water." What purity this water represents is offset by the greenwashing spin of this marketing BS that ignores the carbon cost of bottling and then trucking any water to a potential consumer.

This great video produced Quest for KQED in San Francisco puts the plastic water bottle in its proper perspective

There is an inexpensive way for managing the taste and quality of the tap water, which, in our neighborhood, is fairly good quality well water from a well field a few thousand feet downstream on the west bank of Coyote Creek at East Santa Clara Street and South Seventeenth Street. We use a Brita brand carbon filter that fits into a two-part pitcher and lasts about a month and costs about $5.00. This company is a subsidiary of Chlorox, the makers of the disinfectant of choice of most water companies to protect the water while it is in the pipelines from microbial growth, but which also give tap water its bad rap, causing a foul taste. So the same company that causes the problem, also profits in removing it. What a great business plan!

But Chlorox was recently challenged to stop manufacturing a plastic-case filter containing expensive activated carbon that was simply (for them) disposable. A woman in Oakland, CA created a website called TAKE BACK THE FILTER and began collecting used Brita filters to stage a political action/press conference at Chlorox Headquarters during a shareholders meeting. This example of Blessed Unrest has now caused this large corporation to agree to start taking back its filters in January 2009, which may soon lead to the redesign of the filter product to make it easier to deprocess and reuse the components. Actually, as noted on Beth Terry's blog site, Fake Plastic Fish, she reveals that Brita's filters sold in Europe are recyclable, but not those manufactured for consumption in the US. Wasup with that?

To read more about tap water filter options, click here.

Never Thirst!

Michael Pollan for Farmer In Chief

2008-12-05T01:24:00.000-08:00

I have written several posts on growing food locally. My last post was on the potential demise of food production in the San Joaquin Valley due to all the salt that's in the irrigation water.

Today I watched the PBS video archive of Bill Moyers interviewing Michael Pollan and encouraging him to accept, if offered, the cabinet post of Secretary of Agriculture in the Obama cabinet.

Instead of suffering through more of my verbosity on the subject of local food production, I encourage you to view this two-part video interview.

Never Hunger, Never Thirst!

Salt of the Earth

2008-11-11T12:45:00.000-08:00

The San Joaquin Valley is the California poster child for desertification through salinization of its soils from using water from the Federal Central Valley Project. This water contains 2 million tons of salt, applied through out each successive irrigation season.

The oceans are the planetary depository for salt. The continents have been contributing salt to the oceans since rain began to fall from the atmosphere. Humans add their piece to the salt flow with their activities, greatly accelerating the salt flow from certain watersheds.

Industrial agriculture adds enormous salt loads to the receiving waters upstream of the ocean and re-distributes salt downstream through irrigation projects, mainly financed by the federal government.

Twenty five years ago, the State was prepared to build a canal around the eastern edge of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and thereby reduce this salt load by half and further restrict pumping if salt levels were too high to deliver water during droughts. That essential piece of plumbing was then called the Peripheral Canal and these have become the most dreaded two words in Sacramento.

In response to the State, certain large agricultural interests financed a campaign to stop the Peripheral Canal with a referendum to reverse the state legislative actions which authorized the Department of Water Resources to build the final link in this massive water system. Most support to kill the canal came from the Delta farmers and cotton empires of the Salyer and JG Boswell, built mostly in Tulare Lake and surrounding wetlands. Read excerpts from The King of California here.

With the success of this one ballot measure, San Joaquin Valley farmers fired the poison dart that would steal this 100 year effort by the US Bureau of Reclamation to reclaim these arid lands for production of food and fiber to supply our nation and much of the world. Over the past twenty-five years, the farm lands have been laced with 50 million tons of salt delivered with the irrigation water, twice as salty as it would have been if the Peripheral Can had been built.

It is while these lands are still a viable agricultural resource that we need to act.

I'd like to see California push toward more sustainable agriculture by lowering the salt content of the irrigation water in the San Joaquin Valley rather than watch the land owners salt it in and then develop the salt flats with urbanscape. This means we build the peripheral canal and design it for considerable sea level rise.

Congress should act soon to simply halt all water rights if land use conversion removes it from its agricultural purposes, even if it is due to loss of productivity due to soil pollution. This will create a major shift in protecting our national agricultural resources by making all farmers perpetual stewards of the land, in exchange for a government-developed supply of water.

This proposal would bring the ag lobby to arms like you've never seen it, but it will be good to force them to show their hand (and strong arm behind it!)

George Miller is one of the few members of Congress who could kick off something like this. Congressman Henry Waxman in Southern California could be his strong ally. Senate allies will probably have to come from outside California, as our incumbent Senators Feinstein and Boxer are already owned by the ag lobby.

When the Peripheral Canal was stopped 25 years ago, I started calling the San Joaquin Valley the new Metropolis of SacroBake, home to 30 million future California residents, unable to grow even a backyard garden in this newly created desert, wondering where their next water will come from: the sky or the good graces of the water managers who control any water coming from the ground or aqueducts and still able to pass the health standards set for salinity? Listen to NPR audio track on California Delta Faces Salty Future.

The world may yet mark us down as one more society that crumbled because of mismanaged irrigated agriculture and a self-imposed victim of too much Salt of The Earth.

Piled Higher and Deeper

2008-10-27T19:07:00.000-07:00

One way to REDUCE your flow of garbage to our local landfills is to compost your food scraps from your kitchen. Composting is pretty simple, but if you need guidance you can take a short course at Emma Prusch Park or read more by clicking here.

I use a PHD approach, simply Piled Higher and Deeper. My compost pile is just that, a pile of dirt near my garden where I bury the contents of my compost bucket when it's full or getting too ripe for the kitchen. Actually, we separate some of our food scraps into other containers for the chickens or rabbits, which serves as some of the feed for our livestock, who then in turn contribute their manure for further enriching our garden's fertility.

But food scraps are actually the smallest component of my weekly disposal of unwanted stuff, which includes such things as packaging, bottles, cans, junk mail, newspapers, bill envelopes and stuffers. There's also paper scraps from my wife's art work and broken or obsolete small appliances and electronics. All these items are placed religiously into our RECYCLE bins.

If you live in San Jose, you know that we no longer need to separate our recycling into different bins, although I still do. A former Director of Environmental Services, Carl Mosher, thought it would be more "cost effective" to have residents dump all their recyclables into a 96-gallon wheeled cart and have paid workers separate it at a central processing plant.

This one ill-conceived decision led to the downfall of one San Jose mayor and his would-be successor. The new garbage cart would, in theory, eliminate the need for one teamster from the collection crew and be replaced with lower cost workers at the separation conveyor belt who would belong to a different union.

But the Teamsters did not take well to this elimination of a quarter of their drivers, so they demanded that the separation crew be members of the Teamsters union, and the cost would be an extra $5 million over the duration of the contract.

Mayor Ron Gonzales met with the garbage company officials and soon realized that he was in a lose-lose situation. If the Teamsters didn't get their way, they would call for a strike and his political career would soon be in serious jeopardy. Instead, he agreed to get the company the extra money that the teamster-separators would cost, but tried to hide the reason from the council and the public. This eventually led to a grand jury indictment and a call for his resignation by the press and some of the council members.

All this political brouhaha was brought on by one civil(ization) engineer who used economics alone to make a societal shift away from personal responsibility for the materials San Jose residents purchased and throw away (even though there is no away) When residents were using recycling bins to separate their cans, bottles, paper and cardboard, they were providing both a valuable ($5million) volunteer service for City and informally taking a measure of the type and amount of recyclables they were consuming and then disposing.

This personal consumption information may not be the knowledge quest of most people, although as we "green up"our lifestyles to avoid global warming, it might start to be of more general interest. However, yesterday, I read about an environmental studies professor who started a project to save and log all his garbage for a full 365 days. Now he's going to practice Piled Higher and Deeper more than he or his family ever imagined.

PostScript: If you are planning to have a party for Halloween or later in the year, you might want to read this post about greener partying.

Grey Water For Green Spaces

2008-10-20T13:55:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I received an email from a woman representing the Grey Water Guerrillas trying to organize people to campaign for local ordinances friendly to the concept of grey water reuse at businesses and residences.

My response to her was not too optimistic about getting local or State Health Departments to ever get less cautious about grey water reuse. Remember, a bureaucrat's first job is always CYA, so don't think that a professional health guardian will ever do less to prevent you from spreading disease, even during a serious drought.

Another proponent is taking hope in an actual greywater system that was permitted by the City & People's Republic of Berkeley. His comments can be Downloaded if your curiosity and quest for knowledge care to read Download2 even more.

When a recent call went out by a regional waste(d)water group to speak at a seminar on greywater, no one from the public sector or the many consultant engineers wanted to be a speaker. The only written flyer the organizers could supply was from Australia:

Manual Bucketing & Temporary
Diversion of Greywater

Greywater is wastewater generated from bathrooms (showers, baths, spas,
and hand basins), laundries (washing machines, troughs) and kitchens (sinks
and dishwashers). However, kitchen water can contain food particles, grease,
oils and fats and its use is not recommended (particularly without treatment).

Greywater Characteristics
The quality of greywater can be highly
variable due to factors such as number of
household occupants, their age, lifestyle,
health, water source and products used
(such as soaps, shampoos, detergents).
Greywater may contain:
• Disease causing organisms (bacteria,
viruses, protozoa) from nappies and
other soiled clothing.
• Chemicals from soaps, shampoos,
dyes, mouthwash, toothpaste,
detergents, bleaches, disinfectants and
other products (such as boron,
phosphorus, sodium, ammonia and
other nitrogen based compounds).
• Dirt, lint, food, hair, body cells and fats,
and traces of faeces, urine, and blood.
Risks presented by these contaminants
can be reduced by good management
practices and by sensible use.
Manual Bucketing & Temporary
Diversion
Manual bucketing onto lawn and garden
areas using water from the bathroom or
laundry, or temporary use of a hose
manually fitted to the washing machine
outlet hose, is permitted subject to the
following advice:
• Don’t use greywater from washing
clothes soiled by faeces or vomit, for
example, nappies.
• Don’t store untreated greywater for
more than 24 hours, as bacteria and
organic contaminants in greywater will
cause it to turn septic and produce
strong and offensive odours.
• Don’t use greywater if others in the
household have diarrhoea or an
infectious disease, as this could
increase the risk of other people
becoming ill.
• Don’t use greywater to irrigate fruit,
vegetables, or areas where fruit can fall
to the ground and be eaten.
• Avoid splashing of greywater and wash
your hands before eating or drinking or
smoking.
• Keep children away from areas watered
with greywater until it has soaked into
the ground.
Chemical contaminants: detergents,
cleaners and other chemicals
• Environmentally friendly shampoos,
detergents and cleaning products
should be used to protect soil and
plants watered with grey water.
Products containing low levels of boron,
phosphorus and salt should be used.
Boron can be toxic to plants, some
native plants are sensitive to
phosphorous while sodium and other
salts can damage soil structure.
• Washing machine rinse water has lower
concentrations of detergents compared
to wash water. If wash water is used it
should be diluted with rinse water.
• Bleaches and disinfectants can kill
beneficial soil organisms and damage
plants. Avoid using greywater
containing harsh chemicals or bleaches,
or after washing out hair dye or paint
products.
• A useful website that contains
information on laundry products is
http://www.lanfaxlabs.com.au.
Sensible use
• The irrigation setback distances from
swimming pools, bores, dams,
watercourses (inc. River Murray),
buildings and boundaries must be met.
See Section 5 of the Standard for the
Construction, Installation and Operation
of Septic Tank Systems in South
Australia (Supplement B)

• Greywater tends to be slightly alkaline
and this can be harmful to acid loving
plants such as azaleas and camellias.
• Rotate greywater irrigation using mains
(drinking) or rain water, especially in
areas of low rainfall. This will help to
flush salts from the soil.
• Water several locations. This will
prevent salts and other contaminants
accumulating in the soil.
• Prevent pooling and runoff of greywater
onto other properties, into watercourses
and the stormwater system. Pooled
greywater can turn septic and produce
offensive odours.
• Don’t over-water your plants –
greywater shouldn’t be used to irrigate
more than you would with other sources
of water. Plants are susceptible to
waterlogged soil.
• Monitor areas and plants irrigated with
greywater. If there is visual evidence of
damage you may need to modify
watering practices, try a different or
bigger irrigation area, or reduce the
amount of water used.
Soils in many parts of Adelaide have a
high clay content. Clay soils tend to be
more susceptible to build up of salts and
have low permeability. Extra care should
be taken when using greywater in areas of
clay soils to avoid long term damage.
Permanent Greywater Systems
Permanent greywater systems such as
diversion devices or treatment systems, or
any device attached to plumbing, can
increase the use of greywater. However
due to potential risks associated with grey
water, permanent devices require
installation approval from your Council or
the Department of Health.
Information on permanent greywater
systems can be obtained from our
Alternative Onsite Wastewater Systems

Contact
Wastewater Management Section
Public Health
SA Health

1st floor
Citi Centre Building
11 Hindmarsh Square
Adelaide SA 5000

PO Box 6, Rundle Mall
Adelaide SA 5000

Tel 08 8226 7100
Fax 08 8226 7102

ABN 97 643 356 590

Email: public.health@health.sa.gov.au
Web: www.health.sa.gov.au/pehs/environ-
health-index.htm

© Department of Health, Government of South
Australia.
All rights reserved.

Last revised August 2008

But the real folks leading the local charge on grey water are those that actually do it and tell others about their experience. My neighbors Angelica & Sergio recently put the following in our weekly CSA e-mail:

Heard about California's water crisis? For so long we have been letting go of precious (grey) water down our home drains. Our own MANO member Pat Ferraro, former water district board director for Santa Clara Valley taught us the simple thing of saving our bath water to flush the toilet, rather than using 5-6 gallons of clean water every time we flush. Read more about water concerns at Pat's great blog http://neverthirstpatferraro.blogspot.com . As of last weekend we became true guerrillas, as we disconnected our sewer pipes in the bathroom and kitchen sinks to hold on to that water, and the washing machine too. It has made a great difference in the garden and compost piles. Read on about greywater.

What is grey water?

Greywater is water that flows down sink, shower, and washing machine drains--but not the toilet. Greywater may contain traces of dirt, food, grease, hair, and household cleaning products. While greywater may look “dirty,” it is a safe and even beneficial source of irrigation water. If released into rivers, lakes, or estuaries, the nutrients in greywater (mainly phosphate from detergent) become pollutants, but to garden plants, they are valuable fertilizer. Aside from the obvious benefits of saving water (and money on your water bill), reusing your greywater keeps it out of the sewer or septic system, thereby reducing the chance that it will pollute local water bodies Reusing greywater for irrigation reconnects urban residents and our backyard gardens to the natural water cycle.

You probably won't hear much from any public agency like San Jose or the Water District encouraging grey water reuse, because of their concern over crossing the health officials they deal with on many other issues. This is unfortunate for the people running water efficiency programs at either agency, for grey water use reduces both water demand and wastewater flow to the South Bay.

San Jose has a State-mandated flow cap on their waste(d)water discharge into the South Bay during summer months. This restriction is in place to keep salt marsh habitat from changing to fresh water marsh due to the large volume of low salinity water coming from the water pollution control plant. And when that habitat is home to two endangered species, San Jose is required to do whatever it takes to comply with the State's order.

Until this State mandate, all the engineering and economic studies that had been funded to examine the feasibility of water recycling were never able to get a positive political response from local decision makers at either San Jose or the Water District. It took a federal law, the Endangered Species Act, to move past the culture of built-in bias against water recycling at the Water District. And as long as San Jose could continue to get all the water it needed for continued growth, the City had no concern of their own about the ever increasing flow of waste(d)water to the Bay, except to make the plant capacity bigger and meet the standard discharge requirements.

All that changed when the State of California issued the order to cap the summer discharge from the San Jose-Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant at 120 million gallons per day (mgd). Today, San Jose has built 108 miles of purple pipe and pump stations which today delivers 10-15 million gallons per day of non-potable reclaimed water through a program called South Bay Water Recycling, managed by my friend and neighbor, Eric Rosenblum.

Much of this water is used for irrigating green spaces, parks, athletic fields, school grounds, common areas and parkway landscaping on major thoroughfares. All this irrigation is also highly regulated by the State Health department, with a continuously cautious eye from the local health department and potablewater purveyors. The latest use of this water will be to irrigate the new community gardens at Guadalupe Parks and Gardens near the corner of Coleman Aveue and Taylor Street. Click here for flyer information.

I wanted to be among the first users of recycled water in California at one of San Jose's community gardens, so I signed up for a plot. Last week I was notified that I would have to attend two trainings as a requirement of the State Health Department for participation as a gardener using recycled water.

The first two-hour session included an introduction to recycled water and the benefits and safeguards involved with using the recycled water to grow food and flowers in our plots. After being told that a specially designed $80 "key" made of brass pipe and a standard hose bib faucet (which had to remain onsite) would be our personal responsibility, a lengthy discussion ensued concerning the security of the garden facility at night, with strong warnings especially from other gardeners who had prior experience with failed security at other community gardens centers.

This was much better than hearing concern for the safety of the water for growing food. During introductions, I mentioned that I had used water from Coyote Creek to irrigate my home gardens for 20 years. I expressed my own concern for some of the constituents of the creek water that I used may have contained chemicals that I would probably not want in my drinking water, but that the plants responded very well to a water supply that contained some plant nutrients and did not have any chlorine, which tends to inhibit growth of living things in the soil and the plants themselves.

Next week we will get assigned our plots and soon we should all be tending our 16x20 plots and growing beautiful plants for both food and flowers. Hopefully this pilot will lead to more green spaces in our urban core, as we evolve our culture to appreciate the wisdom of reusing water, whether it's greywater in our home or recycled water in the community derived from our highly treated municipal waste(d)water supply which also came from our homes and businesses.

Click here to view an award winning PBS-style video on water recycling in California called
Water in an Endless Loop

California Warming?

2008-10-15T11:43:00.000-07:00

I sign many online petitions through Care2, but today I received this e-mail reply from the Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger himself:

Thank you for sharing your concerns with me about protecting California's farm workers. The safety of workers whose jobs require them to be outdoors during the hottest season of the year is truly a matter of life or death. We must do everything in our power to ensure that no other workers suffer the same fate as Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez.

We have enacted the nation's first employer regulations to prevent heat illness, and I cannot stress enough that we are taking aggressive enforcement actions and working with employers as partners. Employers must provide water and heat illness training, allow workers to take breaks in the shade and have an emergency plan if someone becomes ill. There is no excuse for failing to protect worker safety and we will prosecute employers who violate these regulations to the full extent of the law.

My administration has already conducted several hundred employer training seminars for heat illness prevention, completed several thousand surprise worksite inspections, and issued several hundreds of thousands of dollars in citations and temporary stop-work orders to employers in violation of these laws. In conjunction with the Department of Industrial Relations' Division of Occupational Safety and Health, we will continue to do so.

Again, thank you for taking the time to write and express your concerns. I am confident that by working together, we can prevent any further outdoor worker deaths.

Sincerely,

Arnold Schwarzenegger

The Farm Workers Union has their response at this link.

I don't remember hearing about farm workers dying in the fields like has tragically occurred this year. Is this another sign of global warming? If we want to be able to continue to have food harvested safely, we had better pay attention to these deaths as a warning to start doing things differently, in the fields and OFF.

So where do we Non-Farmworkers go from here?

The road we take may be determined on Nov 4th.

Mr T. Boone Pickens is trying to play Governor in California by putting, Proposition 10, an initiative, on the November ballot. He's an oil-made billionaire, our version of a sheik. He wants our cars and trucks to run on biofuels and NATURAL GAS. That's the stuff that floats on OIL fields.

Natural gas has a lower carbon footprint, but it's still a fossil fuel. And we're still buying from the same cartels. Yes, he says he supports wind and solar, but I'll wait to see if he actually invests his money, instead of $5 Billion in CA State Bonds, that will cost $10 Billion to repay.

The State expects more revenue from DMV fees and sales tax as Californians are offered incentives and rebates to encourage purchase of alternative fuel vehicles, primarily to those that run on biodiesel and natural gas. How much this would reduce our purchase of offshore oil, no one can be sure.

None of TBoone's campaign is convincing environmental organizations in California.

Proposition 7 was also financed by another billionaire, Peter Sperling, of Arizona, and whose father founded the University of Phoenix. Peter builds solar thermal power plants and wants to change the rules in California to make it easier to get permits for such plants in California.
The proposition has even more opposition than the Sheik Pickens' plan.

The League of California Voters says the following on their website:

Proposition 7

Vote No

No on Proposition 7: Protect small solar producers and encourage solar energy production

Proposition 7 fails to address the obstacles that have been identified by conservation groups, energy agencies, the renewables industry, and others as barriers to reaching our renewable energy goals. In addition, the proposal jeopardizes achievement of the current requirement of California law, which requires that 20 percent of electricity sold to customers be renewable by 2010.

Proposition 7 threatens the status of small-scale renewable resources under California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS). Proposition 7 authors amended the definition of “eligible renewable energy resource” by replacing the phrase “an electric generating facility” with “a solar and clean energy facility.” The proposed change puts the entire spectrum of small-scale renewable generation technologies at risk, and requires a two-thirds legislative majority to provide a remedy, leaving Californians stuck with a flawed and inflexible renewable energy policy. The success of California’s renewable energy future is too critical to achieving our clean energy goals to lock in fatally flawed legislation. Environmental, labor and consumer organizations are united in our commitment to the success of California’s renewable energy future– but we are also united in our opposition to Prop 7, which will not deliver that future

Proposition 10

Vote No

No on Proposition 10: Protect the environment and taxpayers — and stop the alternative energy scam

A fossil fuel corporation owned by Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens spent $3 million dollars to put Proposition 10 on the ballot. That same corporation will almost certainly reap the rewards if Prop 10 passes. California taxpayers will be stuck subsidizing big trucking companies at a cost of $335 million per year; they’ll shell out a total of $2.5 billion in subsidies to trucking companies to purchase “clean” vehicles. Prop 10 does not require any reduction in global warming emissions for trucking companies that get “clean” vehicle handouts of up to $50,000 per truck – and Prop 10 excludes hybrids from its definition of a “clean” vehicle.

The bottom line: California already faces a $15 billion budget deficit crisis, and Prop 10’s raid on the state’s coffers will mean cuts to our schools, our public safety and our health programs. Prop 10 is biased towards investments in natural gas technology— over cleaner alternatives such as wind and solar technology—while draining California’s already over-committed general fund. Although perhaps rooted in a commendable goal of environmental progress, Prop 10 is bad policy for California’s taxpayers and California’s environment.

One Pro comment that I read on the Popular Mechanics web site said this:
It is rather remarkable that California's Prop. 10 is a head scratcher. People with extraordinary resources to make change happen to be the people who will profit from an energy conversion. How is that a problem? How much do the Saudis and Iranians make on the oil they sell us? In the case of the Saudis, it costs $15 a barrel to extract oil. We're sending trillions of dollars offshore, and people want to debate the merits of a plan to replace 20 percent of these imports with natural gas. Never mind that we're fighting a war that will cost trillions before the last soldier is sent home. These are but a few of the compelling reasons to get behind NG conversion. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D., Ill.) is from a state that will benefit from a bigger push on ethanol. He has introduced a bill that would provide tax credits for the purchase of natural-gas vehicles and home-refueling systems, as well as to encourage gas stations to install natural-gas pumps. Pickens develops a plan that will save commuters millions, provide a stop-gap on global warming while reducing oil dependency as we transition to renewable fuels, and he is cast as a villain. We can probably can safely say T. Boone is not financing terrorists with the money he makes from oil and gas. If a profit has to be made -- and it does -- wouldn't it be a far sight better to have someone benefit who is not bent on our destruction. You can read more about NG use in Utah. For more on the Pickens' plan click here. From the Wall Street Journal story: "If we started moving to natural-gas vehicles in large numbers, even if we didn't go to renewables, we'd have plenty of natural gas," said Rich Kolodziej, president of Natural Gas Vehicles for America, a Washington trade association. The industry's goal is to replace 20% of the diesel used in the U.S. -- about 10 billion gallons, or 1.3 billion cubic feet -- with natural gas by 2025, Mr. Kolodziej said.

Over the River and Through the Woods

2008-10-13T13:26:00.000-07:00

The title to this post is actually what my Naglee Park Neighbors have to do to get to Northside Theatre Company in the Olinder Center. There, they will be treated with the sweetest play I have seen there or anywhere lately. It's a stage play called Over the River and Through the Woods. This is just the perfect gift from one of our most treasured neighborhood assets, especially for this time of angst and anger so many are feeling these last few days.

It's a story about a twenty something man who spends every Sunday having dinner with his four grandparents, who live two homes apart. The cast members are perfect in their parts, with the older actors sorta losing lines just like old folks like us actually do in our own lives.

Give yourself the benefit of this gift and get your tickets while they last.

Never Thirst!

Pat

Doing the Funky Chicken

2008-10-10T14:38:00.000-07:00

So, what's it mean when being funky farmer suddenly becomes urban chic?

I found this link in my neighborhood listserve today on the subject of urban chickens.
And for a great series of videos about chickens, cluck here.

I recently read an article on local food harvesting that ended:
Ninety years from now will look like 90 years ago.

Luckily, much of who I am today is me "channeling" my grandfather Teddy.
That's both a blessing and a burden. It was certainly a burden when suddenly, when I was 30 years old, I began to grow a fleet of trucks. This launched a life both familiar to me, but drastically changed from that expected of a professional career in civil engineering. This re-appendage of the trucking business was again as present for me, as it was for my father, and as it was for Teddy, and probably for earlier ancestors as well. There were many days when I referred to it as my genetic flaw.

But Grandpa Teddy was a certifiable urban gardener if I ever saw one. Where an adjacent building lot could have been, was instead half used for a truck barn facing the alley and the front half used for his amazingly productive vegetable garden. In front of his house were two 25 ft. cherry trees that gave life its sweetness when they were ripe. The vegetables were hedged with well-pruned raspberry bushes which rivaled the cherries for best taste ever. But it was too cold to keep a fig tree alive.

That's me and my sister Marcia in my Grandpa Teddy's garden on Ashland Avenue in the city named after the famous geo-hydraulic occurrence called Niagara Falls.

Beside giving us the falls, nature also gave us lake-effect snow blizzards that were ferocious and sometimes life threatening. I could imagine folks here going into complete chaos if such weather were to strike us here in this climatic paradise we know as Silicon Valley or San Jose, if so inclined.

When I arrived in this valley in 1969, the fringes of San Jose were still devoted to economically viable agricultural operations. In 1970, I planted my first garden in San Jose at a duplex on South 18th Street, fertilized with fresh chicken manure from the Olivera Egg Ranch in the Berryessa District in east San Jose. In 1972, I moved about a thousand feet south where I've have lived the life of an riparian urban truck farmer ever since.

Luckily, many can still remember when growing our own food was part of every day life.
And with urban chickens returning, our future seems in one more way to be heading steadily backward toward a more sustainable community.

Blessed Be!

Learning While Teaching -The Coyote Valley Lesson of the Day

2008-10-03T10:55:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday and today, dueling Op-Ed pieces appeared in the San Jose Mercury News giving readers the pros and cons of developing a new community college campus in the Coyote Valley by the Gavilan College District.

I wrote responses to both articles in the comments section @ the MercuryNews. com, but I want to add it here for my own record and to share with anyone else who cares to read my musings:

The CV Specific Plan could not get traction under Chuck Reed's administration so Sobrato and others will try to do the development in smaller increments and accomplish the same thing over time.

People, the Coyote Valley is your main groundwater recharge zone. If you get put on hold when calling the Santa Clara Valley Water District (408 265-2600) they say in their recorded message"If you don't want to drink it, don't put it on the ground."

Mr. Kinsela, what are you planning to do with the polluted rainfall runoff from a campus of 10,000 or more students and faculty. Maybe gas will be too expensive to drive like we do now, but even electric cars have hydraulic fluids that can leak onto roads and paved lots. Can your college budget cover treating storm runoff or exporting it north or south to get it away from the recharge zone? I doubt it and why should you spend money on this when you can join in the sensible thing to do by helping to protect the Coyote Valley as our prime water recharge area and help safeguard the quality of our drinking water. Maybe you could use the land as a field classroom for teaching organic farming?

Humans & Creeks, Living Together in the City

2008-10-02T10:58:00.000-07:00

I have described my decades-long relationship to Coyote Creek in a prior post.

Coyote Creek is one of San Jose's most valuable assets, serving as:

A vital riparian corridor for fish, furry and feathered creatures

The sediment transfer mechanism through the watershed

A drainage system for conveying storm water runoff from paved surfaces and buildings

A walking and bikeway system of creek-side trails, allowing the members of this community the enjoyment of the natural, right in the midst of this thriving urban hardscape we call Silicon Valley.

For a short and inspirational video about local creeks, click here.

San Jose is now really growing UP, with ever denser housing in the urban core and even in the burbs, along the light rail lines and elsewhere, sometimes under the moniker of Affordable Housing.

The added stress that accompanies a denser human environment needs a way for all of us to release some of that stress through some contact with nature. Trips to Yosemite are wonderful, but costly in time, fuel and sometime peak use impacts, that greatly reduce the intended benefit of the trip.

Our creeks are right here. Some of the trails are already in place. More will be welcomed as the public input from local residents, students and workers in the urban core make their desires known.

If you want more access to local creeks, restored to their full spectrum of uses listed above, you may want to join and become active in the Santa Clara County Creeks Coalition or a more local group like Friends of Coyote Creek

The World's A Stage, Let's PLAY WELL TOGETHER

2008-10-01T14:39:00.000-07:00

I found an article in a trade journal about Olin College of Engineering, which tells of how the students' committee sold their curriculum design by writing a stage play as their presentation.

Today, I had a melt down when I saw this video on line. This campaign finally got it.
And another today(10/4/08) I found this great jazz number.
And in case you're Irish or tried to be on St Patty's Day, watch this wonderful singing video
This one's just for Sarah. But this one is even better still.

We, in the audience, have to all stand up and pierce the fourth wall from this side of the show.
We must become the media, rather than watch it, letting IT filter our reality, as it gives us only the party line.

We have these tools for a reason, and it's more than just better communication or data storage.

Something jumped off a slide show I was watching a few days ago:

Humans are the strategy of Gaia to produce and accelerate the speed that nature can creatively express herself.

and remember,

The World's A Stage, Let's PLAY WELL TOGETHER

Beware of Water Wolves in Economist's Clothing

2008-09-30T17:30:00.000-07:00

As we move from one mega issue to the next, the water wizards are lining up to tell you how to price water to penalize water wasters and gluttonous guzzlers.

Today I received a notice about a upcoming two-week event sponsored by the Economist debating water as commodity versus that of an inalienable human right.

From The Economist’s online debate on the subject:

It’ll be a two-week long, Oxford-style online debate on the topic of the global water crisis. As both an industrial input and a prerequisite of life, water has become extremely scarce for roughly a billion people who do not have a constant supply of clean and safe water.

The exact proposition is, “This house believes that water, as a scarce resource, should be priced according to its market value.” Some of the issues the debate will cover include: Would water supplies be better managed if it were treated as a commodity, and priced accordingly? Or is water a basic human right that governments should secure for their citizens?

Arguing for the proposition: Stephen J. Hoffmann, founder and president of WaterTech Capital, a merchant and investment banking firm that specializes in serving the myriad of companies that, in aggregate, comprise the water industry, and co-founder of the Palisades Water Indexes.

Arguing for the opposition: Dr. Vandana Shiva, author of Water Wars and founder of Navdanya, an Indian-based, non-governmental organization founded to protect nature and people’s rights to knowledge, biodiversity, water, and food.

Links to additional posts were also listed, authored primarily by David Zetland:

The Bridge That Never Was

2008-09-22T17:30:00.000-07:00

This post IS NOT about one of the issues surrounding the Republican Party Vice Presidential candidate's "Bridge to Nowhere."

Instead, it's a story about how a bridge that never was played a role in determining a bit of our local history. As the City of San Jose grew larger even at the turn of the 20th century, local engineers planned to build an additional bridge over the Coyote Creek in San Jose but for some reason, the first design was never built. This bridge would have spanned the Coyote at the east end of San Salvador, near South 16th Street and connect to Williams Street's east-west alignment, south of and parallel to San Salvador . In 1911, the City of San Jose actually paid real money for the acquisition of a triangle of land on the creek center line to build a mid stream column to support the long bridge needed to span the fairly wide flood plain at this point in the river.

Either for economics or safety or both, this design option was abandoned, and a shorter bridge was constructed in its current location on E. William Street. The existing span is a shorter bridge and crosses the river at a skew. In order to have this shorter span, it was required that a embankment be created across much of the floodplain on which to build the western abutment, thereby restricting the flow of the river at flood stage. To mitigate this restriction of the floodway, the land that now is William Street Park was purchased as public open space but also to serve as a flood detention basin.

As subsequent storms proved the inadequacy of the storage volume in the upstream park, more riparian land was purchased upstream, giving us first Kelly Park and the connecting riparian lands in between, and then future purchases were added even further upstream, until urban and park planners realized that they were creating a park chain along one of the two main riparian corridors running through the watersheds draining the city of San Jose.

Today, the Coyote Creek Park Chain is one of San Jose's ecological and recreational assets with the potential to be one of its jewels. The trails along the creek are not yet contiguous from the bay to the base of Andersen Dam in Morgan Hill 30 miles south of the estuary. Our current Council member for District 3, San Liccardo, made one of the planks in his platform printed in his first ballot statement, continuing to connect the spot parks like Kelly, Williams, Roosevelt and Watson Park with creek-side trails.

Whether Sam considered the uproar that would arise from the 60 or so homeowners whose homes backed up to Coyote Creek downstream of the William Street bridge, I'm not sure. This idea had been pretty well vetted by the prior council member, Cindy Chavez during her tenure.

However, the Santa Clara Valley Water District has opened the door for achieving the extension of the creek side trails as part of the Mid-Coyote Creek flood protection project design that has been going on for about a year. The objective of this project is to prevent overflows of flood waters from entering their natural overflow channels to the east of the creek in order to protect the homes and businesses that the City of San Jose has allowed to be built in the bypass channels. The benefit of this project is obviously the prevention of flood damages from occurring, but also to relieve these bypass channel homeowners from the burden of paying annual flood insurance premiums to FEMA, whose regulations actually allowed these homes to be constructed in the floodable areas.

As downtown San Jose continues to densify the housing for its growing population, more demand will occur for contact with the natural environment that the riparian corridor of the Coyote Creek can offer. Despite the innovative approach Councilman Liccardo is proposing for bikeways on some of the one-way street around SJSU campus, continuous trails along the creek can provide off-road bicycle trails that are much more enjoyable and safer.

The Water District has so far ignored the fact that forcing the additional flows to stay within the main channel of the creek will constitute a inverse taking of the creek side properties downstream of the William Street bridge. Upstream diversion of some of the runoff from the Upper Silver Creek watershed has already augmented the flows through this reach of the river. Before the flood control project is implemented. the City and the District will have to address the inverse condemnation that results from the induced flooding of the Silver Creek and the newly proposed flood "protection" project.

Gold and Water in Them Thar Hills

2008-09-05T10:53:00.000-07:00

A new video called Flow, about to be released should shake things up a bit.

It' s aimed at the bottled water companies, primarily.

But it also covers the World Bank deals which are forcing privatized water systems in urban areas, where there's lots of people to complain about the high costs and profits going to the corporations that own these water delivery systems.

In my last post, I told the story of the wealthy gold miner who owned the private water company that served water to the port city of San Francisco until 1930, when the City "municipalized" the private company and combined it with the new Hetch Hetchy water project and formed the SF Public Utilities Commission.

San Jose and much of Silicon Valley has gone in almost the opposite direction, although the public is still a strong partner with our local private water companies. In the local cities that have a municipal, rather than an investor-owned private water company, are those cities that wanted to contract for Hetch Hetchy water from the SFPUC. This arrangement was mandated by the Federal legislation, called the Raker Act, which authorized the construction of the dam in Yosemite National Park. Since San Francisco had long battled in court with the private Spring Valley Water Company, it was amenable to a requirement that none of the water or power from the Hetch Hetchy Project could be sold to any private company for resale. Municipal water and sometimes power companies were formed in the Peninsula and the South Bay cities of San Jose, Sunnyvale, Milpitas, Santa Clara, Palo Alto and Mountain View. In some cases like Mountain View and San Jose, investor-owned companies serve some if not most of the water to the residents and business in those cities.

According to their website, San Jose Water Company (SJW) was founded in 1866. SJW is an investor-owned public utility, and is one of the largest urban water system in the United States, serving over 1 million people in the greater San Jose metropolitan area. In the 1970's, the privately-owned Campbell Water Company was acquired by SJW, followed soon after by assuming the management of the municipally-owned Cupertino Water system. Most recently, San Jose Water Corp. has acquired the Canyon Lake Water Service Company in the state of Texas.

Recently, Rich Roth, the President of San Jose Water gave an address to the San Jose Rotary Club which naturally praised the benefits of investor-owned water system ownership, while pointing to many of the problems in the water supply situation we are facing in the coming years. Most of those problems are the result of the very conservative approach the leaders of this valley adopted for the last five decades, opting to obtain half our current water supplies from the State and Federal aqueduct systems, which draws all of its supplies through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Now that the Delta is in ecological collapse and threatened to be destroyed completely by sea level rise from global warming, all that supply is at risk and the $30 million per year mortgage payments for the construction costs of the two aqueducts are still due and payable by the Santa Clara Valley Water District.

But scarier than losing the Delta supply, which is water of marginal quality, is the ever-present threat that San Jose Water Company could be sold to an even larger conglomerate and business decisions could move out of their local Board Room to anywhere on the planet. This threat became very real just a few years ago when American Water Company made a buyout offer for SJW. While the deal was not closed, American Water Company now has three directors from the German company RWE AG, which now owns controllingr interest in American Water Company. These directors are the Chief Financial Officer, Chief Counsel and the head of their mergers and acquisitions unit of RWE AG.

A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor poses the Question: Is Water Becoming the New Oil?
Of course, almost everyone agrees, people can learn to live without oil, but not without water. If water is managed strictly as a profit center for investor-owned corporations, many fear that water will not be considered part of the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

For a entertaining scenario of life with very little water, I recommend the hilarious musical stage play Urinetown.

Temples of Water

2008-08-31T20:45:00.000-07:00

Pictured above is the Pulgas Water Temple, built at the western terminus of the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct, constructed by the City of San Francisco in the early 20th century. The inscription chiseled into the crown of the temple reads: “I give Water in the Wilderness and Rivers in the Desert to give Water to my People”(Isaiah 43:20) invoking the an extra-terrestrial god's words to justify desecration of natural beauty in the wilderness. There, in the wilderness, are the formerly-protected glacier-carved granite monoliths of Yosemite National Park, now partially inundated in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, by a dam authorized by Congress and the water commandeered by the San Francisco politicians, still reeling from the loss of most of their city from earthquake and fire in 1906.

Of course this water project did not happen without a fight. Remember the wise words of Mark Twain, "Whiskey's for Drinking, Water's for fighting over." John Muir started the Sierra Club and used it's fledgling support to battle this outrage against some of nature's most beautiful sculptures, and died of a broken spirit as the nation's chief resource protectors, like Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt, succumbed to the support San Francisco's Mayor (1896-1902)and later US Senator Phelan built in Congress.

But San Francisco did have a fairly well developed water system before the Hetch Hetchy Water Project was built, and that system was once a privately owned water company called Spring Valley Water Company (SVWC). Elements of the former SVWC are today essential local elements of San Francisco's regional water system and includes groundwater wells in Pleasanton, infiltration galleries in Sunol and the Calaveras Reservoir to the east and the Crystal Springs Reservoir, in San Mateo County, well-viewed by travelers on the "scenic highway" portion of Interstate 280. Picture at right is the Sunol Water Temple.

The cynical version of the Golden Rule which reads "The guy with gold makes the rules" really holds true when you consider the early roots of San Francisco's water system. Wiliam Bowers Bourn II, upon his father's untimely death was given the Empire Mine, which produced 5.8 million ounces of gold, extracted from 367 miles of underground passages. He used this wealth to invest in many other ventures, including vineyards, gas and electric systems consolidations (leading to the formation of PG&E) and the City of San Francisco's water supply. While successfully enlarging the sources of water available to the City through the infrastructure developed by Bourn's Spring Valley Water Company, he also vigorously opposed the construction of the Hetch Hetchy Water Project, which would destroy his monopoly water supply for the west's premier port city. Prior to construction of the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct, half of San Francisco's water supply, approximately 6 million gallons per day passed through the Sunol temple. The SVWC, including both of the temples, was purchased by the City of San Francisco in 1930 for US$40 million.

Bourn bought the entire watershed in San Mateo County where the Crystal Springs Reservoir now resides.
Before selling it to the SVWC, he split off about 654 acres at the southern end of the watershed, overlooking what would become the lake impounded by the Crystal Springs Dam. On this land he built his 36,000 square foot mansion,which he called FILOLI (the first two letters of the three words of his abbreviated philosophy: “FIGHT for a just cause; LOVE your fellow man; LIVE a good life.”) Hikers and naturalists all know that this watershed was placed off limits for all other development or even entry by anyone outside the San Francisco Water Department. Filoli was donated to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1975 by Mrs Roth, owner of the Matson Shipping empire and second owner of the estate. For a small fee, the public is now welcome to visit the estate and tour the mansion and spectacular well-manicured 16-acre formal gardens.

Today, the San Francisco Water Department has been in high PR mode to gain support for its proposed $4.3 billion voter-approved Water System Improvement Program to upgrade the SFPUC Regional Water System and ensure reliable water delivery for more than 2.4 million customers in San Francisco and parts of three neighboring counties. Much of the support has come from the 28 retail agencies in those three neighboring counties, as well as PR specialists like the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group ( now the self-anointed Silicon Valley Leadership Group, after leading most of their members' manufacturing jobs offshore between 1990 and 2000, when the tech bubble was burst by the prick of the valley's premier pirates.)

All this expenditure by SFPUC is expected to raise water rates to these 2.4 million water users by about 400%. This will then set a new baseline for what Santa Clara Valley Water District can compare to its rate structure and make it much easier to sell new expensive projects to the Board of Directors and the mostly ignorant public in Santa Clara County.

Humans Arrested @ RNC Carrying Ecosystem

2008-08-31T14:51:00.000-07:00

From: Starhawk <stella@mcn.org>

Subject: [starhawk] Permaculture Education Bus Seized by Twin Cities Police at RNC

Hey friends, we need your help! Our Earth Activist Training Sustainable Skills Bus has been seized without cause by the police. Below is an account from the Wilsons, who have been travelling in the bus for the last seven months doing trainings in permaculture and sustainability, including ways you can help. My own accounts from the action can be found on www.starhawk.org and I’ll be posting daily as long as I can—or sign on to my own list by emailing starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net. If you’re on that list, my own account follows. Please support these folks who have been doing such good work for us all. Thanks!

POLICE SEIZE PERMIBUS

Please Post Far and Wide including any Media Contacts You May Have

At approximately 6:25 pm on August 30, 2008 Minneapolis Police, Minnesota State Troopers, Ramsey County Sheriffs, Saint Paul Police, and University of Minnesota Police pulled over the Earth Activist Training Permaculture Demonstration Bus (Permibus) by exit 237 on Interstate 94. Initially the police told the people on the bus to exit. When the people on the bus asked if they were being detained they were told that they were but police wereunable to provide justification. When asked why they pulled the bus over they refused to answer. After repeated requests to explain why the bus had been stopped Officer Honican of the Minneapolis Police explained that this was just a routine traffic stop though he did not explain the reason for the traffic stop. The police then told Stan Wilson, the driver and registered owner of the Permibus, that they were going to impound the bus in case they wanted to execute a search warrant later. After more than an hour of being questioned by Stan and Delyla Wilson as to the legalities of their detainment and the impoundment of the Permibus, the police then informed Stan that the bus, which is legally registered as a passenger vehicle in the state of Montana, was being impounded for a commercial vehicle inspection. Shortly afterward Sergeant Paul Davis, a commercial vehicle inspector arrived on scene. Despite the polices insistence that the reason for impoundment was for a commercial vehicle inspection the Permibus crew were not allowed to remove anything from the bus including computers, toiletries, and 17-year-old Megan Wilson's shoes. The police finally allowed the animals to be removed from the Permibus before it was towed, leaving the Permibus family standing beside their chickens and dogs, homeless on the highway.

The Permibus was relocating from the Bedlam Theatre in Minneapolis, where they had spent the day teaching Urban Permaculture, to a friend's house in Saint Paul for a well deserved break. The Permibus has been in the Minneapolis area since August 2nd when the crew appeared at the Midtown Farmers Market for a morning of Permaculture education including Permaculture 101, chicken care, seed ball making for kids, and the Permi-puppet show. During the past month the Permibus has parked at several local businesses and, as a neighborly gesture of respect for local police, Mr. Wilson contacted the appropriate precincts just to let them know the Permibus was in the area and had permission from the business owners to be parked on their lot. Through this, as well as other casual discussions with Minneapolis and Saint Paul police officers, the Permibus crew found the local police to be interested and respectful. However on August 30th all that changed when, for no apparent valid reason the police pulled over and seized the Permibus. After the incident Stan Wilson said, "If the combined law enforcement of Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Ramsey County, and the State of Minnesota can pull over and impound a vehicle and home used to teach organic gardening and sustainability, one has to wonder what it is our government really fears. After all, we seek to teach people that the real meaning of homeland security is local food, fuel and energy production. For that we have had our lives stolen by government men with guns."

As of now, after repeated requests to be present at any vehicle inspection, with an list of what they are inspecting for, as well as requests to be served any warrants for searches of the vehicles prior to a search and to be present during the search the Permi-family has been unable to ascertain the current status of the Permibus. On site Mr. Wilson was told that Officer Palmerranky was the inspector in charge of the case and would determine if the Permi-family's rights protecting them from unreasonable search and seizure would be respected. Neither Officer Palmerranky nor his supervisor has yet to return Mr. Wilson's calls. The loss of her home and possessions is particularly difficult on seventeen-year-old Megan Wilson. Megan, a shining example of what this country asks of today's youth, has dedicated herself to making positive changes in the world. She was the youth keynote speaker at the Local to Global conference in Phoenix AZ, has taught conflict resolution at youth shelters and is the outreach coordinator for the Skills for a New Millennium Tour, the family traveling educational project. Megan believes that, "While I understand that the world we live in is not as it should be I strive to live and teach in a way that shows the world how life could be. What I don't understand is why I can't get dressed for an evening out with friends in my own home without armed men stealing my life out from under me." The Permi-family, along with their dogs and Permaculture super-hero chickens are currently being housed by folks in the Twin Cities.

The Skills for a New Millennium Tour is a family education project that travels around the United States teaching homesteading, citizenship, and life skills at farmers markets, community gardens, churches, intentional communities, schools, and in people's living rooms. The Skills Tour is a donation supported project dedicated to providing tools for sustainable living, including Permaculture, to anyone who is interested, regardless of income. "We believe that any solution that is not accessible to the poor and urban areas is not a real solution for the future," states Delyla Wilson. Permaculture is a design system with ethics and principles that can be applied to food production, home design, and community building in order to increase sustainability in food production, energy production, and social systems. The Permibus is a rolling demonstration of small scale sustainable living with three people, three dogs, three chickens, and a box of worms as permanent residence. The chickens and worms are part of a closed-loop food productions composting system that supports the Permibus's traveling garden. For more information on the seizure of the Permibus, the Skills for the New Millennium Tour, or Permaculture, the Wilson's can be reached at 406-721-8427 or through email at skillstour@gmail.com. You can also see pictures and read stories about the last six months of their educational adventures at permibus.livejournal.com.

To our supporters: First we ask that as many people as possible contact precinct one in Minneapolis, MN at 612-673-5701 and Mayor Rybak at

Phone: (612) 673-2100 or

call 311 or call (612) 673-3000 outside Minneapolis.

Also call the Ramsey County Sheriff

Sheriff - Bob Fletcher 651-266-9300

and demand the immediate release of the Permibus.

We are also in desperate need of donations. Though we do not yet know the full cost of getting the permibus returned we know that it will include tow fee, impound fees, and legal fees. To donate contact us directly for a local address or...

Donate On-line:

Go to: www.earthactivisttraining.org/donate.htm

Click on: Donate Now!

Under "Gift Information" write: Permibus

Under "Please send acknowledgment of this gift to" write: skillstour@gmail.com

Donate by Mail:

Make check payable to: A.C.T.

On the "For" line write: Permibus

Send check to: A.C.T. 1405 Hillmount St. Austin, TX 78704

Guest Bloggers Cari & Starhawk:Spelling Magic: M_I_S_S_I_S_S_I_P_P_I

2008-08-31T14:20:00.000-07:00

Starhawk's continuing bulletins from the Republican National Convention, chilling stories about raids and police actions, but here is a wonderful story of magic and power. For those of you who have seen my recent work, you will know why I burst into tears when I read the "chant to the mother river" - spelling indeed!

Blessed Be!

Cari

From: Starhawk <stella@mcn.org>

Date: August 31, 2008 10:14:12 AM PDT

Subject: [starhawk] RNC Report 3: New Moon Ritual

Feel free to forward or repost this—thanks to all who have made calls already—it really helps! We got the convergence space reopened—but the raids continue!

New Moon Ritual
By Starhawk

This is how magic works:

We are gathered on sacred ground overlooking the Mississippi to celebrate the new moon and to begin this week of demonstrations and actions outside the Republican National Convention. We have an intention for the ritual, an intention the planners have been working with here in the Twin Cities for months: to court an upwelling of earth wisdom.

Magic, we say, is the art of changing consciousness at will—that’s Dion Fortune’s definition. Implicit in that is ‘art’, imagery, poetry, and we’ve been looking for the imagery that will embody our intention. The most powerful rituals are built around one clear image and one clear intention.

But we keep getting multiple images: webs, crystals, bedrock, surging water. The hurricane, roaring toward the Gulf, back toward New Orleans where many of us volunteered after Katrina. And dragons.

“Oh please Goddess not dragons!” I’m saying silently inside my own mind. “With or without dungeons—high wince factor. Overused. Disneyesque.” But dragons it is—protective Chinese dragons, ancient earth serpent powers, water dragons, fierce, fire-breathing guardians.

Many years ago, I had a friend who lived in a group house in San Francisco. He used to say that every collective needed a dragon who lived in the basement, someone really ill tempered who will emerge from time to time and drive off those people who come to visit for a night and end up staying for a month, eating up all your sweet pickle chips and losing your bicycle.

And so, when we do ritual in a public place, we always name some people as ‘dragons’, to guard the boundaries of the circle. This ritual coincides with the arrival of a group who has biked from a conference in Madison, Wisconsin all the way to the Twin Cities. Paul has contacted them, and asked them to be our dragons.

I am having a lot of trouble shifting my own consciousness as the ritual begins. It’s been a hard, tense day. All day we’ve been getting news that the police have been raiding houses, breaking down doors, arresting people, with or without warrants or warnings. We hold the morning meeting in a public park, because our Convergence Space has been raided and closed the night before. Someone says, “We’re a community that includes children—we can’t clear them out of their own living spaces. Remember if the police raid your space it’s important to have someone negotiate with them to get the children out.”

I am a tough person. I’ve been through a lot of these things and in spite of all my efforts to stay open I’ve grown something of my own protective scales. But those words pierce through them, and I find tears welling up in my eyes. It just hits me, that we’re standing here in the United States of America, in the liberal city of my birth, talking about how to protect children from armed police.

So this is on my mind as I try to center for the ritual, and then comes the news that our PermiBus has been pulled over and our friends in it are being arrested. My own organization, Earth Activist Trainings, has helped to build and fund this bus, and our dear friends Delyla and Stan Wilson and their daughter Megan have been traveling in it for seven months, offering trainings in Sustainable Skills, and tours of the bus itself as a living example. It has solar panels and graywater systems, a worm bin, hydroponic herb garden, composting toilet and three resident chickens. Megan, a gifted poet at sixteen, says: “We know the world is not as it should be: we want to live in a way that shows people what could be.”

So I’m trying to wrench my mind away from worrying about them, using all my magical tools to try to get calm and grounded and centered, and not having great success. I’m responsible for a major part of the ritual, and though I’ve been meditating on it and thinking about it for days, my mind is still pretty much a blank and now, as the ritual begins, I still don’t know exactly what I’m going to do.

And then the dragons ride in. Paul signals to them, and they ride down the hill and around and around the circle on their bikes, while we cheer and laugh with delight. For each of them has made a dragon costume. They have long snouts of painted cardboard and foam spikes in their helmets and wild wings of wire and gauze and webbing. They ride around and around, and just for a moment, the clouds of stress and worry roll away and I’m filled with wonder and delight. Three bald eagles circle above us. Magic.

As the ritual begins, I know what I am going to say, what images and energies are asking to be expressed. We honor the ancestors, and ask permission to do our work on that sacred land. We cast a circle, call in the elements of earth, air, fire, water. A young woman from the biking group has asked to spin fire, and her dance with twirling balls of fire on chains lights up all our hearts. All the while, the dragons stand guard around us, calm and still in their snouts and wings.

Susu, who is a poet, calls the Mississippi by having us all chant the letters of the mother river’s name, spelling a spell. We call in the earth spirits, and we call protection, for the circle, for all our friends in the street, and for our friends and all those in the path of the hurricane heading toward the Gulf.

My turn comes. Right away, I abandon my plans. This circle needs to move, to sing and dance, so I call in the drummers and we sing a chant to Spider Woman and to change.

“Spiders and webs are positive images for us,” I tell the group when the chant dies down. “The web is a symbol for the web of life, the web of connection. But there are other sorts of webs, too. Sticky webs. Webs of lies. Webs of entrapment. There’s a web of negative energy that has been covering this country, media webs that whisper to you day and night that you’re not good enough, not good looking enough, webs of scorn and judgment. And those webs get inside us.”

I ask people to turn to each other, to draw out the threads of those webs and let them sink into the ground as pure energy. To open up a space for something new.

If there’s a core belief in the Goddess religion, it’s this: that each of us is part of the web of life, and precious, bringing our own unique gifts to the world. We don’t ask people to believe in things, not even the Goddess who is simply our term for the great creative mystery that weaves the world. But we do ask people to believe in yourself, in your own deep work, in your sacred purpose. You are here for a reason.

And then I ask people to sink down into that web of life, to feel it beneath our feet, in the soil, in the web of waters that flow beneath us, in the very bedrock below us which was once living things and which in the fullness of time will return to life as soil and root and growing thing. To listen to that web of life, and to know that all we really need to do to court its upwelling is to open up a space for it, and listen.

Eagles circle, and then as the sun sets, so do helicopters, circling around us, their thrum making it nearly impossible to hear. But we begin to dance and drum, to weave a spiral and raise a roaring cone of power, and the helicopters finally move away. Energy pours through us, roaring upwards like dragon fire.

At the end of the ritual, someone calls for anyone who was in the convergence center when it was raided to come forward. A young woman steps into the center of the circle. She was in the building the night before, with her five year old son, who was scared and crying as the police drew their guns on his mother, handcuffed her, patted her down. Now we lay soft hands on her, chant and sing and send her healing. When it is done, she’s glowing; and immediately begins organizing housing for all the people who have been displaced by the raids.

I sit down, spent. A man and a woman come over to talk. They are thinking of offering housing, but worried. What about the anarchists? Won’t they destroy things, or bring down the police on their home? If they march with us, will they be in danger? They’ve heard that anarchists like to provoke the police to attack peaceful demonstrators, to radicalize them.

I explain gently that anarchism is many things—a political philosophy with widely varying strands, from nihilists to pacifists. But mostly a way of organizing, a stress on personal responsibility, on taking action oneself and not waiting for the government or someone else to do it for you.

A young woman from the biker’s group comes over. She’s dressed all in black—if ever someone looked the part of an anarchist, it’s her.

“We were just talking about you,” says the man, and soon they are deep in discussion. She tells him that yes, she is an anarchist, and so are pretty much all of the group with the bikes. And that for her, it’s about building community, looking out for each other, making decisions together, mutual aid and respect. They have a long discussion, in which magic is happening: consciousness is changing.

I talk with her and with some of the other dragons as we share food made by Seeds of Peace. A tall young man with golden curls tells me how much it meant to them to be dragons. “We really got into it,” he says. “We spent a whole day making our costumes, and getting into that guardian, protective energy. And now I don’t want to let it go. I’m going to keep my foam spikes in my helmet when I’m doing deliveries. We want to be guardians for the marches, for the city. For the world.”

This is how magic works.

The bikers are all hugging each other in a circle, reluctant to leave each other now that the ride is over. They have fulfilled their intention, built their community, spread their message, and brought us a gift of wonder and delight.

And as we prepare to leave, I get a new message. Our friends with the bus have not been arrested, although the bus itself has been impounded. They are free, although their home and all their possessions, computers, permaculture displays, worms and the contents of their composting toilet are now locked up somewhere in a police yard, with no explanation or reason. The police had no search warrant—indeed, they did not search the bus, but explained that they were impounding it in case they wanted to search it later. They did, however, release the people, the two exuberant Australian shepherd dogs, and the three chickens, with whom we are reunited back at our home.

Magic. Like so many things, it doesn’t work perfectly. But it works.

www.starhawk.org <http://www.starhawk.org/>

www.earthactivisttraining.org <http://www.earthactivisttraining.org/>

http://permibus.livejournal.com <http://permibus.livejournal.com/>

This post has been sent from Starhawk@lists.riseup.net. This is an announce-only listserve that allows Starhawk to post her writings occasionally to those who wish to receive them.

Summer Sweep Prevents Crud in Creeks

2008-08-22T13:28:00.000-07:00

Today our street was posted with NO PARKING signs to allow for more thorough street sweeping. It's always amazing to see our street, Brookwood Drive, without a single car parked along the curb. Could call it a dreamscape for someday when we have evolved beyond the ubiquitous automobile as our main transportation device.

Kudos to the folks at San Jose Environmental Services for going the next step in removing litter from the streets BEFORE it reaches the creeks. The alternative is to exert huge effort to remove debris rafts from the creek itself, after long efforts to get help from the Santa Clara Valley Water District to actually expend funds from their parcel taxes to give the community CLEAN, SAFE CREEKS, if not NATURAL FLOOD PROTECTION.

Although I am often bashing the Water District for their blindspots over the years, I am pleased to give praise to the work that some of the staff are currently engaged in restoring wetlands. This is in high contrast to the work they were doing in the early 70's to help put huge malls in the middle of local wetlands.

The project that I am most excited about is the Laguna Seca Freshwater Wetlands Project located toward the northern end of Coyote Valley. This project may actually provide some mitigation for the Upper Silver Creek diversion project that was installed to protect the Eastridge Shopping Center from being flooded, since it is located in part of an old wetlands in the Silver Creek-Thompson Creek watersheds, which are tributary to Coyote Creek.

The primary description of the Coyote Creek's lower 100 square miles of watershed in San Jose is that it is heavily urbanized, hardened by developments, it's riparian corridor encroached upon, and its water quality significantly impaired by storm drainage that carries floatables like plastic bags and packaging and dissolved poisons like automotive fluids or pesticides from landscaping. Many tools have been proposed to help mitigate the flow of these pollutants into local creeks, but none are as effective as restoring wetlands.

The Water District web pages for teachers includes a note about when the native Ohlone lived with the many marshes throughout their range between summer encampments by the rivers and streams, to their hillside habitats where they moved in winter. Farmers in the 19th and 20th centuries filled many of these wetlands, and more wetlands were recently filled by city planners and developers with typical urban buildings and parking structures to accommodate the cars that were primarily employed to move people and products around town. If this were the Bayou, we'd certainly would be up to our collective asses in alligators, but what we mostly have is tons and tons of pollutants flowing in huge seasonal slugs to our all our local creeks and rivers.

Under the provisions of the Federal Clean Water Act, the State Water Boards have been trying to curtail this flow of pollutants from these urbanized watersheds by crafting action plans with groups like the Santa Clara Valley Urban Runoff Pollution Prevention Program. This joint venture of fifteen public agencies, with jurisdiction over watershed lands flowing into South San Francisco Bay, tries to continuously improve the prevention of storm water pollutants from reaching our waterways.

The Silicon Valley Pollution Prevention Center was created in 1994 through a consent decree settling a Clean Water Act lawsuit filed by Clean South Bay, a coalition of environmental groups, attempting to prevent further damage to local water resources by addressing the sources of pollution, rather than the more costly approach to removing pollutants after they reached the water bodies. This organization was shuttered by its Board of Directors when the conversations finally reached the root of the problems for watershed pollution: Land Use. The proposed Coyote Valley development became the line in the watershed where the Board members tried to gag me, as the Executive Director of the SV P2 Center, and keep me from discussing the huge impacts this development would have on the groundwater quality. But once released from my contact, the comments embedded above were submitted to the City of San Jose, and hopefully contributed to the withdrawal of that very flawed proposal with its terribly inadequate draft EIR.

When the SVP2 Center was closed in 2004, over $250,000 of funds remained in the bank. Under State law, all assets of a nonprofit must be bequeathed to another nonprofit, rather then being returned to the donors. Since most of these funds had originated from the Santa Clara Valley Water District, they were able to convince the SVP2 Center Board to transfer the remaining assets of the organization to the San Francisco Estuary Institute to conduct a study of the Historical Ecology of the Coyote Creek. This study clearly identified the historic upland wetlands on both the Silver-Thompson Creeks and the Laguna Seca in the Coyote Creek Watershed, the former wetlands partly occupied by a shopping mall, while the later was severely threatened by the Coyote Valley development proposal.

With the recent court ruling nullifying the last parcel tax vote to fund the Santa Clara County Open Space Authority, the Water District project to restore the Laguna Seca may be the only publicly acquired open space land in Coyote Valley in the near future. That is, unless we can attract enough attention to the problems associated with allowing urban development and enlist the help of a nationwide NGO, like Trust For Public Land, to help acquire the development rights in the Coyote Valley, before a future City Council puts the blinders back on and thinks it's a good idea again.

Ferraro's Funky Farm

2008-08-18T15:08:00.000-07:00

Grounded is a good thing for an electrical system, but also important for these "bio-machines" we live in.

How each of us stays grounded varies according to what we have access to. Everyone has the power to just slow down and find their center through meditation. Some do it while practicing vigorous exercise, high on endorphins. I ground myself usually in the very literal sense, inserting myself into the organic cyclical flow of matter entering and leaving the ground right around me.

In my post First Harvest, I described many of the plants that flow through my creek side home, from the cultivated annuals to the trees and vines we have planted by our own hands, as well as the constant delivery of new plants that come to us from the riparian ecosystem. As steward for this small piece of the watershed, I am perpetually called to remove all such organic materials as their maturing renders them food, fuel or yard waste. Of course, there is no such thing as waste, knowing everything has to go someplace, and there becomes what it will be next.

The life style of an urban farmer also often involves keeping some "live stock," domesticated animals that can also dine on some of the organic materials flowing around us. And then, we in turn, may dine upon them. Also their excrement also joins the flow, back to our vegetable gardens, producing food directly for us, with peelings and other garden growth feeding the animals.

Thirty-six years ago, we built the first chicken coop in the flood plain behind our house, and named it "Ferraro's Funky Farm." Free range chickens too often turned into dog-hunted carcasses, so we eventually hardened a 10 x40 ft. chicken run, built of galvanized chain link fencing, with a welded steel pipe arches supporting the heavy wire roofing fabric and the thatched shade organically provided by the molting bark falling from the 80 ft. eucalyptus tree growing through the middle of the structure.

This structure has normally been the habitat for up to a dozen chickens, including, temporarily, a rooster or three. Of course, it seems natural to buy chickens in lots of a dozen, since we know that not long ago, they were encased in egg shells. Our local city ordinance forbids urban farmers from keeping roosters, but as chicks, it is often the case that the sex of some of the new birds will be male. It doesn't take long for the chicken run to become the protected territory of the rooster(s) and biting and generally attacking the hand that feeds you becomes part of the experience.

Luckily, thanks to a wise woman named Emma Prusch, San Jose has a publicly-owned working farm, right off King Road, in the southeast quadrant of the 101-680-280 interchange. This space is the one of San Jose's most valuable park assets, as it provides a place for urbanites to participate in the agricultural process and be reminded of the great potential for food production that this entire valley possesses, now hidden below the veneer of asphalt, concrete and buildings. With many kinds of birds in residence at Prusch Park, it is an natural place to release our roosters rather than harvest them for our dinner table. This usually quickly provides other real roosters for our cocky residents to engage with instead of someone in our family who is trying to feed the other hens or rabbits.

While I do not relish the act of killing and cleaning the feathered animals living with us here at the Funky Farm, I find that raising rabbits for food is a far easier process for putting meat protein on the family menu. A few hours of work skinning and cleaning rabbits puts 10-12 dinners in the freezer, while the discards are buried on the creek banks and return to the nature, as they should.

Raising rabbits and chickens in the same run showed me the basis for the connection of the Easter Bunny and the Easter Egg that are central to the Christian feast, as celebrated in the USA, at least. In the spring, The chickens usually increase their egg production so much that nesting boxes are in higher demand than supply, so chickens will lay eggs almost anywhere. When rabbit hutches are open, they soon possess several eggs, and next there is the appearance that even the rabbits are producing eggs. And the Easter Rabbit-Egg myth is born. One year, I made a video of a white rabbit hopping around some Easter Eggs, which then was edited with appropriate music by my bright son, Nick.

Yesterday, my rabbit population on the Funky Farm increased dramatically, adding 15 furry critters to my pens in one day. But you're thinking: new litters, from rabbits multiplying like rabbits. That would be an inaccurate assumption. What occurred was a neighbor of my friend Frank Schiavo, named Frank Rocca, has a daughter who just turned thirteen, and no longer is interested in caring for her large population of rabbits that had grown in her yard. Her dad was happy to find a willing recipient of this rabbit population, and the possibility of getting some of the rabbits back in a more eatable form than when he delivered them to me.

Luckily, the apples are ripening in San Jose right now and our neighbor John Engel and Karen English on South14th Street had bags of apples on the ground for the taking. This should be a tasty supplement for the alfalfa pellets that were their main staple in their diet to date. Since wild plants are found only in irrigated areas at present, the amount of free food for the rabbits comes mainly from neighbors' gardens and our own during the dry summer months. The alternative is to buy alfalfa pellets at $30/cwt.

Ferraro's Funky Farm has been home to some other critters during the last 36 years. I purchased a dozen pheasants from a huge pheasant farm that used to be located along Summit Road, east of Hwy 17. I also adopted some ducks from Vasona Reservoir County Park, with the Park Rangers blessings, as the amount of duck guano had become a deterrent for park visitors' enjoyment of the lakeside amenities.

We adopted two kid goats one year in the mid 70's, but found a better place to graze them at a friend's home in the Santa Cruz Mountains until they were old enough to butcher. Another goat was purchased live from a farm in Morgan Hill and butchered and barbecued for my Grandfather's birthday in 1978. This year my daughter, Chrysalis, has a friend in Santa Rosa whose family keeps a herd of goats to eat their pastures, converting grass to goats. I was tempted to buy a pair of young goats to eat the winter's vegetative ground cover that grows during our rainfall season between November and April.

The largest living live stock to ever come to the Funky Farm were two full grown hogs we bought from our friends Doug Nelson and Judy Chambers who lived in the rugged hills of Mendocino near Andersen Valley. These hogs had been pretty wild and were hard to keep penned. Their diet was comprised of apples and acorns, both plentiful local crops. Doug finally mellowed out these pigs when he acquired and fed the pigs fermented grape skins from a local wine maker.

Doug delivered two of these special-diet pigs to us, which we penned in our carport until our custom butcher could get to San Jose to kill and process our live stock. Our pigs were quite a surprise when folks would ring our bells at the front gate and get an immediate response of a loud grunt from the porkers. On the early Saturday morning when the butcher arrived, we first discussed the legality of shooting the pigs. They had never been hired to butcher pigs in the city limits before. After deciding it would be OK, they proceeded to shoot and bleed the pigs on the compost pile and then move them to the driveway to skin, gut and cut in half with a giant meat ax, while suspended from a boom on their rig. About this time, my neighbor across the street came out to get his newspaper, but nothing in the paper was as strange as what he was seeing in our driveway that morning. The reward for all this effort was pork that had the most incredible taste I've ever eaten and the normally white meat was tinted pink, probably the result of the fermented red grape skins in their diet.

The Funky Farm is also home to about six cats, some with names and others feral, but friendly enough to cry at the door when feeding time is delayed. We did have two dogs for a time, Tipsy, a black lab with white tips on her front paws, and Sandy, a dirty white terrier that we adopted when our neighbors John and Mandy Hall moved back to Illinois after John was stricken with multiple sclerosis. John and both dogs have since passed back into the earth, but will always be missed and loved.

The First Harvest

2008-08-12T17:14:00.000-07:00

While we have all been engaged in our personal and collective dramas, the earth has been traveling around the sun, as she does, and summer is upon us in the northern hemisphere and, especially, our gardens.

Despite all accounts that the planet's ecosystem is in collapse, our gardens are again producing such an amazing variety of plant types, some cultivated but many planted by the surrounding environment.

And that surrounding environment is the Coyote Creek Riparian Corridor. As long as the corridor is vital, the migratory birds and waterfowl in the Pacific Flyway will move along the creek, bringing us constant surprises. Sometimes these new species pick the least-possible fertile locations to grow, like dirt-filled cracks between bricks or curbing.

Other plants are placed on the earth by our hands, while our hands do all the removal of all the bio-growth that happens around here, when its nature has been fulfilled. Thankfully, our city, San Jose, provides unlimited piles of yard waste to be picked up every week, so I don't have to compost all this stuff right here. I can order a load of compost returned to me whenever I need more mulch.

Cari claimed a piece of land right next to our bedroom side windows to plant sunflowers. These were the same blessed seeds we used in ceremony on the Winter Solstice. Nearly every seed germinated and produced some of the largest and tallest sunflowers that I have ever seen.

Blessed Be!

The vineyard is also ready for grazing. First '08 vintage were bunches of spicy white seedless grapes, that I lust for more of every year when they ripen. If the water supply was more abundant than it is right now and the food-growers 95% water discounts were in place uniformly ( i.e. for both commercial farmers and local community farmers, like so many folks are), I might plant a dozen more of this varietal, if I could find it.

This weekend, the first large tomato harvest came in. The first produce went off to my family chiropractors and staff and my neighbors. By the second picking, we had to get out the large scale kitchen equipment to process the first 30 pounds of perfectly red, ripe and round tomatoes. Added herbs were just outside the door, like fresh basil, and oregano, plus fresh parsley and cilantro from the CSA. (Community Supported Agriculture) The peppers and eggplants are also ripening and will be on the menu soon.

And a word of thanks to our most essential garden assistant, the bees.

Thank you, your majesty, and all your helpers

The ubiquitous cherry plums are also ripe and ground fruit is trying to ferment beneath every tree, even on part of the driveway near the carport. The next fruit crop will be the figs, probably in September, followed in December by the oranges and tangerines. Which brings us Full Circle, back to the Winter Solstice.

I am glad San Jose now hosts many Farmers Markets so hundreds, hopefully thousands of local folks are buying fresh produce directly from local growers, many certified organic. As Michael Pollan advocates, "Shake the Hand That Feeds You" If you cannot grow your own fruits and vegetables, the Farmers' Market or joining a CSA are the next best options.

Our neighbors Angelica and Sergio, at the corner of Brookwood and E. William St. have organized a CSA for about 20 families. They buy organic produce from Ledesma Farms, located in Watsonville and Los Banos. The Ledesma's sell at various farmers' markets in San Jose, so Sergio connects with the farmers each Saturday at the Willow Glen Farmers' Market and brings back crates of fresh produce. The MacKay's on 18th St. and I show up at 10 AM and we help divide the produce into single, medium and familly shares during the next hour. When folks start to show up at 11AM, we all catch up on news with each other. With the young ones playing around their beautiful gardens, the scene is tribe-like and the feeling of community is stronger each week. Subscription rates are quite modest: $15/wk. for a single share, $22.50 for medium share, and $30 for a family share. Subscriptions are for any part of the spring, summer or winter growing seasons. The photo below is of a single share last April.

Once you get in the grocery store, the link to the earth that produces your food starts to fade quickly into a mirage, at best. Growing conditions and transportation costs are unknown to you. The price you pay is not a signal of the where or how the food is grown. The "added value" that you pay at Whole Foods Markets is the story you get with the product that you are buying. Our dear friends the DiDinato's are so proud of their daughter, Francesca, who has risen to the corporate heights of chief cheese buyer for Whole Foods. What a cool job for a young urban professional. She can tell us the stories of the many delectable cheeses she buys for their customers

In Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, he exposes the processed food industry and the nutritionist's that make it all possible. He advises that the only real food in a market is on the perimeter. The inner isles are where the processed foods are located, and it is there where the reductionist science of nutrition has allowed factories to take over the feeding of the world. This would be where I would embed a link to Soylent Green if I had one.

Never Thirst!

Rainmakers, The Seedier Side of Running Water

2008-08-10T13:15:00.000-07:00

During the 2004-05 season, Northside Theatre Company produced one of their best stage plays, entitled The Rainmaker. John Grisham wrote a book called the Rainmaker, but there it's the euphemism for a lawyer who brings in lots of cash to the firm. But the subject of this post is actually the art/science/cult of trying to squeeze more rain from a storm cloud as it passes over a thirsty watershed to give a needed boost to the local inhabitants' water supply.

Last week, I posted about seeking a Clean Bill of Health. I sent the link to this post to many of my caregivers at the CET Cancer Center at Alta Bates Summit Hospital in Oakland. So after my last treatment, Alfred Jamison, one of the many skilled folks assisting me through through the rigorous morning routine, engaged me in a conversation about, of all subjects, water supplies in California. Alfred wondered why the State water managers don't engage in the practice of cloud seeding to increase the amount of rain that falls from the skies in the watersheds with near empty reservoirs. This is certainly not on the list reported by the media of forthcoming solutions to California's water woes. Things are pretty serious though, when the Peripheral Canal is actually being discussed again and was to be included as a bond election in November.

Alfred's question set off my memories of when the Santa Clara Valley Water District performed cloud seeding in a program that was intended to be as scientific and as liability-free as possible. In 1973, when I took my seat as an elected member of the District's Board of Directors, an engineer named Dan Kriege managed this program and reported his procedures and results to us during the time that the operations unit of the agency conducted this activity.

In 1952, the first cloud seeding began in an effort to increase the average rainfall in the valley. Silver iodide crystals were shot from the ground into the clouds. According to the water history available at the Water District's website, in 1992 the cloud seeding program switched to airplanes flying into clouds with canisters of silver iodide crystals sprayed from the wings of the aircraft in order to increase the density of the water droplets and "squeeze more water out of the clouds." It also states that the "Cloud seeding remains a drought fighting strategy of the District."

I could swear that the Board ended the use of cloud seeding for a variety of reasons long before I left the Board in 1995. I will ask the Clerk to survey the Board's minutes to see when it was last discussed. I seem to remember that the District may have done an Environmental Impact Report on the program. This may be when they decided to eliminate the risks to the environment from spraying silver, which is a toxic heavy metal, into the watershed to fall with the induced raindrops.

There was also the aspect of determining the efficacy of the program. Each storm that was seeded had to be classified as a seedable event by the official weather watcher agencies. After that, there was kind of a lottery where as Seed or No Seed determination was made by flip of the coin or some other means. This was supposed to give more statistical relevance to the overall measurement of water added to the watershed by virtue of the cloud seeding. But during times of extended drought like we experienced in 1976-78, we abandoned the lottery and seeded every storm to try to get more local rainfall.

A Google search of Cloud Seeding shows that 12 States including Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Kansas, North Dakota, Texas, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, Georgia, Colorado and California, operate ongoing cloud seeding programs. Kansas and North Dakota use cloud seeding for hail suppression, while Washington, Oregon and Georgia use it for fog dispersal.The remaining states use it to increase precipitation, with California with the most activities, according to a 1996 publication of the Weather Modification Association.

Although the American Meteorological Society says some studies have shown a 10 percent increase in rain volume, the National Academy of Sciences has said there is no conclusive evidence that cloud seeding works.

It's not the initial cloud-seeding equation that is in doubt: Silver iodide does produce ice crystals in clouds. "You can see on a radar how it grows to larger particles," says Dan Breed, a project scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "But the chain of events between that and precipitation hitting the ground is much more complicated."

Some clouds, it turns out, are less complicated than others. Winter orographic clouds, which form over mountains in winter, are simpler to work with than convective clouds, which cause thunderstorms. Orographic clouds occur almost every day in the Western mountains, where shortages of winter snowpack (needed to fill lakes, rivers and reservoirs in the spring) mean extra precipitation is most often needed.

Glaciogenic seeding, using silver iodide -- its structure mimics that of ice crystals -- is most commonly used in cloud seeding. It is also used for hail suppression; by providing many ice particles for hail to form around, it prevents very large hail from developing. But hailstorms are extremely complicated, Breed says, and experiments with hailstorms are risky. "You do a project or experiment and you can end up with insurance claims or crop damage," he says.

Other countries that practice cloud seeding include Japan, Australia, Russia and China. China spends $90 million per year on cloud seeding, and made an extraordinary effort to seed storms to try to wash some of the pollution from the air before the Olympics began this week. Reports on the air quality by the media indicate that the results were less than noticeable.

In June of this year, The Russians tried to seed a storm to prevent it from raining in Moscow on June 12, Russian Day. The Russian Air Force, for some reason, was using a some packages of cement as condensation nuclei. When the cement failed to disperse, it fell straight to earth, and put a 3 ft. hole in the roof of a suburban homeowner, who is now suing the government for "moral suffering." Guess Russia also has too many lawyers.

Beyond using cloud seeding for solving local weather shortcomings, some researchers are looking at using similar physics to mitigate the global warming process brought on by increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Click here to view a 10 minute video on this subject.

If this account was not as entertaining as you'd prefer, please click on the this YouTube link for a funny episode on a Canadian show featuring cloud seeding. And if you don't have a sense of humor, I hope you get one soon.

Never Thirst!

In California When the Figs Are Ripe

2008-08-07T15:00:00.000-07:00

While growing up in the small town of Niagara Falls, NY, famous for its water falls, power plants and the deadly toxic waste dumps at Love Canal, my father's father, Theodore Ferraro, used to always say, "I'll be in California when the figs are ripe." We just used to listen to Grandpa Teddy say this, not knowing what it meant, so it just became an echo of words that I remembered from time to time.

In 1961, my mom and dad traveled to California for a month long vacation, leaving my sister and I under the care of my mom's mom, Lillian. They traveled with an eye to relocating our family to California, willing to leave all our friends and family, familiar folkways, community, landscapes, not-so-wonderful climate, and Grandpa's trucking business.

My grandfather, Ted, had built up a small but successful trucking business in Niagara Falls, despite the dire economic conditions during the Great Depression, and did even better once the war began and local industries based along the Niagara River began to grow with the war effort. My dad served in the army until the war ended, and foregoing his GI Bill education incentives, then went into partnership with his father in the trucking business.

For the next 15 years, we somehow managed to survive post-war recessions and nasty weather, both snow-bound winters and hot and humid summers, by running our small mom & pop trucking business out of our house and grandpa's truck barns, built behind his house. But my dad was less and less happy about our economic well being and our health. Sinus infections, allergies, and chronic ailments plagued us all during these years. My dad decided we needed to leave and my mom readily agreed.

I early 1963, my dad set off for California in a new used Oldsmobile he bought with profit he made from selling the land he had bought to build a new warehouse. He arrived in Southern California and bunked with the son of his dad's next door neighbor, Bill Porreca, for a couple of weeks. Bill's connections quickly landed him a job with a Mayflower Moving Company franchise which was opening a new office near Thousand Oaks. 50 miles north of Los Angeles in Ventura County along Hwy 101. By the end of my school year in June, we said our goodbyes in Niagara Falls and flew to Los Angeles to begin our lives in California. My grandfather loaded our truck, crying most of the time, and the truck was driven by a fellow trucker my dad flew east to drive back with our furniture.

We soon bought our first home in Thousand Oaks through a nice woman realtor named Edith Seid. My dad and I both worked for the Mayflower agent for the next few years, until I got my first engineering job at Caltrans and, soon after, he started his own moving company, Ferraro Van Line. He ran this business from 1965 to 1991, when he sold the business and moved to Las Vegas.

My mom passed back into the earth in 1973, weakened by a long battle with cancer and finally suffering a deadly stroke. After losing my mom after 27 years of having a good loving mate, my dad at first faltered, mistakenly marrying a stressed-out psychiatrist, who was the inverse of Tony Soprano's shrink, Dr. Melby. When their relationship soured, she was the paranoid delusional, fearing my dad was really in the mob and would hurt her. Luckily, my dad reconnected with that nice realtor he had bought a house from back in 1963, Edith Seid. Edith's has just lost her husband to a mid-life craziness crisis and a younger woman, and was left raising four teenagers on her own.

Edith and my dad were soon married and she agreed to jump in and help him run the family trucking business, as my mom had done before she died. Suddenly I had four step-siblings, and a family life that was way more complex than ever when I had with only my sister to relate to. I was living in San Jose by this time, newly elected to the Water District Board and busy writing environmental impact reports for projects in the area.

In 1977, about the time the water district was having their signing ceremony with feds to build the San Felipe Water Project, I called my dad and asked him to send me a truck so I could expand the family trucking business to San Jose. This surprised my dad, since he always wanted to be sure that I wasn't stuck in a manual labor job because I did not have a college degree, as he had foregone to go into the family business and start his family. But I did get my degree, including a Master of Science degree in Environmental Engineering and was already an elected official in San Jose.

From my perspective, I was getting writers block after drafting enough engineering and environmental reports to fill three filing cabinets. Most of my water district projects, like water recycling, were taking decades to implement. I desperately needed something that could give me some short-term satisfaction. I also felt I needed to connect to my dad in a stronger way, less he get farther and farther away dealing with his new family members and local business management.

As it turned out, the moving business was a great balance in my life to offset some of the mega-engineering projects that I was trying to develop in the arena of water politics. Loading someones personal belongings into and out of a bobtail truck became my physical mantra, that gave me exercise, a sense of immediate accomplishment, a paycheck, and an on-the-job training worth more than any MBA.

Also in 1977, my Grandfather, Teddy Ferraro, put himself on a plane and flew to San Jose from Buffalo to teach me "everything I needed to know to run a moving company." Grandpa moved in with my then wife, Lexa, and I and my "training" began. Grandpa taught me about the value of the"sit down" soon after he arrived. San Jose was lucky enough to have two Pat Ferraro's, one an older businessman who used to run a hat shop in downtown, and who recently had opened a mini-storage business. While I was running for the Water Board in 1972, my opponent, Vic Corsiglia, Sr. had accused him of running against him, a fellow member of the Elks lodge. He said "It's not me!" but Vic continued to doubt him until they checked the registrar's office and learned that I was 24 years old, so it couldn't be Pat-the-Hat.

In 1977, when I started the trucking company, I sent out postcards to the other movers, asking them to refer small or overflow jobs to us as we build our own clientele. One of the movers who had been referring storage customers to the other Pat Ferraro, called him and angrily read him off for now going into competition with them. He again said "It's not me!" This time he called me and said I was stealing his good name for my benefit, and he was not happy about it. I related all this to my grandfather soon after he arrived. He told me to call the other Pat Ferraro and set up a meeting at his office. We arrived with some fresh fruit and a compulsory bottle of wine and just sat and got to know each other, like we should have done many years before. Soon, Pat and I were referring customers to each others businesses, and remained friends throughout his life. Not something I could say about owner of the local garbage company, Mr. Corsiglia, who went to his grave angry with me for pushing him off the Water Board after his years of politicking that lead to his appointment in 1968.

Grandpa, was above all, a natural born and self-taught engineer. In Niagara Falls, he had designed and built many machines for moving large, heavy items into and onto upper stories of buildings, like three-ton air conditioning units or for walkin coolers and refrigerated cases for grocery stores. The man knew how to use the wheel, block and tackles and inclined planes. The Egyptians had nothing on him. He also designed and built electric lawn mowers for everyone in his family, using scavenged motors from things like old washing machines. For this design, he even applied for a patent, but someone had already received one, so no big fortune coming from electric lawn mowers.

He noticed that the truck my dad had sent me did not have a external tool box for holding things like road flares, tow chains, or spare oil and filters, lug wrenches, jacks, etc. My grandfather had built most of his moving vans in Niagara Falls. One year he first built the truck barn, equipped with a wood-burning stove, and then spent the winter building the box on a cab & chassis, which he rolled out in the spring, with the pride of a ship builder.

He said he would design and build and attach the tool box, but warned me that he was in charge of this project, and I should just watch and learn. All went as planned until we were hanging the box, and the hanging cleats he designed and had machined needed to be readjusted while we were physically attaching the tool box to the chassis. As we lay on our backs under the truck, we were soon yelling at each other about whose truck it was and who would be liable for the mess when the box fell off the truck. My secretary came outside, wondering what had happened to cause such a load, angry exchange between me and my dear grand dad.

Grandpa Teddy was also a master gardener, who always kept a large vegetable garden in the front of the lot where his truck barns were built. One day he noticed a sickly fig tree trying to grow between two fifty foot eucalyptus trees along my driveway. He placed a large cobble stone in the branch of the fig tree and put a hose at the base of the tree and watered it deeply for three days. Two weeks later, the tree sent up a shoot from the base of the tree. He then cut off this shoot, walked across the driveway and stuck the shoot directly into the ground and watered it until it sprouted leaves and grew roots. Thirty years later, that fig tree dominates my own vegetable garden with its 25 ft. height and girth during the summer, and grandpa is truly in California when the figs are ripe.

A Clean Bill of Health

2008-08-01T13:51:00.001-07:00

A Clean Bill of Health is almost an oxymoron.

A Clean Bill of Health is a euphemism used to describe a medical evaluation that says you are HEALTHY. Yeah! But many, many people never get to hear such a positive pronouncement from their medical care givers. Of course most people only seek out the advice of a medical professional or neighborhood herbalist when they are already in the state of DIS-ease, and they know they do not have a A Clean Bill of Health.

I say A Clean Bill of Health is an oxymoron, since CLEAN is not what we live in, and HEALTH is what goes missing because we have lost the CLEAN, as we exponentially increase our flow of our culture's excrement into our own nests. One would think that the denser the nests, the denser the amount of waste products. But today, even land without many homes, operated by the machinery of agribusiness, can be equally as polluting, or worse.

The recent floods in the mid-west again reminded us of the deadly chemical legacy the pesticide industry has sold us to have a short-term adequate supply of food and fiber and, now, fuel. Dead zones in the receiving water of this purge reveals the hidden stockpile of poison we have dumped into our farmlands, only now having it washed to the sea, continuing to poison everything along the way.

So just what is the BILL for this UN-CLEAN environment we have created, which has robbed so many of us of our HEALTH? Some damage, like losing a salmon season or a cancerous kidney, is easier to calculate the cost. But the pollution problems we are causing today are so completely linked to the entire web of life on the planet, that we seldom get far enough away from a specific problem to see the systemic problem and its total cost. I'm not sure we have the right metrics to measure the loss of the entire life support system provided by our planet to sustain human life and all the interdependent species that allow our survival.

Simple science demonstrates biological growth dynamics by using a petri dish. Here, a growing "culture" expands exponentially, while the substrate food supply exceeds the demand. At the point that demand exceeds supply, the colony begins to die off exponentially, both from starvation and toxicity of the culture's own waste products.

As a home wine maker, I used to watch this happen when I fed a cultured yeast into a barrel of freshly crushed grape juice. The yeast colony doubled every twenty minutes until the yeast colony was so large that it needed the last half of the sugar in the juice for its next meal, then the die-off would begin. The waste products of this wanton yeast orgy are both carbon dioxide and alcohol. In an uncorked barrel, the carbon dioxide bubbles off to join the other CO2 in the atmosphere, but the alcohol remains in the juice and helps preserve the residual mixture, hopefully through the winter until the next vintage. But as the alcohol concentration increased, it became more toxic to the yeast and increased the rate of die-off of the yeast colony.

All the money we spent getting to the moon in the 60's was for only one reason, that we probably didn't appreciate when we began that great endeavor. Seeing the whole earth from our own moon changed our perception of our planet from terra firma to that of a spaceship/home orbiting and fueled continuously by the sun. But the folks at NASA soon shifted their focus back to what we, as passengers on this spaceship, were doing to our planetary life support system we have taken for granted throughout human history.

Like the yeast culture, human culture is growing exponentially, charging toward that day when we demand more from the earth than she can provide. As our human colonies grow mostly in cities, NASA also examines the impacts of all the cities on the HEALTH of the Planet. As an environmental engineer, my role was to build the portion of the infrastructure dedicated to mitigating the flow of a city's wastes to a degree necessary to protect the HEALTH of the ecosystem and the human population.

James Lovelock says in the Revenge of Gaia, "through our intelligence and communication systems, humans are the nervous system of the planet. Through us, Gaia ( the concept of the living Earth) has seen herself from space and begins to know her place in the universe. We should be the heart and mind of the earth, not its malady."

In a prior posts, I described the merger of the political and the scientific process to determine How CLEAN is CLEAN. The practical determination for a water quality standard depends on where the specific beneficial use of the water occurs. How all this translates to HEALTH is difficult to ascertain. The nexus of exposure to a particular pollutant to a dis-EASE is nearly impossible to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt."
This has protected the generators of most pollutants from liability and damages are seldom awarded to injured parties in such law suits.

Despite heart dis-EASE and cancer being the leading causes of death, medical science spends little effort on prevention. Most of the effort is expended looking for the next miracle pill that will undo the damage caused by who knows what. Michael Pollan, in his latest book, In Defense of Food, exposes the absurdity of trying to achieve HEALTH through a prescribed diet composed of the proper nutrients, instead of eating the whole foods that used to be part of the culture taught by our grandmothers.

I have been diagnosed twice with cancer, once when I was 24, with testicular cancer, and again at age 60, with prostate cancer. Both times, my treatment involved the use of controlled doses of nuclear radiation, in effect destroying the delinquent cancer cells by exposing them to a toxic environment containing lethal amounts of radiation. The first time I was treated with radiation in 1971, the radiation caused extreme nausea for the next twenty-four hours, such that I thought dose was certainly lethal. The medical experts, called oncologists, told me that they would reduce the dosage on my next 14 treatments to avoid the radiation sickness I experienced on the first treatment.

Thirty-seven years later, radiation oncologists are much more sophisticated when using radiation on their cancer patients. My odyssey for selecting the best course of treatment for prostate cancer began with an elevated PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) level found in a routine blood test. After the level increased again six months later, I consulted a urologist, who took a four-core biopsy that revealed a early stage cancerous growth in my prostate. He recommended that I have 100 radioactive metal seeds implanted in my prostate that would remain in my organ after the radiation had decayed beyond detection.

The first oncologist that I saw recommended the seeds plus external beam radiation to treat any cancer that had extended from my prostate to surrounding organs. The next oncologist I consulted refused to give me any radiation, since I had received radiation 37 years prior and no records existed to define exactly what dose was given. My next stop was at Stanford Cancer Center for further evaluation of these two conflicting attitudes.

There I met Dr. Chris King, an MD and professor at Stanford University Schoolof Medicine. He ordered a 12-core biopsy that revealed a more advanced stage of cancer. He referred me to a clinic in Oakland called California Endocurietherapy (CET) Cancer Center that administers high dose radiation (HDR) brachytherapy directly into the prostate without the need to leave radioactive metal pellets in my prostate gland. These metal seeds seemed too much like getting a load of radioactive buckshot in my crotch, some of which could dislodge and move through my body, with evidence of some migrating into the lungs, while still radioactive. Umm, getting lung cancer from treatment of prostate cancer did not seem like a risk worth taking.

Once I met Dr. Jeffery Demanes at his clinic at the Alta Bates Summit Hospital in Oakland, I decided that his treatment technique was the best treatment option combined with Dr. King's administration of the external beam radiation after completing the HDR Brachytherapy. I was also referred to another urologist, Dr. Andonian, here in San Jose, who would administer hormone reduction therapy and assist with related aspects of my treatment.

On July 29th, I checked into Alta Bates Summit Hospital for my first HDR treatment. I found that this procedure required that I be a very patient patient. After checking in at 8AM, the entire day consisted of many steps of preparation for a 20 minute radiation treatment that I finally received at 6:30 PM, spending most of the day on a gurney, unable to move or turn over without guided assistance from the dedicated CET staff. Three days later I am feeling pretty free of pain or side-effects. This is good since I have to repeat the entire process again next week. After six moths of research and patience, I am finally in the process of trying to get my proclamation of a CLEAN BILL OF HEALTH.

Below is an X-ray of my pubic region with the flex straws inserted into my prostate which guide the radioactive sources directly to the cancer cells. The round thingies at the side of the picture are my two hip prostheses.

Fresh Power With Fresh Sunshine

2008-07-28T17:04:00.000-07:00

Forty years ago, it was about flower power.
Today we welcome the wonderful world of sun power.

Regardless of the cost you incur when you install PV's, the feel-good part is priceless.

And if you can combine solar and a plug-in car of some kind, you will feel even better and increase your return by the amount you save on gasoline.

I have solar water and power on our home.

The power panels were installed at the end of 2003, and reduced my power import by 50%, and saved me $600 per year. But I also add $600-800 savings on gasoline, as I drive my neighborhood electric vehicle about 2000 miles per year, and my gas-powered car gets only 10mpg with cold starts in the city.

I have two meters on my house. One gets standard 3-phase power (220 volts) and still powers my HVAC and electric oven. My average bill from the standard meter averages about $50/month. My house was a duplex when first build is the reason I have two meters.

The other meter is a time-of-use meters that measures net energy usage and instantaneous power readings into or out of the grid.

I do not have the Fat Spaniel Technology on my system for online monitoring, but if you like to see lots of data, go for it. Here is a neighbor’s link if you want to see how it works:

I have 36-100 watt panels on my roof, facing southeast on a 4x12 slope. The incentives from CA Energy Commission were better than they are now, but still worth getting. The State is getting the peak power it needs, right where it's needed so the tariffs are generous for peak of day export to the grid, over 30cents per kwh, while off peak rates are abut 8.5 cents/kwh

The result is I build a credit of about $100 during the period from May-Oct, which pays for about the first 1000 kwh that I draw from the grid during evenings and winter. I usually use about 600 kwh in addition to the first 1000kwh, which costs me $5/month, which happens to be the minimum amount billed each month by PG&E.

Hopefully, my experience will help other reach a positive decision to install PV's and maybe even a solar water heater. The EV options may not be what you'd like for transportation, but I have found the GEM good enough to get me going and works great as a vehicle to use in downtown San Jose.An update on solar power in the Economist published 04/15/10 is available here.
To read more about a plan to convert 100% of the US electricity to solar by 2050 click here and then scroll down and click on Grand Solar Plan under further reading.

Take Me Shopping

2008-07-23T16:00:00.000-07:00

My friend Frank Schiavo used to tell his Environmental Studies students "If you don't want to make garbage, don't buy garbage." This refers both to the product and the packaging. It also refers to the bags that your purchases come home in.

One of the low-hanging fruit we picked while I was running the Silicon Valley Pollution Prevention Center
(SVP2Center) was to produce and give away strong canvas bags to our seminar attendees. In green ink (of course), the bags were printed with our name and logo and the words "Take Me Shopping"

Today, more and more stores offer cloth bags to their customers for a dollar or less. They still offer paper and plastic bags, but the later may soon be a relic of our no-deposit, no-return society because they are being banned in city after city. The amount of plastic trash bags littering streets, parks and stream channels has finally reached our cumulative YUK level, as we see pictures of the devastating impact these bags have on wildlife when they float on the wind or stormwater runoff into creeks, bays and oceans.

The pollution prevention aspect of store bags took about dozen years to take hold in a major way since we printed those first bags in 1996 for our conference attendees. In fact, almost every issue we discussed during my eight-year tenure as Executive Director of the SVP2 Center, was often a sort of prophetic effort that would be on our radar for action long before it reached general knowledge as environmental problem.

The SVP2Center was created within a consent decree which settled a Clean Water Act lawsuit filed by a coalition of Environmental NGO's, calling themselves CLEAN South Bay. The suit was filed against the three municipal treatment plants in San Jose, Sunnyvale and Palo Alto that discharged waste(d) water generated in thirteen cities in North Santa Clara County. All these discharges were in violation of national limits for heavy metals such as nickel, copper and cadmium being dumped into the circulation-starved South San Francisco Bay.

The largest discharger of nickel into the sewer system was a hard drive manufacturing facility owned by a company named Komag, whose CEO at the time was Bill Whitmer, who served as a board member of the SVP2Center for most of my tenure as Executive Director. The design of this Board was intended to have executives from industry and business, seated with government executives, both elected and appointed and the executive officers of the environmental NGO's. Our mission was to identify the sources of various pollutants and determine the extent that these directors' respective organizations, from the top down, could modify behavior and thereby prevent pollution from reaching local water resources.

The trilateral Board was evenly balanced, with at first three, then four members from each sector. The seed money of $375,000 was contributed from the enterprise funds of the San Jose -Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant and the San Jose City Council appointed all but the environmental members of the Board. In 2000, the Santa Clara Valley Water District committed $350,000 for pollution prevention out of the $15 million per year revenue from its new parcel tax called Clean, Safe Creeks and Natural Flood Protection Program. This allocation was split between three pollution prevention programs: the Santa Clara Valley Urban Stormwater Pollution Prevention Program, The County Pollution Prevention Committee and our NGO. With the Water District's commitment to providing $150,000 per year of funding to our organization came a bylaw change to split the appointing authority between the SJ Council and the District Board.

The Board always included one member from San Jose and the Water District. Trixie Johnson, of the San Jose Council and Stan Williams, CEO of the Water District were charter members of the Board, with Stan serving as the Board's first president. Since Stan and I could not be properly evaluating each others performance, I was offered the position of Executive Director contingent on my resigning from the Santa Clara Valley Water District Board of Directors. Not willing to lose my vestiture in CALPERS, I was offered a position on the staff of the District, which would be under contract to allow me to serve as XO of the SVP2Center, with my performance and salary to be controlled by the NGO Board.

In order to have the greatest influence on business and industry, it seemed prudent to have both the Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce and the Silicon Valley Manufacturer's Group represented on the Board to better disseminate practical pollution prevention initiatives to the broadest possible audience. These two organizations normally lobbied to prevent environmental regulations from impacting their members. If this new paradigm of ongoing mediations could avoid the long delays previously incurred through the litigation and appealed regulations, environmental protection could occur sooner and without the costly delays incurred during administrative hearings and court expenses.

Other industries, represented at various times on the Board, included Agilent Technologies, a spinoff of Hewlett Packard, the San Jose Mercury News, Pacific Gas and Electric, Pacific Bell, and IBM. IBM had learned the enormous value of pollution prevention after the $90 million cleanup costs from their leaking underground storage tanks which dumped solvents into the local groundwater basin in the late 1980's.
San Jose Water Company was also represented on the Board, having the largest corporate interest in protecting the quality of the water in the valley.

The Government sector directors included small cities like Milpitas and Santa Clara, and the County of Santa Clara. While the County had its own Pollution Prevention Committee, their program focused exclusively on business ("I'm from the Government and I'm here to help") Not willing to take the wrath of other departments within county government, the County P2 Committee refused to ever identify and try to prevent pollution generated by the County's own activities. Our organization had no such fear, although in the end, our successful efforts to move the County away from pesticide use resulted in a very oppositional director, who could not block this effort that was strongly resisted by his boss, the County Executive.

Another of our first initiatives was funded by the Integrated Waste Management Board in Sacramento. We received an $80,000 grant to identify ways and means to have oil filters removed from the solid waste stream and recycled at curbside in a safe and user-friendly manner. We ran a short-term pilot to determine the best container to issue to residents to place used oil filters in along side the used oil containers. This program was funded by a four cent fee on every quart of motor oil sold in the state. The goal was to remove the 2 million oil filters per year from the local solid waste stream that were previously going to landfills, some of which, unfortunately, were sited at the top of our watersheds.

I used to tell my Board that the most valuable product of our organization was the conversation that took place between the directors, and the resulting agreements to change the behavior which was causing pollution of our air, land or water. They may have agreed, but they generally felt funders were not going to contribute resources for us to just talk among ourselves. What the Board wanted was to increase our visibility in the community by holding some large events that could attract other decision-makers and the media. I was asked to organize such an event during my first year on the job.

The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) held an annual three-day event called the State of the Estuary Symposium. I volunteered for the conference planning committee, with a notion that we could help contribute reports on our work, which focused on the South Bay watersheds and efforts to protect and restore health to our end of the Bay. The committee chair did not have a vision of having separate segments devoted to each geographical portions of the estuary. Once I realized this, I resigned from the committee and decided to hold our own one-day conference in San Jose, calling it simply the State of the South Bay.

While I served on the Water Board, I was also appointed to the Board of the California WateReuse Association, that was staffed by a law firm, which included former state legislator John Knox.
One of the staff members, Terri Taylor, acted as the event coordinator. Having been impressed again and again with her extremely well-organized events, I contacted her to see if she would consider assisting me in planning and staffing our event. Once she agreed, she gave me a punch list of the details and sequence we would need to follow to craft a successful event.

An essential element for a good conference was lining up a keynote speaker that would attract both attendees and other speakers. My first choice was Felicia Marcus, who agreed immediately to be our keynote speaker. I had met Felicia Marcus at another recent event and was quite impressed with her brilliance and wit, which charmed her audience while encouraging people to do their best to protect the environment. Felicia Marcus had been recently appointed as Regional Director of USEPA by President Clinton after demonstrating her incredible negotiation skills in settling a 75-yr. war between Los Angeles and Inyo County over the Owens Valley water appropriations. As Chair of the LA Public Works Committee, appointed by then Mayor Bradley, she was able to craft an agreement that allowed Mono Lake to refill by replacing the diverted water from the lake's tributary streams with some of LA's recycled waste(d) water, with financial aide provided by the State of California.

Our first symposium was a great success, impressing my Board and Silicon Valley at large. This of course lead to the expectation of more of the same. Over the next seven years, we held numerous other conferences focusing on the Bay and protection of our drinking water supply and the County's streams from urban stormwater pollution. We also held seminars for elected decision-makers to help them understand the linkage between land use and pollution of the groundwater and water demand, in general. My favorite conference was on the subject of industrial water use efficiency and recycling, delighting in hearing local companies dueling over who could use the least amount of water per widget or successfully reuse their process water, rather than simply discharging ultrapure rinse water to the sewers.

In the later years of my tenure, the Board took a noticeable shift. Two of my strongest environmental directors, Ted Smith of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and Craig Breon of the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society were forced to shift their attention to new business of their own NGO's and left the Board.
Both the Water District and San Jose's directors shifted their Board appointments to elected members, with Rosemary Kamei replacing CEO Stan Williams, and Chuck Reed replacing the ESD Director, Carl Mosher.
Bill Whitmer, who had been an industrial director originally, had resigned when he left Komag just before it declared bankruptcy. At the suggestion of Director Trish Mulvey, another environmental activist from CLEAN South Bay, Bill Whitmer returned to the Board as an environmental director and took over as Board President. This drastically shifted the governance of the organization from being managed by the Executive Director to being managed by the Board President.

With the environmental sector of the Board in a weakened state, the other sectors started to avoid discussing some of the thornier issues like land use decisions in vulnerable parts of the watershed and the lack of progress in marketing recycled water. At a public meeting, I had a very negative exchange with SV Manufacturer's Group's XO, Carl Guardino, about the proposed development of the Coyote Valley. This fiasco was being lead by John Chambers of Cisco Systems and one of Guardino's bosses. Guardino told my Board President that if I continued opposing this development, he would remove his representative from my Board. This resulted in a Board directive to submit all correspondence to the Board for review before transmittal.

At this point, it became obvious that our mission to prevent pollution was being subverted by the same forces that had decimated the environment during the last forty years of the valley's rampant growth and industrial laissez faire.

I decided to take an extended medical leave to have a bilateral total hip replacement. I attempted to hire a consultant to work with the Board to follow San Francisco's lead on adopting the Precautionary Principle in place of the inferior approach of toxic risk management. The Board flatly rejected this proposal and let the organization exist with no staff during the next four months.

During my recovery from surgery, while San Jose Water Company was replacing the water main and fire hydrants on my street, it dawned on me that this investor-owned water retailer had no interest in extending the recycled water system for use for firefighting or any other allowable uses, like landscape irrigation.
After trying to prevent the publication of an addendum report on the Obstacles to Water Recycling, San Jose Water Company offered their facilities for my Board to hold a clandestine meeting where they voted to not renew my employment contract and close down the organization.

Despite the fact that the current makeup of the Board precluded continuing our mission, it seemed inconceivable that Silicon Valley would lose two of its three pollution prevention programs in the same year. The County had disbanded its Pollution Prevention Committee, salvaging only the Green Business Program. Only the Urban Stormwater Pollution Prevention Program remained, which spent too much of its efforts hiring legal council to try to minimize the requirements mandated by orders of the Regional Water Quality Control Board.

When people asked why the Board shuttered the Silicon Valley Pollution Prevention Center, I would sarcastically reply that there was no more pollution to prevent. More to the truth, these directors probably believed that if no one was discussing pollution, then hopefully the community would not be hearing about pollution and not think about it, and then not get in anyone's way by trying to prevent it.

My retirement gave me a new sense of freedom that I had not enjoyed for these past eight years. Without a Board of Directors, I no longer needed to push an entire Board into alignment before I could engage in a political action. About a month later, I wrote emails to the circulation managers of both the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News. Some telemarketer had signed up all the duplex units on my street to get free delivery of both daily papers to households that only spoke Spanish. All these papers sat in the driveways, getting soaked in the rain, and pulped by the car tires, and the pulp and ink were starting to run into the storm drain inlet at the corner and directly into Coyote Creek. Citing both litter laws with $1,000 fines per incident and possible citizen suits for violations of the Clean Water Act, both newspapers responded immediately and were picking up their papers within an hour.

After a few years of freedom from being chained to my laptop to produce and transmit all the documents necessary to operate the Silicon Valley Pollution Prevention Center, I am again happily typing these stories into my blog. My hope is that some of this information will keep the spirit of pollution prevention alive in a more sustainable future.

Never Thirst!