How California could save up its rain to ease future droughts — instead of watching epic atmospheric river rainfall drain into the Pacific

All that runoff in the middle of a drought begs the question — why can’t more rainwater be collected and stored for the long, dry spring and summer when it’s needed?

Beavers offer lessons about managing water in a changing climate, whether the challenge is drought or floods

I believe we can learn from beavers’ water management skills, coexist with them in our landscapes and incorporate their natural engineering in response to weather and precipitation patterns disrupted by climate change.

The Forgotten Treasure In These American Lands

This year marks the sesquicentennial of explorer Powell’s expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers in 1869. Perhaps more than any other man of his time, he comprehended the limits of Western geography, and suggested that inhabiting the land would require a far different set of rhythms than those we had cultivated up to that point. He questioned the entire orthodoxy shaping the West during his age—an orthodoxy that is shaping it still.

A carbon sweet spot

For a minute, I thought I had stepped into that scene from Lawrence of Arabia where T.E. Lawrence, approaching the Suez Canal, sees a ship sailing across the sand. Only I saw it in a farm field with cattle. I had parked on a levee at the north end of Twitchell Island, in the middle of the great Sacramento-San Joaquin river Delta, east of San Francisco. In front of me was prime farmland – a busy mosaic of pasture land and row crops as far as the eye could see – and just beyond a slight rise in the distance I saw a big cargo tanker plowing its way slowly across the farm field. Of course, it was plowing the middle of the San Joaquin River instead.