California Faces Another Drought as Lake Beds Turn to Dust – A Photo Essay

Water shortages and dry conditions are already affecting the state as the governor has declared an emergency in 41 of 58 counties.

Verdant hillsides losing their hue, receding reservoirs with bathtub rings of newly exposed earth, crops withering in the fields.

These are the visions of California’s parched landscape as the state braces for another potentially devastating drought. Water shortages and exceptionally dry conditions are already beginning to hit home.

The state is facing yet another hot, dry summer ahead, and the governor has declared a drought emergency in 41 of the state’s 58 counties. More than 37 million Californians reside in these drought areas, according to the US drought monitor.

“This is without precedent,” Newsom said at a news conference announcing the first two declarations in April, speaking from the bed of Lake Mendocino that had been reduced to arid, cracked clay. Not long ago, he would have been standing under 40ft of water. ‘Oftentimes we overstate the word historic, but this is indeed an historic moment.…’

The photos are shocking.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/30/california-drought-water-shortage-photo-essay

From Maui Surfer

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

2 Responses to California Faces Another Drought as Lake Beds Turn to Dust – A Photo Essay

  1. I lived in California in my youth. I remember droughts but not as bad as things have been in the last 10 or so years, and I don’t remember wildfires on the scale we have seen recently. I hope people will build around the trees more often and not scour the earth with big machines. I believe the mass subdivisions and the way they are built really plays a role. When the soil is decimated it also doesn’t let the ground water in. I had a neighbor who is an excavator remove a small area of blackberries for me recently, He could sense my hesitancy in letting him use his big machine I was happy to clip them with my clippers one by one, but I was amazed how gentle he could be, how he had control enough to stay within a foot or two of where I wanted him to leave the blackberries and vegetation and he was able to literally take the blackberries he pulled and sweep the earth rather than compacting it. We do have the ability to leave vegetation when we build subdivisions and we should!

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