Photo of Lake Shasta in 2019 (when the drought was much less severe than now in 2021) by Bruce Warrington
Much of the Western half of the United States is in the grip of a severe drought of historic proportions. Conditions are especially bad in California and the Southwest, but the drought extends into the Pacific Northwest, much of the Intermountain West, and even the Northern Plains.
Drought emergencies have been declared. Farmers and ranchers are suffering. States are facing water cutbacks. Large wildfires are burning earlier than usual. And there appears to be little relief in sight.…
www.nytimes.com/article/drought-california-western-united-states.html
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:
UC Santa Cruz Professor Lisa Sloan co-authored a 2004 report in which she and her colleague Jacob Sewall predicted the melting of the Arctic ice shelf would cause a decrease in precipitation in California and hence a severe drought. The Arctic melting, they claimed, would warp the offshore jet stream in the Pacific Ocean. Not only have their models proved correct, Prof. Sloan told Joe Romm of ThinkProgress she believes “the actual situation in the next few decades could be even more dire” than their study suggested.
As they anticipated fifteen years ago, the jet stream has shifted drastically, essentially pushing winter storms up north and out of California and the Northwest. As a result, snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas, which feeds water to most of Southern California and the agricultural operators of the Central Valley, has all but disappeared. Winters are drier and springs are no longer wet, which means when the warm summer months roll around there’s no water to be cultivated.
Joshua Frank
The Truth About the California Water Crisis
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/15/the-truth-about-the-california-water-crisis/