This is how we’ve come to the point today, during the driest decade in state history, that valley farmers haven’t diminished their footprint to meet water’s scarcity but have added a half-­million more acres of permanent crops—more almonds, pistachios, mandarins. They’ve lowered their pumps by hundreds of feet to chase the dwindling aquifer even as it dwindles further, sucking so many millions of acre-feet of water out of the earth that the land is sinking. This subsidence is collapsing the canals and ditches, reducing the flow of the very aqueduct that we built to create the flow itself.

How might a native account for such madness?

No civilization had ever built a grander system to transport water. It sprawled farmland. It sprawled suburbia. It made rise three world-class cities, and an economy that would rank as the fifth largest in the world. But it did not change the essential nature of California. Drought is California. Flood is California. One year our rivers and streams produce 30 million acre-feet of water. The next year, they produce 200 million acre-feet. The average year, 72.5 million acre-feet, is a lie we tell ourselves.

www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/16/1041296/california-climate-change-water-drought

Picked up one of these at REI last week, 5 gal. Bucket, about $20. Looks to me like much better solution than the typical campers’ shitting in plastic bags, which end up in landfill. Ugh!

I would use either peat moss, sawdust, or rice hulls to cover each deposit. Ward Hensill makes an upgraded model of this and uses a plunger to compress everything.

No urine. Have 2 of these so when close to full, you let one sit while you fill the other. Then back into soil. Circle (cycle) completed.

• From @lloyd.kahn’s Instagram

Talking to Louie on the phone just now about the smoky air of the last week, he said, “That isn’t just wood smoke: It’s plastics, building materials, exploded gasoline, burned-up houses and cars…”

Shit, I hadn’t thought of that this last week. I wasn’t out running, but did take a few walks.

I shouda stayed inside a lot more.

We went on to talk about causes of these fires. He said that a lot of the problem is the type of logging that does not deal with the “understory” — all the saplings and plants that spring up afterwards. If they keep growing unchecked, they produce ever more fuel for fire. It makes sense to burn the understory (at its right phase of growth) on a windless day in wet or moist weather.

When foresters are involved in a cut, they will set a limit on the height of the understory, so loggers have to cut slash up into smaller pieces; this is managing the forest. However a lot of logging is interested in profit, not land management, and they leave behind conditions ripe for fire.

He then segued into how the Pomo of the Pt. Arena / Manchester area managed the land. In addition to hunting, fishing, and  harvesting, they used fire to clear selected areas of land, making it easier to move around, making hunting easier, producing green young growth.

I told him about this great book, Tending the Wild, by M. Kat Andersen; about “…indigenous land management practices …in… California when first encountered by Europeans and detailed explication of the care of, harvesting of, and use of California’s native plants.”

You can get it at Larner Seeds: www.shltr.net/tend

The cycle of life…

At the Rebuild Green ExpoThis has been an extraordinary day. By now, I’d say 20 people have come up to our booth about the influence of our books on their lives. It’s not us, really, it’s the people we show in our books. Readers are relating to these people and their lives, and it resonates with them. For example, this guy hauled out an old copy of Domebook 2, and this tattered copy of the original printing of Shelter and told us how important it was to him. A couple of guys told me they’d come across Shelter in their teen years; they were now in their 60s. Wow!

I’ve had meaningful discussions with landowners about septic systems, building codes, construction methods, building materials. It’s great to talk to people about real things.

I think this is a real story here. 8,000 homes destroyed, the clean-up, and in the future, rebuilding. People here are motivated to do things better. Sun-heated water and sun-powered electricity. Building materials that cost the planet the least in pollution from their manufacture. Structural systems that are efficient and economical. Somebody could do a video of the rebuilding as it unfolds in coming months in Santa Rosa.