Links to various things.

I know we don’t do link+commentary anymore because that’s what Twitter is so good at. But here on the public record, we shall always kick it old school.

This purports to be a creative financing mechanism that greatly extends the money that can be used to build infrastructure. If I understand it right, it is securitized by future wastewater treatment rates, presumably higher to cover installing new capital. Wallets of the people of the state, taxes or fees. That’s all there is.

There’s nothing especially new in this report on dry landscapes from Press-Democrat in Santa Rosa. But the tone is more poetic than I’m used to in newspapers, and the comments go loony in ways that are new and funny to me.

The city of Sacramento is fundamentally unserious about water management. I deeply resent that I don’t have a meter and can’t know how much water I use at home.

There is little I love more than seeing agriculture turn on itself. You would have no idea that all of San Joaquin Valley ag isn’t Westlands from a CDFA hearing, but the eastern side of the Valley has different self-interests. The drought is bringing that out. Also, a Bakersfield voice saying that all those trees were a bad idea, looking straight at you, POMEGRANATE PISTACHIO PEOPLE.

This interview with writer Kim Stanley Robinson is lengthy; here’s the only part that’s directly relevant to us. Since we’re going to be fallowing 1-2 million acres anyway…

The Central Valley has been depopulated of its Serengeti’s worth of wild creatures, and that’s a disaster. But you could do amazing agriculture in the Central Valley and add wildlife corridors, where the two could coexist in a palimpsest, big agriculture and the Serengeti of North America, occupying the same space. And then it would be that much more interesting and beautiful. If you went out there to the edge of Davis now, you would see nothing in terms of animals. But if you went out there and it was filled with tule elk and all the rest of the animals and birds of the Central Valley biome, occasionally a bear would come down out of the hills

And a couple good books:
Don’t manage the new Central Valley Serengeti like Jon Mooallem describes in Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America Great, funny, troubling book.

I enjoyed Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars as well. A good story, although it may be rough for dog owners. Given my single-mindedness, the entire book was essentially set-up for one funny scene.