Water - CA

Vegetation grows between boat docks at the now defunct Echo Bay Marina in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Thursday, May 19, 2016, near Las Vegas. Lake Mead's surface was at its lowest level Wednesday since the reservoir was created.
(AP Photo/John Locher)

Lake Mead's drop to an all-time low is another sign that solutions to the West's prolonged drought may involve creative approaches to water allocation and conservation.

csmonitor.com - by Lucy Schouten - May 21, 2016

Extended droughts has shrunk the country's largest reservoir to an all-time low, and leaders in the West's water planning say the area's water users must shift how they view their most valuable resource.

“California and the rest of the West are now at a point where they really can’t dismiss ideas that once would have been considered downright silly,” Rich Golb, former president of the Northern California Water Association, and now a Vancouver-based water consultant for PacificComm, LLC, told The Christian Science Monitor. 

Lake Mead, hemmed in by the Hoover Dam, is the largest manmade reservoir in the United States and supplies water to California, Nevada, and Arizona, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.

Image: Not all cows get to spend their days with soft green grass under hoof. For many, the picture isn't so pretty, according to the book Farmageddon.

npr.org - July 31, 2014 - Barbara J. King

For Philip Lymbery, head of the U.K.-based Compassion in World Farming and his co-author Isabel Oakeshott, a visit to California's Central Valley amounted to an encounter with suffering.

In Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat, Lymbery and Oakeshott write that the mega-dairies of the Central Valley are "milk factories where animals are just machines that rapidly break down and are replaced." At one huge dairy they visited, cows stood idly outdoors, some in shade and some in the sun.

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California’s Central Valley—prime agricultural land—is being hit the hardest by the state-wide drought which could cause catastrophic losses to crops and food supply.

As California enters its third consecutive dry winter, with no sign of moisture on the horizon, fears are growing over increased wildfire activity, agricultural losses and additional stress placed on already strained water supplies.

ecowatch.com - by Kiley Kroh - December 27, 2013

The city of Los Angeles has received only 3.6 inches of rain this year—far below its average of 14.91 inches, USA Today reported. And San Francisco is experiencing its driest year since record keeping began in 1849. As of November, the city had only received 3.95 inches of rain since the year began.

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