Turns out there are as many ways to photograph an eclipse as there are to watch it. With a bit of preparation and the generosity of strangers, I got to experience five of them during Sunday's annular eclipse.

My husband and I drove from the Bay Area up to Mt. Hirz near Lake Shasta which was smack in the middle of the optimal eclipse viewing path. About a mile from the top, we ran into an amateur astronomer named Ben who'd scoped the whole mountain the previous day and decided this was the best spot. He had a telescope, so we stayed with him.

A bit of cloud cover when the eclipse started had us all chewing our fingernails, but then it cleared up–and what a view!

Although I am an admirer of photography, I am not the most skilled practitioner. Flickr, however, is a treasure trove of beautiful images. All the pictures in this post are from photographers kind enough to share their work openly, for the enjoyment of the masses.

To make a hokey pinhole camera like I did, cut a square out of a piece of cardbord, tape aluminum foil over the empty square, and poke a hole in the foil with a pin. Stand with your back to the sun and hold the cardboard so the sun shines directly through the pinhole onto a piece of white paper. (This photographer made three holes, one of which was obviously best.)

photo by stevendamron

A better technique is to replace the pinhole with a pair of binoculars like my husband did. You keep your back to the sun and hold the binoculars in the same position as the pinhole camera and you get a larger, clearer view of the sun on the paper.

photo by jinxmcc

Astronomer Ben's wife had a pair of eclipse viewing glasses that were the best way to see color–the "ring of fire" when the moon is totally inside the sun. You can put these glasses–or a really thick filter, which is the same thing–in front of a camera as well as in front of your eyes. But the sun looks really small.

photo by °Florian

Best of all is an actual telescope. Then you can see sunspots!

photo by Mark Langridge

The fifth, final, and possibly my favorite way to see/photograph the eclipse requires no equipment at all–just some trees. When the sun is a crescent, it shines through the leaves to create hundreds of little crescents on the ground or wall.

photo by niiicedave

Photographing the sun is one thing. But the full mood of an eclipse, with its cool air and dusky light, is difficult to capture. Here's one picture (not from the path of full annularity) that really pulled it off:

photo by jimnista

Photo of Ribbon Cutting by Christopher Lane

5/22/12 Update: I was just sent images from Christopher Lane, Assistant Director of Marketing at the Stanford Shopping Center, who helped produce this press event so I'm updating this blog with one of his images. (A link to all the images is given at the end of this blog.)

On the afternoon of Tuesday, May 15, 2012, I hitched a ride with my closest friend from San Francisco out to Palo Alto to attend the ribbon cutting for the first public fast charger in California for electric vehicles in Stanford Mall. This was definitely a green carpet event as it took place in the shopping mall’s garage within walking distance of the fast charger. Many people drove in zero emission cars to attend and the podium was lined on both sides with electric vehicles. Out of the many electric vehicles that were parked, most of them were Nissan Leafs, the same model we drove in from San Francisco. I counted 17 electric vehicles in all which I was told was a modest turnout at a EV event!

Now I’m not new to electric vehicles and the infrastructure. I tagged along with Obrie Hostetter, the Northern California EV Infrastructure Director at 350 Green, a developer of electric vehicle (EV) charging station networks. Her company, along with a partnership with the city of Palo Alto and John Ryan Company, Inc., was responsible for the permitting and construction necessary to place the Level 3 Fast Charger.

A level 2 charger will take about 7 hours to fully charge an EV battery; the Level 3 fast charger can charge the battery up to 80% in 30 minutes. Most EV owners do the majority of their charging at night at home and stay within a close proximity mitigating “range anxiety”. To give you an example: the ideal range of a Nissan Leaf for freeway driving is about 100 miles. With an infrastructure of fast chargers, that range can be increased without spending a lot of time to recharge the battery. This is just the first step in a fast charger infrastructure, as plans are in place to install 25 public fast chargers near retail locations by the fall of 2012.

EV drivers sign up for a payment card from 350Green to use the fast charger station. Use of the card and how to properly use the station was demonstrated after remarks from Palo Alto's Mayor Yiaway Yeh as well as the partners involved in making the public charging station possible. There were quite a few statistics that came out that were enlightening about this new technological movement: 1) There are over 3000 EVs in the Silicon Valley making Palo Alto a great corner stone for the EV infrastructure; the fast charger has already gotten quite a bit of use — since being turned on, it’s been used 3 to 4 times a day; 136 EV drivers have already signed up for the payment card to use at the station and the infrastructure to follow.

So what is the best ribbon to cut at such a green event? Applause went up when a gas hose was cut in front of the fast charger station and the Nissan Leaf it was charging with 100% renewable energy!

More photos of this event can be found here.

Credit: jypsygen/Flickr

Opening the refrigerator to find a gallon of spoiled milk is a rotten way to start the day. But for fresh cheese makers, every day begins with sour milk. Here’s why: 80% of the proteins in milk belong to a family called caseins. Adding acid to milk, like lemon juice or vinegar, makes these invisible proteins visible as a white, chunky solid we call the curds.

In a glass of milk, caseins aggregate into small spheres called micelles. The outside of each protein cluster is negatively charged, causing neighboring spheres to repel each other. Thus, these micelles remain evenly distributed throughout the milk.

Acidic vinegar neutralizes the negative charge on the spheres. With the repulsive force gone, the protein clusters clump together and form an observable solid, the curds. When chefs collect the curds and discard the liquid whey, they have queso fresco. Try it yourself with this recipe.

Stretching the hot curds instead of pressing them into a cake gives you homemade mozzarella cheese. I've tried to make mozzarella using this kit, but it only worked once. That's because the quality of the curds depends on the type of milk that you use.

Credit: poopoorama/Flickr

Most milk from the grocery store has been ultra-pasteurized, meaning it's been heated to temperatures above 172° Fahrenheit. That extra heat disturbs the casein proteins. Curds from ultra-pasteurized milk don't stick together and stretch as nicely as they do when made from milk that has been pasteurized. I've had a hard time finding milk not labeled UP or UHP, so I haven't tried to make mozzarella at home again.

But now I'm hankering for a mozzarella, tomato and basil salad. Guess I'd better find some pasteurized milk before summer comes!

Red-eyed Tree Frogs by Laurel Mundy. Mating events are not always easy to observe in the wild, but a good illustration can capture the moment.

Leafy Sea Dragon by Natalia Wilkins. Life cycles are a common theme for science illustration.

Science illustration began in a time when drawing was the only way to record the anatomy of a bird or the life stages of a flower. While it's charming to envision Darwin sketching in a field notebook, is illustration still useful today, when it seems every cell phone has an 8 MB camera with zoom, auto-focus, and image stabilization?

Marimo by Justine Shih. Colors, especially underwater, can be distorted in a photo, but selected carefully in an illustration.

The Science Illustration Certificate Program at Cal State University, Monterey Bay, gives a resounding "yes," and the success of its graduates lends credence to that answer.

Illustration and photography are both powerful tools of modern science and education. There's nothing like a photo to record, for example, the unique identifying pattern on a whale's flukes as they make a fleeting appearance above the water. But an illustration is uniquely suited to convey the similarities and differences of all cetacean species in a comparative poster.

Bills of Ardeinae Herons by Jillian Walters. This comparative illustration creates a composition that would be rather difficult to photograph.

The "Program", as it is affectionately known, trains fifteen students every year in the skills of science illustration. Techniques range from the obvious, like graphite and watercolor, to things you've probably never heard of unless you're an artist, like coquille and scratchboard.

Students also become adept with digital tools (but how many people can use Photoshop well?). They learn to sketch in the field, to create trompe l'oeil compositions and to design infographics and interactive displays.

The CSUMB students complete their training with summer internships at magazines, museums, and parks. The Smithsonian is a popular destination.

Alveoli by Leigh Anne Carter. Although cameras are getting smaller, it would still be a challenge to take a photo of these little cavities in our lungs.

Some graduates may go on to regular employment, but the job of science illustrator is more often a freelance one these days.

Blue-Ringed Octopus by Meghan Rock. Sometimes, art is just beautiful, though I am biased by the subject matter (cephalopods are my favorite).

They have their work cut out for them. Once you start looking, you see science illustration everywhere: in aquariums and on hiking trails, in field guides and textbooks, in the doctor's office and even in legal briefs.

And some truly spectacular examples can be seen right now on the walls of the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History.

"Illustrating Nature," the Program’s end-of-year exhibit, is open until June 18th, and it's just as fun and educational as the "Art of Nature" show in Santa Cruz.

I learned that the "lucky bamboo" my aunt gave me at my wedding is actually not related to real bamboo at all, and that the novelist Vladimir Nabokov made a seminal discovery about the evolution of butterflies. Who knew?

Nature's gopher control, the Great Blue Heron, photographed in Bolinas by Ryan DiGaudio.

It's a sight to behold: an elegant four-foot tall heron slowly stalking across the field above the Big Rec baseball diamonds in Golden Gate Park. Suddenly, from a motionless stance, it strikes out and nabs an unsuspecting pocket gopher, swallowing it whole. If you've seen it happen, you won't soon forget it, and if not, this is a prime time for heron sightings. Why? Because up at Stow Lake, they have nests full of hungry mouths to feed.

Great Blue Herons are solitary birds for most of the year, but when mating season arrives in the spring, they pair off and build nests close to one another. Assuming they were successful the previous year, the same pair will often mate year after year, raising chicks in saucer-shaped nests that range from 1.5 to 4 feet across. Nests used over and over (like those at Stow Lake) tend to be on the larger end of the size scale.

On Saturday morning, volunteers at San Francisco Nature Education had a series of spotting scopes set up just to the right of Stow Lake's boathouse, trained on Heron Island’s towering treetops. The scene was action-packed. Adult herons swooped through the air, chasing one another away from their nests, and every so often the chicks could be seen between tree branches strutting around their nests. Observers estimate the four nesting pairs produced six chicks, which hatched in early April and are now about six weeks old.

On Stow Lake's Heron Island, parents keep watch over young chicks. The large nest in the lower-center part of the photo contains two chicks whose heads are behind a tree branch.

Heron chicks hatch from eggs slightly bigger than a chicken’s and grow to full size in just 10-12 weeks. That means mom and dad are busy around the clock hunting and regurgitating partially digested food for their rapidly growing young to eat. Soon, the chicks will begin flapping from one branch to another and at about eight weeks old, they will be ready to fledge, taking their first flights from the nest. Just a few short weeks later, parents and chicks will part ways.

When Great Blue Heron chicks hatch, they have bluish eyes and are covered in covered in pale gray down. Photo credit: Glenn and Martha Vargas, California Academy of Sciences.

Hunting herons will eat just about anything within striking distance, including fish, amphibians, reptiles, small mammals, insects, and other birds. Their S-shaped neck allows them to strike with a spring-like power (up to 90 miles per hour), and underneath those feathers is a curious anatomic design. In a human neck, the esophagus runs parallel to our vertebral column, but in a heron's neck, the two cross one another, creating a speed bump in the swallowing process. When a meal hits the crux of the "S," a heron will often do a series of maneuvers to help shift its meal past the obstacle. It sounds uncomfortable to me, but this design helps protect the delicate esophagus from potential damage to the front of the bird's neck.

Find "Heron Watch" just to the right of the boathouse at Stow Lake on Saturday, May 19.

Herons can be seen in Golden Gate Park year-round, though individuals are thought to come and go. This year’s chicks and their parents should be visible at Stow Lake's Heron Island until mid-late June, but if you want the benefit of San Francisco Nature Education’s naturalists and spotting scopes at your disposal, don't miss the final "Heron Watch" program on Saturday, May 19. Founder Nancy DeStefanis first started documenting the birds’ nesting behavior at Stow Lake in 1993, and now runs a series of interpretive bird walks, field trips, and observation sessions to educate school kids and locals about birds and local ecology.

Indo-Pacific Sailfish by Kate Spencer

Two artists sat side by side at the demo table. Diane T. Sands wrestled with a live turtle who didn't want to pose; Megan Gnekow hovered over her laptop, flipping between "nestcams"–live video streams from birds' nests around the country. At the beginning of the evening, Gnekow found a pair of red-tailed hawk parents feeding their chicks. "What a treat!" she exclaimed, and began to sketch.

Sands and Gnekow were participants in the First Friday Art Tour on May 4th at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History's exhibit "The Art of Nature." Throughout the museum, behind permanent display cases of stuffed foxes and a marine touch pool, the walls were covered with artwork from the California Guild of Natural Science Illustrators.

Allen's Hummingbird by Karen Talbot

The Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History has been hosting an annual science illustration exhibit for twenty-three years. It began as a showcase for the graduating class of the UC Santa Cruz science illustration program, but when that program moved to CSU Monterey Bay, the end-of-year show moved with it. ("Illustrating Nature" is now on display at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History–I'll be reporting next week.)

The Santa Cruz museum switched partners from the university to the California chapter of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. As it turns out, a large proportion of guild members are graduates of the UCSC/CSUMB program. So those artists currently showing at the PG Museum may well be featured in a few years in Santa Cruz.

And future generations of science illustrators could spring from participants in school tours of "The Art of Nature." Deborah McArthur, the Santa Cruz museum's education manager, leads kids on a picture hunt through the exhibit, then lets them experiment with their own mixed media illustration. Science and art instruction go hand in hand.

California Butterfly by Sondra Cohelan

Even as an adult wandering through the show, I found myself learning new things. When a drawing of shiny scarabs caught my eye, I first thought "Ancient Egypt!" then learned that some scarabs are actually native to the southwest US. On another wall, a California gull plowing hungrily through a cloud of flies taught me that a seagull's diet is far more varied than fish and picnic sandwiches.

One painting is particularly poignant: a watercolor of an Indo-Pacific sailfish, commissioned by the Monterey Bay Aquarium as a gift to the director of the Japanese sea museum Aquamarine Fukushima. According to the placard, "The framed original survived the 2011 earthquake/tsunami."

As I left the museum, Sands' turtle was crawling across Gnekow's colored pencil case while Gnekow sketched eagle chicks from Decorah, Iowa. Science illustrators may travel far afield–there were sketchbooks on display from New Zealand and South America–but I appreciated the reminder that natural subjects are everywhere, from the family pet to the internet.

Updated 5/10/12 with artists' links and higher-quality images. Thanks, artists!

Marsh plants (in sketchbook) by Emily Coren (walkaboutem.com)

Water from the Delta has been fought over for more than a half century. Reporter Lauren Sommer sat down with Jason Peltier, the Deputy General Manager of Westlands Water District to discuss the future of the Delta and California’s water supply. The Westlands Water District is a 600,000 acre agricultural district on the west side of the San Joaquin valley. It’s part of the 3 million acres of farmland that’s served by water that’s moved from the Delta.

For another viewpoint, check out this Q&A with Barry Nelson of the Natural Resources Defense Council or see the rest of our series coverage.

Jason Peltier, Deputy General Manager of Westlands Water District

Where does the water for Westlands agriculture come from?

Through our history, California has accomplished great engineering feats with a system of dams and reservoirs. Those dams, like Shasta and Folsom, allow us to store water and move it through time. In other words, from wet season to dry season. And the aqueducts allow us to move the water from place to place.

How has the allocation of water changed over the years?

Over the last 20 years, our farmers have seen dramatic swings in their water supply, mostly on the downside. We’ve experienced 40%, 60%, up to 90% reductions in deliveries out of the Delta. In some cases there were dry years, but mostly it’s driven by environmental laws, the Endangered Species Act and the Central Valley Project Improvement Act. They’ve had a rough couple of decades dealing with uncertainty, unpredictability. You can’t get a loan to farm unless you can show the banker what water you have. And they don’t have a lot of confidence in going to their bankers.

Fifteen years ago, people were astonished by it. Now they are learning how to cope with it to some extent. The district has purchased 100,000 acres of farmland and taken it out of irrigated agriculture. Our farmers have shifted their crops to higher value, permanent crops, so they can afford to buy water on the market when the projects can’t deliver water. 80% of the district is on drip irrigation today. We’ve seen our water rates go up tremendously — our cheapest water is $100 an acre foot. Sometimes on the market, farmers are paying $400 an acre-foot.

Where do those fluctuations come from?

Part of these 20 years of water supply uncertainty has been driven primarily by environmental laws and restrictions. The restrictions that emanate out of the Endangered Species Act in the form of the biological opinions issued by the federal agencies have been kind of an added wrinkle of complexity for us. We can look at the results of reallocating water supply over the last two decades, and here in the last few years, you know, the fish have not done any better. We’ve seen 40 million acre-feet reallocated from human use to environmental use, and we haven’t seen the kind of response any of us would like to see. It’s very frustrating.

Something Westlands has sued over–

Well, yes, there’s been a lot of litigation and I’m sure there will be going forth because the stakes are so high. We’re quite happy to use the third branch of government to help to decide some of these huge differences we have with the administration. You know, we lose more than we win. But you know, it helps, even losing creates some certainty that, in the big picture, is of great value to us.

Now, there’s a new planning effort underway to create more certainty, right?

All the stakeholders kind of came together and said you know, what we’re living, this status quo is unacceptable for all of our interests. So we’ve got to try and find a new approach, a new way to address and resolve the conflicts between water project operations and our fisheries and our ecosystem. And that’s what gave rise to the Bay Delta Conservation Planning effort.

That plan, the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, calls for a large tunnel or canal to take water around the Delta, instead of through it.

It’s been recognized for decades that the location of the export pumps in the southern end of the Delta is a real problem for water quality issues, for vulnerability to earthquakes, for fish on some levels. So, we’re kind of trying to figure out how can we relocate those intakes up to the Sacramento River? We would be able to positively screen for fish, because we’d have a river flowing by. So there’s the alternative conveyance, probably cost $12 billion. And we think, you know, it is expensive. But it’s not because we have such a huge population base to spread our costs over. There’s a huge part of the economy of California that is at-risk today. And we shouldn’t accept that. We shouldn’t live with it.

The plan also calls for a lot of habitat restoration. Who should pay for that?

Our current planning target for recreation of intertidal habitat is about 60,000 acres. It’s to be determined how that’s going to be paid for. But in our minds, most of that is a public investment. That land was at one time fully in contact with water. With the Swamp and Overflow Act in the mid-1800s, islands were created, levees were built, and that water-land contact was lost. We can’t go back and find the people that built the levees in the 1800s, but we can recognize that there’s a broad public value for increasing intertidal habitat and trying to recreate some of the food conditions. Creating better habitat creates more food for the lower-end of the food chain, which then hopefully will work its way up to help the native fish.

Fish recovery is good for everybody, right?

The Delta is not dying – it’s a healthy and vibrant place. But there are those that think that the system is over-subscribed. We hear, “we don’t have enough water in California; we’ve got too many people, too many demands.” Some years, that’s the case. But there are also a lot of years when we have absolutely plenty of water in the system to meet the reasonable needs that are out there.

Plenty of water to meet the needs of both water users and the species?

All the beneficial uses. The average through the years is at about 80% of the water that flows into the Delta goes out to the ocean. And after a new conveyance is built, we’ll still be at about 80%. If somebody could tell me specifically where additional water is needed, when it’s needed and what good it’s going to do, we could have a conversation. As it is, it’s kind of a bumper sticker kind of a debate.

Right, fish vs. farms.

Farmers and fishermen have a heck of a lot more in common than they have dividing them. One of the saddest things for me right now is that we can’t work together more constructively: they want healthy fishery to sustain their fishing, and we want a healthy fishery to sustain our ability to export water. And we have an identity of interest. It’s just how we come at the problem.

When Spanish explorers first viewed the Delta from the top of Mt. Diablo in the late 1700’s, they thought they had discovered an inland sea. A vast low-lying, partly submerged marshland of wetland plants (tules) and winding tidal channels, the Delta teemed with birds and game animals, including elk, antelope, and grizzly bears. It’s only human inhabitants – small settlements of Miwok Indians – fished and hunted there during the drier months.

Today the Delta, dotted with levees and constructed islands, bears little resemblance to its native state; much has been reclaimed for agricultural use. But it wasn’t until the mid-Nineteenth Century, just over 150 years ago, that its momentous physical transformation began. It’s been a Herculean effort to meet the steep demands of California’s increasingly crowded and insatiably thirsty population, nearly two-thirds of who rely on the Delta as a primary water source. A stark symbol of our quest to bend nature to our will, the Delta also remains the epicenter of an epic drama of seemingly insurmountable political battles and power struggles, pitting north against south; farmer against environmentalist.

So how did it get like this?

Take a quick paddle through the key events in the slideshow above.

Water from the Delta has been fought over for more than a half century. Reporter Lauren Sommer sat down with Barry Nelson, the Senior Policy Analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council to discuss the future of the Delta and California’s water supply.

For another viewpoint, check out this Q&A with Jason Peltier of the Westlands Water District or see the rest of our series coverage.

Barry Nelson, Senior Policy Analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

When were the first signs that the Delta ecosystem was in trouble?

Since the 1960s, we’ve seen a steadily growing trend of diversions from the Delta. If you look at long-term averages, you filter out the impacts of droughts and wet years, we’ve taken more and more and more water from the Delta pretty steadily for the last 50 years, and that really hit a crisis point in the ‘90s. That’s the point at which we started seeing the winter-run salmon and the Delta smelt being protected under the state and federal Endangered Species Act.

And ten years ago, things really changed dramatically. Starting in 2000, suddenly we started taking a lot more water out of the Delta for a lot of reasons. It was an enormous increase, about a 20% increase on average. And the ecosystem crashed. It was called the “pelagic organism decline.” But what it meant was pretty simple: that everything swimming in the Delta was in deep trouble.

So now we’ve got half a dozen species in deep trouble in the estuary and a fishing industry that’s honestly fighting for survival.

What caused their decline?

A lot of work has been done looking at this catastrophic, across-the-board, collapse of the Bay Delta ecosystem. And the bottom line was recognition that, while there are lots of stressors, there are pollution problems in the ecosystem. We do have invasive species like clams that have come from overseas. But the core problem is the amount of water we pump out of that system.

There was a huge fight in the courts over this issue. And ultimately, the courts and then the agencies imposed a new set of rules that really have returned us to the level of pumping we saw for about 30 years prior to the 2000’s.

And what were those rules on pumping?

The Delta’s a complicated ecosystem. As water flows through it, it flows through it in a complicated pattern. Fish have evolved to survive with that pattern; water coming through at certain times of year, and flowing through those Delta channels into the Bay.

Basically, the federal rules control two things: the amount of water that flows all the way through the ecosystem into the Bay in order to maintain a healthy ecosystem and the extent to which some of the channels within the Delta flow backwards.

The pumps in the south Delta are so powerful that they literally reverse the direction of flow in these Delta channels. And if you’re a young migrating salmon swimming downstream towards the ocean as Mother Nature programmed you, when the Delta channels are flowing the wrong direction, it’s very easy for those fish to follow that water and get sucked right into the pumps. And that’s why those pumps have killed in the last decade or so not a million fish, not tens of millions of fish, but over a hundred million young fish killed just at the pumps.

So if you could design your ideal plan for the Delta, what would that look like?

First, we know we need to see some real habitat restoration in the Delta. We’ve converted almost every scrap of habitat in the Delta to farmland, and in order to restore a healthy Delta, we need to return some of that to habitat. And actually I think that’s something where there’s a fair amount of agreement. How you do that is not trivial, but I think there’s a fair amount of agreement around that. And given the challenge of maintaining all of the existing levees in perpetuity, the question is: are we going to do it in a planned and thoughtful way?

Second, we really don’t have a choice but to maintain a lot of our Delta levees for a couple of decades. It’s going to take a long time to make major changes in the Delta. And there is so much infrastructure, the Delta communities, Delta farming, and water supply that depend on Delta levees today.

Third, from our perspective, the challenge we face in terms of exporting water from the Delta is first figuring out how much water we can safely pump from the Delta. And then designing a facility around that.

You’re talking about the “peripheral canal,” right? A canal or tunnel that would take water around the Delta?

Well, there are two conflicting visions for a facility in the Delta. One is the old plan. Fifty years ago, the state of California was planning to build a peripheral canal around the Delta, an enormous facility that would allow those pumps in the south Delta to take water from the north Delta and pump it around the Delta rather than through Delta channels. And that was really a simple proposal to simply take more water from the ecosystem. We know now that that, the amount of water that that would have taken would have been devastating to the ecosystem.

That’s the old version of the canal. But there’s a new version out there. And that is a proposal to deal with earthquake risks in the Delta. It’s to deal with the fact that there really are earthquake risks in the Delta that represent significant threats to water supply. And a facility could provide a lifeline in case the Delta was to temporarily fail. What we’re struggling with right now is that we have competing interests in California advancing two different visions for what the problem is in the Delta.

With such a long history of disagreement, what are the chances of agreeing on a plan?

There’s a reason that the discussion on the Delta is so politically heated that people don’t usually talk about. And that is California is out of rivers. If you look around the state of California at the Colorado River and the Klamath River and the Trinity River, the Owens River, the San Joaquin, on and on, we’ve really started to hit real hard physical limits in the amount of water we can take out of all of those rivers.

Ten years ago we weren’t paying enough attention to sea level rise impacts. We weren’t really thinking about earthquake risks in, in the Delta. So there really is a sense that we need to figure this problem out this time.

That’s what makes the Delta debate so compelling. The Delta is an incredibly important ecosystem. It’s an incredibly important place for a quarter million people who live there. And it’s a tremendously important water supply for the state of California. There are a lot of reasons why our planning efforts today could fail, but it’s so important to the future of the state. It’s so important to the health of the Bay and the Bay Area, it’s so important to the future of the salmon industry, to the residents of the Delta. We can’t let that effort fail.

If you’re like most Californians, you’ve probably never heard of the Delta or why it’s important to the state’s economy and wildlife. In three minutes, we’ll explain how the Delta is a key part of California’s water supply and why it’s been the focus of a decades-long water battle.