The early morning harvest trip at Drakes Bay Oyster farm.
California Sketches: Point Reyes shellfish bounty faces a shutdown - The Sacramento Bee
It’s early morning on Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco. Oystermen push an old wooden boat into low tide and leap aboard. Their leathered faces expressionless, lost in thought, their hoods pulled tight: it’s cold. Their day will be long, their labor tedious, their futures uncertain. We head toward the sea, to the oyster beds.
Shuck and Jive: Drakes Bay Oyster Company Forces a Redefinition of Environmentalism
On a map, the rambling 2,500-acre inlet known as Drakes Estero looks like a chicken foot, its bony fingers pointing north from the larger Drakes Bay. In person, the estuary is strikingly beautiful: calm water protected f
Allegations of scientific misconduct at oyster farm
“There are new charges that the National Park Service and the U.S. Geological Survey falsified data to make a local oyster farm look bad.” (abc)
These aren’t “new” allegations. Dr. Goodman has been talking about this for months. I interviewed him and he is brilliant and very clear about what his findings.
Scientists investigate water memory | OdeWire
“New research from the Aerospace Institute of the University of Stuttgart in Germany supports the theory that water has a memory.”
What water? The last vestiges of growth and moisture are disappearing from these mema mound plains, the “largest surviving complex of vernal pool habitat in the world.”
A tiny lark stayed perfectly still. I thought it was a baby owl, doing what it’s mother told it to do.
The grass crunched under my feet, most like walking across snow. Soon, all the creatures in the vernal pools will disappear underground.
Scientists look for rare plants in vernal pools. Thousands of acres of the tiny percentage of pools and mema mounds on a private ranch east of Merced is a vast plain of stunning landscape. Big skies, Yosemite far to the east, prehistory landscape except for the non-native grasses. This region never had grasses at all, but just small, ground-hugging plants. A few cottonwoods along streams, and vernal pools in the spring until they all dry up. This is a very dry year. In past years, the region is a sea of wild flowers.
Drakes Bay estero and oyster company. Out on the boats with the oystermen, early in the morning.
Estuary death sentence if tunnels proceed.
“You can’t deprive an estuary of half its flows and expect it to survive,” said Stockton-based Bill Jennings of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. “And frankly, BDCP is essentially a death sentence for one of the great estuaries in the world.”
Add this story to the low snow pack this year, and we are in big trouble. Climate change doesn’t look to favor more snow in the future, but less- more extreme weather events, not more predictable. The CA central valley has always been a region of extremes- from too much to too little water. http://www.sacbee.com/2013/03/28/5300607/water-managers-despair-snowpack.html
“Books have a way of seeing us through these dark winter days.”
Read more from the second installment of Kelly McMasters’s “Notes from a Bookshop” series here.
To Be or Not To Be Funny? Bob Mankoff on dealing with death through humor: http://nyr.kr/XMnl8n
At a Water Education Foundation conference today in Sacramento, ARkStorm projections show CA in top contention for major flooding events. Better buy a boat.
John O’Connor and I had decided to get married and he was a year behind me and so I was out of law school and we both liked to eat, so that meant one of us was going to have to work and that was me. I needed a job and I wanted to work as a lawyer. I had graduated high in my class and I thought I could probably get a job. We had notices on our placement bulletin board at Stanford Law School that said, ‘Stanford law graduates: Call us if you want to get an interview for employment. We’d be happy to talk to you.’ I called at least 40 of those firms asking for an interview and not one of them would give me an interview. I was a woman and they said, ‘We don’t hire women,’ and that was a shock to me. It was a total shock. It shouldn’t have been. I should have known better. I should have followed what was going on, but I hadn’t and it just came as a real shock because I had done well in law school and it never entered my mind that I couldn’t even get an interview.
—Sandra Day O’Connor tells Terry Gross about trying to get a job interview after finishing law school (via nprfreshair) She also repeated the story to Charlie Rose. And then, ends up retiring because of her husband. Ironic.
California roads- degrading
I have a great idea! Let’s pay for a new high speed railroad instead of maintaining our current and very critical infrastructure. Let’s use lots of CA water to build that new system that will likely be flooded repeatedly.
