Forty percent of the earth's total resources have been extinguished by human activity.
Extinct or speeding toward complete extinction: Coral Reefs, Rain Forests, Human Habitat near Seas, 1/3 of all plant and animal species over the past 30 years, 1/3 of all remaining plant and animal species by 2050, 90% of ocean surface fishing.
Without an immediate and absolute cessation of mankind-produced greenhouse gases, irreversible Climate Shift-caused ocean-level rise, ice cap and glacial melt, accelerating desertification and rising temperatures are making the middle latitudes (such as Los Angeles County) too hot to be habitable by 2104.
According to a Los Angeles Times article on October 31, 2008, "State water deliveries could be slashed next year if California continues its dry streak, a move that could lead to widespread rationing. California Department of Water Resources officials Thursday said water agencies could get as little as 15% of their State Water Project allocations..."
Revealing the local water crisis confronting the Los Angeles community
Without the Mono Basin, Owens Valley, Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (all with reduced or no water stream flow forecast) and with the Colorado River being under a 500-year drought, a spector exists for a potential net out-migration of 16-17 million people without water and who must find and build new cities near adequate water.
Los Angeles County flood control engineers estimated upwards of 80 percent of storm-water percolated to groundwater prior to the concretizing of our natural river systems. Only 8 percent of rainfall in urbanized areas now recharges the groundwater, the rest along with urban contaminants flow to the ocean via the channelized streams.
Before suburban sprawl, the Tujunga/Pacoima Watershed was a major contributor of groundwater supply feeding the San Fernando Groundwater Basin—a natural underground reservoir that has become depleted over the years as most of the valley floor became impervious.
A third of LA County's total water recharge is attributed to snow-melt, and rainwater runoff which is collected in the upper watershed by Pacoima and Big Tujunga dams and infiltrated along the Pacoima and Tujunga Washes - comprising the total local surface water infiltrated to groundwater in Los Angeles County between 2003 and 2006.
Currently less than 15 percent of the water supply for the City of Los Angeles comes from local native groundwater. The other 85 percent is imported from distant sources via a delivery system that costs a significant percentage of our total statewide energy bill.
Revitalizing the Tujunga/Pacoima Watershed is key to a local solution of the Los Angeles water crisis
The two Upper Los Angeles River Area groundwater basins (San Fernando and Sylmar) are at a tiny fraction of capacity - with almost no infiltration. Impervious paving and long-term contamination have denied needed recharge to the basins.
If one-half the urbanized lower watershed is reclaimed to it's historic, natural state - using current landscape design methods (with 'Green Streets', non-polluting transportation modes and point sources) and advanced recycled water technologies, potable groundwater could be boosted five-fold or 75% of the city water supply. To insure a safe water supply, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board have announced that Honeywell International, Inc. has recently begun construction of a wellhead treatment system for chromium in the North Hollywood region of the San Fernando Valley - Area 1 Superfund Site.
State and municipal declarations of drought will require reduction in water demand (particularly for landscape irrigation), expanded conservation and re-use programs, exploration of other water supply options, and increased reliance on local supplies. Climate shift implications for neighborhood councils have to do with being frugal, making sacrifices, planting and cultivating community gardens as neighborhood festival, being able to recreate by hiking, bicycling, riding a horse from our homes in the lower watersheds to the upper watersheds in the Angeles National Forest - in the process getting ourselves weened off the oil-based transportation infrastructure, weaned off the power grid by decentralized solar, solar-thermal, wind, and on-site waste recycling systems.
In a report just released by the U.S. Department of Energy that analyzed a scenario in which 20 percent of the nation's electricity is generated from wind power by the year 2030, the DOE noted that such a shift would reduce water use by approximately 8 percent. That's a significant savings, roughly equal to the average share of western water withdrawals claimed by urban users.
Then what would one do or advocate now given the impending urgency? Urban planning and design must be ordered by the watershed. One needs to insure that survival of civitas will be dependent on having local production of and access to (work, food, water, energy, shelter, goods, health care, education, culture). Bio-regional determinism (effected by this process of relocalization) will develop and define the watershed as the basic political governing, economic, social, cultural and currency unit where the grassroots govern from the bottom up.
Removing developers and politicians from the built-form development decision process
Payola politics between developers and politicians casts a blight on grassroots community development.
Removing developers and politicians from the land-use decision-making process is key to mitigating climate change-caused environmental degradation on the neighborhood level.
Once developers and politicians are divorced from the decision-making process of where, how much and what to build, gentrification fueled by payola politics will cease to block and counter the public interest, permitting a revitalized Tujunga-Pacoima Watershed to answer a sizable portion of the City of Los Angeles water needs as a localized solution to our water crisis.
Prudent land-use policy does not promote sprawl. Political opportunism must be dead-ended, as such was the misguided recent effort to gut and amend defeated legislation, in which the elected office holder accepted a developer's campaign donation in return for allowing the same developer to sponsor Assembly Bill 212 (to limit the municipal powers of the City of Los Angeles to control land use) favoring the same developer whose sprawling 229 single-family home Tujunga project would benefit from the legislation.
Respecting and seeing a renaissance of the watershed's carrying capacity presents a powerful argument for neighborhood empowerment to reject payola politics: the greed and corporate-personhood of the developer greasing the skids by writing the legislation, then profiteering from that legislation, after paying the politician, with both the developer and the compromised politician threatening, exhorting and coercing the constituency to share their viewpoints with bureaucratic layers of immunity provided by the one-party town politic.
Surely, once payola politics borne of a tryst between politician and developer is extinguished, dialog of communitas in the public forum around aesthetic, life-safety, and other community impacts will resurge and negotiation between all concerns will be voiced, but the nature of bio-regional determinacy will leave the decision-making about restricting sensitive, ecologically vital land areas from urbanization up to a map generating process of overlaying various map overlays of hydrologic, ground water recharge, riparian, chaparral, flora, fauna, woodland, forest, geologic, landslide-prone, seismic off-limits-to-urbanization preserves to be maintained for the overall carrying-capacity of the watershed.
Without human intervention, an emergent composite will reveal those least ecologically sensitive areas remaining as suitable for green-collar, 100% renewable energy source economic and built-form development.
Once crass developer payola-inspired politics are removed from the State Legislature, California can proceed to mitigate and cope with global warming and act to pull the human species back from the precipice of extinction. Payola politics does not allow adequate funding to restore our watershed and provide for a relocalization of our unsustainable, failed global economy based on the local production of food, energy, and goods and the local development of currency, governance and culture.
Reuse, reduce, repair, recycle, restore – have to replace the one-party town payola mantra of denial, distraction, disruption, distortion, and diversion.
Healthy watershed means healthy neighborhood means no payola politics.
- Mr Lindblad is running for State Assembly in our 39th District, has anchored his 26 year planning and architecture practice in the San Fernando Valley with his work being recognized for excellence and innovation. Mr Lindblad is also a long time Community Activist in the San Fernando Valley who is dedicated to protecting the environment, co-author and presenter of the award-winning Panorama City Commercial Area Revitalization Study which was codified into Los Angeles City Planning ordinance. He has given support to the formation of Panorama City and Valley Glen Neighborhood Councils.
