The Sierra Club recently released a scorecard comparing the water conservation efforts of cities in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. The City of Los Angeles was the only city to meet all 19 criteria and receive a perfect score!

The criteria included (more…)

In 1994, the State Water Resources Control Board issued Decision 1631, restoring Mono Lake and its tributary streams through a plan of reduced water diversions to Los Angeles. At that time, the decision considered LA’s water supply projections:

The Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (DWP) projects that the city will use approximately 700 thousand acre-feet per year by 1995, increasing to 756.5 thousand acre-feet by 2010 due to population growth. DWP cautions, however, that large uncertainties exist regarding future projections.

The decision went on to (more…)

How much water do you use every day?

It might be relatively easy to estimate the amount of water you use at home and in your yard, but do you know how much water it takes to grow and produce your dinner from last night? What about to produce the energy you’re using this winter to keep warm? Or the items you bought last weekend at the mall?

National Geographic’s water footprint calculator takes you through an easy survey to estimate your complete water footprint. (more…)

“What we are asking, what Mono Lake is asking all of us is ‘where are we going to draw the line?’ If we don’t share some water with Mono Lake what will be next? Will it be Lake Tahoe, will it be the Eel River, the Yukon? Will it be on and on until the last of our singing rivers and beautiful lakes are gone—because we’ve taken every last drop, we’ve watched the last waterfowl, and the last salmon, follow the California State emblem, the California Grizzly, into oblivion? It is a battleground in that sense: it’s asking us: ‘how much are we going to share with the earth?’”

—David Gaines, co-founder of the Mono Lake Committee

You hear it all the time: there isn’t enough water. We are running out of water. But it isn’t true—there is no problem with water supply, in most cases. The problem is almost always too much demand. We are overextending ourselves. Poor decisions about (more…)

Did you know? October 15 is Blog Action Day, an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action. This year that issue is our favorite here at Mono Lake: water.

We think about water every day here at the Mono Lake Committee. We watch how much water is flowing toward Los Angeles, and how much is flowing into Mono Lake. We talk about how to adjust those flows to benefit the recovering creeks. We visit the lakeshore to measure the water level of Mono Lake. (more…)

Join in on a statewide effort to clean up California on September 25! The Mono Lake Committee and friends will tackle a stretch of Lee Vining Creek as part of the Great Sierra River Cleanup.

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Last year the Public Policy Institute of California published an interactive map on its website. When you mouse over each hydrologic region of the state, it shows how the population and per capita urban water use in that region has changed since 1960. The map was released in December as part of a report on California Water Myths, which highlights eight common water myths.

Despite a steadily increasing population, most regions of the state began cutting back per-capita water use after (more…)

At lunch on Tuesday I sat with Lynn de Frietas, Executive Director of the Friends of Great Salt Lake, Wayne Martinson, Utah’s Important Bird Area Coordinator for Audubon, Bob Jellison, and Kim Rose. We talked about a proposed potash extraction project threatening Great Salt Lake that would remove 365,000 acre-feet of water, which (more…)

“We must prepare for a change toward dryness” said Wally Broecker in his keynote address Warming Planet, Shifting Rainfall, Lessons from the Past.

Broecker, from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and well-known in the climate science field, was Tuesday’s keynote speaker at the International Symposium on Terminus Lakes. He first visited (more…)