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I was very fortunate to hear the keynote address at yesterday’s Water Conservation Showcase by David Carle, author and retired park ranger. I loved his books, Water and the California Dream, and consider him the heir apparent to Marc Reisner. When it comes to western water, he is one of the best thinkers and clearest writers we have today. The slides from Mr. Carle’s presentation are available here, mostly containing lots of photos.

During his presentation, he showed a map which I hadn’t seen before, that vividly portrays the loss of salmon habitat from damming and de-watering rivers. It turns out it’s from a 1998 publication from the Bay Institute called Sierra to the Sea: The Ecological History of the San Francisco Bay-Delta Watershed. Shown below is
Map G3: The Transformed Watershed (174K PDF).

From the description of the map in Appendix A of the report:

The transformation of the aquatic environment of the San Francisco Bay-Delta watershed is seen in this watershed view of the lost historical aquatic habitats and the major disconnected reaches. Nearly 5000 square miles of lowland floodplain and estuarine intertidal habitat, including 900 square miles of historical lake, has been lost in the past 150 years. Because of the barriers imposed by dams over a thousand miles of upland river is no longer available as salmon habitat; additional lowland river mileage is lost to salmon because of the dewatering of the San Joaquin River. Not all of the transformed habitat is lost to the system forever. Restoration of natural processes and rehabilitation of degraded habitats can bring some of this habitat back into the aquatic system.

The map could be better. Is the legend really in Comic Sans? The legend for the Pacific Ocean, while not especially necessary, is hard to read due to the blue-on-blue color. In general, the colors are a bit odd. Green says to me, “natural” and “good”, where in this map it seems to represent the area where the salmon can no longer go. On closer look, it is actually the land above an arbitrary elevation cutoff. It flips the usual color scheme for elevations where blues and greens represent bottom lands, and higher elevations are shown in tan or white, which usually corresponds with areas above the treeline with less vegetation, or snow-capped peaks. These wouldn’t be necessary if a hillshade were used to show topography. The historical wetland areas should probably be shown in blue or green. The locator map does not cover much more area than the map itself, and isn’t necessary. Quibbles aside, it’s an extraordinary map that tells an immensely important story.

This graphic appeared in an op-ed in the New York Times on February 10, 2008 titled, You Are What You Spend.

To understand why consumption is a better guideline of economic prosperity than income, it helps to consider how our lives have changed. Nearly all American families now have refrigerators, stoves, color TVs, telephones and radios. Air-conditioners, cars, VCRs or DVD players, microwave ovens, washing machines, clothes dryers and cellphones have reached more than 80 percent of households.

As the second chart, on the spread of consumption, shows, this wasn’t always so. The conveniences we take for granted today usually began as niche products only a few wealthy families could afford. In time, ownership spread through the levels of income distribution as rising wages and falling prices made them affordable in the currency that matters most — the amount of time one had to put in at work to gain the necessary purchasing power.

At the average wage, a VCR fell from 365 hours in 1972 to a mere two hours today. A cellphone dropped from 456 hours in 1984 to four hours. A personal computer, jazzed up with thousands of times the computing power of the 1984 I.B.M., declined from 435 hours to 25 hours. Even cars are taking a smaller toll on our bank accounts: in the past decade, the work-time price of a mid-size Ford sedan declined by 6 percent.

It is really striking to me how quickly technologies like cell phones are adopted. Within a few short years of their first availability, nearly everyone has one. Why shouldn’t this be so? After all, they are useful, or an economist would say they have high utility. They’re relatively inexpensive, and available nearly everywhere. Lastly: they are heavily marketed.

What does this have to do with water?

I think there are important lessons here for the water business. According to Wikipedia, mobile phones could reach “4.6 billion by the end of 2009.” Time for some quick math here: with a global populationabout 6.8 billion people, that means that 2.2 billion don’t have access to a cell phone.

Recent numbers from UNICEF and the World Health Organization indicate that 2.6 billion don’t have “improved sanitation”. I’ve never liked the “sanitation” euphemism, because it obscures a brutal and disgusting fact: in many places, people don’t have a place to poop where it doesn’t re-contaminate their food or water. This leaves them vulnerable to cholera, dysentery, and other diseases that are virtually unknown in the west. We know that toilets and latrines save lives and provide dignity, but the average global citizen is more likely to have a mobile phone than a clean, safe place to shit. Where have we gone wrong?

Hello,

Some of the area maps at your stations and on the website have incorrect north arrows. That’s a pretty serious cartographic error, and makes it harder to get oriented when you’re visiting a new neighborhood.

I have only looked at a couple stations (Downtown Berkeley and 12th Street Oakland), and they are both wrong. Just look here to see what I mean (Shattuck Avenue runs north-south in reality):

http://www.bart.gov/stations/dbrk/map.aspx

I am wondering if a) anyone is aware of the error, and (b) if there are plans to do anything about it?

Let me offer a simple remedy: print some stickers of a compass rose, and have someone with knowledge of geography stick them over the north arrows on the maps. This will probably be cheaper than re-printing the entire map.

Thank you,

Matt H

Someone else must have noticed this shoddy cartography. First off, if you produce a map where north is not up, you should prominently display a compass rose. It is not even worth mentioning that the rose should be rotated so that the side marked “N” points to the north!

I’ve noticed that the maps posted at the Downtown Berkeley and Downtown Oakland stops both feature incorrect north arrows. They’ve even duplicated the mistake on their website. Shattuck Avenue runs north-south. How many Ph.D.s walk past this every day?

Jenness Enterprises, which appears to be a one-many GIS consultancy, offers some useful extensions for ArcGIS at:

http://www.jennessent.com/arcgis/arcgis_extensions.htm

Tools for Graphics and Shapes is “a large suite of tools for calculating geometric attributes of vector features and for selecting and naming graphics. All tools are available at the ArcView license level.” The extension gives you lots of useful functions, like:

Tools for Graphics

• Graphic Elements to Shapes
• Select Graphic Elements by Type
• Select All Graphic Elements
• Unselect All Graphic Elements
• Flip Graphic Element Selection
• Zoom to Selected Graphic Elements
• Name Graphic Elements

Tools for Shapes

• Convert Polygons to Label Points
• Convert Shapes to Centroids
• Convert Shapes to Spherical Centroids
• Convert Shapes to Vertices
• Convert Polylines to Polygons
• Convert Polygons to Polylines
• Build Polygons from Polylines
• Split Multipart Features
• Combine Features
• Calculate Geometry

NPR has a great report on the new album “I Speak Fula” from Bassekou Kouyaté and his band Ngoniba.

Kouyaté is a master of the West African fretless lute, the ngoni, which is hugely popular in traditional music all across Mali. I think that he’s doing for the ngoni what Toumani Diabate and a young generation of young players did for the kora: experiment, push the boundaries, incorporate new influences, and wow audiences around the world.

Update: Bassekou and band are playing a bunch of gigs in the US, sponsored partly by the National Endowment for the Arts. Thanks, federal government!

For the 1 ½ people out there who will notice or care: I’m officially retiring the East Bay Bike Mapper project. This is prompted largely by Google’s recent release of bicycling directions on Google Maps.

I’ve tried Google’s bike directions, and they’re pretty darn good. There is not much chance I could reach a hundredth as many people, even if somehow my directions were marginally better. I’ve been using “Report a Problem” like a fiend, and I just hope that someone in Mountain View (or Bangalore?) will get to my suggestions sometime this year.

I have submitted lots of corrections for my area. Based on my experience, Google makes fixes that have to do with automobile routes quickly, usually within a week. They don’t seem to be in as much of a hurry when it comes to bike and pedestrian routes. I submitted information about some pedestrian walkways and stairways in the Oakland hill. Not many people know about these, but they’re documented in the printed “Walk Oakland!” map, and most of them are visible on aerial photographs. Google did add them eventually, but it took them about a month.

They’ve got lots of fixes to make:

• Did you know you can ride across the Bay on the same route the ferry takes?
• Care to ride your bike up and down some stairs in the Berkeley hills?
• No one wants you biking through the Bonsai Garden at Lake Merritt (besides, the gate is usually locked).

Don’t expect the “beta” notice to go away anytime soon. Walking directions have been in beta for what, three or four years now?

It’s been fun learning about python, javascript, etc., but I think I need to devote more energy to my real passion (and vocation) as a hydrologist and water policy analyst.

My favorite feature of the bike mapper was a snippet of code that produced the following text based on your route:

By riding your bike for this 1.9-mile trip, you’ll burn 95 calories, save $0.53 on gas, and prevent the emission of 3 lbs of CO₂-equivalent greenhouse gases.

I’ll go ahead and publish that in case anyone out there wants to use it. The latest Google Maps API v3 includes the Bicycle Directions features, so it would be easy enough to make a mashup that lets Google compute the directions and then gives you this info. Perhaps one could set up a site where cyclists are an eligible recipient in the voluntary carbon offset market? Hmm… there’s a thought. Get paid to ride your bike. 

From a recent (opportunistic) press release (because floods are usually followed by a flurry of infrastructure projects):

Throughout much of American history, rivers have been treated as problems that must be “solved” through large scale and expensive engineering projects. As a result, rivers have been clogged with dams, straightened and channelized, cut off from their floodplains and even buried underground.  But these approaches have often exacerbated the very problems they were meant to solve, and have saddled communities with long-term costs they cannot afford.  Despite spending more than $25 billion on federal levees and dams, our nation’s flood losses continue to rise.

“American Rivers is committed to helping Massachusetts bring flood management into the 21st century,” said Stephanie Lindloff, river restoration program director for American Rivers. “Levees and other structural solutions will continue to be part of the flood management strategy in some communities that must protect existing development within floodplains, but the real answer to long-term safety and well-being lies in working with nature, not against it.”

Oceans Getting More Acidic

A recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters, based on measurements in 1991 and 2006, shows that the ocean is becoming more acidic due to rising CO₂ in the atmosphere. This is very bad news for, well, everyone that cares about life on earth. I met Ken Caldera, a scientist at Stanford, last year, and heard a presentation on ocean acidification which terrified me more than anything else I’ve heard or read about climate change.

Plankton fertilization may backfire

One of the solutions proposed to reduce atmospheric CO₂ levels is to capture some of it and store it deep in the ocean. In these so-called sequestration schemes, the seas swaths of the ocean surface are fertilized with iron, and vast quantities of carbon are absorbed by single-celled aquatic plants, which then sink to the bottom of the ocean where they will stay, theoretically, forever. The only problem: these schemes also produce poisons which spread through the food chain and kill wildlife.

G

Georgia is close to signing into law the Georgia Water Stewardship Bill, which mandates a number of water efficiency measures:

• higher efficiency standards for toilets, faucets, urinals and cooling towers
• standardized leak reporting by public water utilities
• metering of multi-family, commercial and industrial construction
• a statewide outdoor watering schedule that prohibits watering during the hottest hours of the day when evaporation and water waste is highest

Of course, many will say that reducing water use is best accomplished through economic means, rather than telling people what type of fixtures they can and should buy, or when to water their lawns. Still, there is convincing proof that national plumbing standards passed into law as part of 1992’s National Energy Policy Act have collectively saved billions of gallons nationwide.

Here’s a congratulatory press release from the environmental group American Rivers. And here’s an editorial from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, with two sides arguing about whether or not it will help solve Georgia’s water problems. Links to the text of the bill here: HB 1094.