In spring 2021, unauthorized operators crashed two drones in a patch of protected estuarial wetlands near Southern California’s port complex where elegant terns were nesting on sandy soil. Thousands of spooked terns abandoned their nests and scattered. Some resettled on a barge carting rocks off shore. When the terns began to hatch on the barge later that summer, many chicks taking exploratory steps tumbled off its steep sides into the water. Unable to fly or clamber back onto the barge deck, the chicks drowned and washed ashore, prompting local outcry and a rescue effort. A California Department of Fish and Wildlife officer said that the event represented “a full generation of birds not established.”

Elegant terns are designated as “near threatened” by U.S. environmental regulations that date back to the 1970s. Meanwhile, the Southern California port complex, the largest in the U.S., is an emblem of oil-driven growth and globalization. But while these two forces—environmental protection and petro-capitalism—seem to be at odds with one another, the tern catastrophe is an example of how measures to protect wildlife are carefully calibrated to exist alongside commercial shipping, petroleum, and military uses of the coastline. Rather than a brake on economic growth, environmental conservation in coastal California has come to play a key role in making it possible.

Elegant terns are black-hooded, slim white birds with scythe-like wings that give them agile flying capabilities. Like many other birds, these terns depend on stopover points in Southern California as they traverse the Pacific Flyway, a migratory route extending from Alaska to Patagonia. Terns favor sandy nesting areas in close proximity to ocean, estuary, and brackish waters where they can dive for small fish to feed young.

Historical ecologists estimate that the estuaries of the Los Angeles coastline once totaled between 15,000 and 18,000 acres. But by the 1980s, 90% of California’s wetlands had been sacrificed to oil development, military uses, agriculture—and the ports. Even the ecological reserve where the terns were nesting, Bolsa Chica, is far from an unspoiled idyll. It was formerly used as a gun club, for oil drilling, and for army installations; it is surrounded by active and idle wells and has a pipeline running through it; and adjacent wetlands were oiled in fall of 2021, when a cargo ship’s anchor struck and dragged a pipeline on the seabed.

The Southern California port complex—two contiguous but separately administered ports about 20 miles south of downtown L.A., one belonging to the city of Los Angeles and the other Long Beach—is one of the ten largest container ports in the world. Far from L.A.’s image of palm trees, Hollywood, and recreational beaches and boardwalks, the port’s shoreline is an industrial mega-site, where the same estuarial ecology in which the terns nest has been subjected to an intense modernization project. The marshland was hardened into cement docks that flow into intermodal infrastructure, connecting ships to the rail and freeways that move goods to distribution centers; the shore was also filled with petroleum infrastructure that connects ships and offshore drilling to inland refineries.

Oil fueled this growth. Los Angeles and Long Beach tapped rich coastal oil fields near the harbor after 1920, and over time, port and municipal managers decided to invest their revenues into expanding the complex, dredging deep channels in the harbor silt to allow the passage of large ships. Cargo movement reached stratospheric heights in the 1990s, when a high volume of Chinese imports began to come ashore. U.S. consumers who recognize that many of their goods are made in China may not realize that these items traveled to their homes via the Port of Los Angeles.

Concurrent with this rise of offshored manufacturing and development of logistics techniques to manage a skyrocketing volume of goods movement, the U.S.’ environmental regulatory apparatus came into being. After environmental outcry starting in the 1960s, the government began to require wildlife surveys for infrastructural projects that might impact air and water quality or endangered species. As mitigation measures for such projects, wetlands areas are sometimes created or restored in exchange for permits for new industrial activity, including oil drilling.

The requirements for biological surveys and air and water quality monitoring have meant that since the 1970s, environmental management is incentivized to sign off on the continued operation—and even expansion—of the logistics industry and petroleum development. Funding and logistical support for conservation occurs alongside the ports’ unquestioned pursuit of year-over-year growth. Some habitat management and wildlife rescue here is even funded by forces like the petroleum industry that inevitably cause harm to landscapes and wildlife.

Conservation’s entanglement with industry means that “disaster” scenarios are part of normal operations, rather than anomalies. The terns’ 2021 nesting catastrophe was not an isolated event. Similar incidents also occurred in 2006 and in 2007: nesting terns had taken up residence on barges in the Long Beach harbor, and many chicks drowned in 2006 when harbor operations spooked the birds. This prompted discussion over building an artificial sandy island to provide expanded habitat for the terns to nest in. But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rejected the proposal, saying it was too pricey. A Bolsa Chica Reserve manager said, “The reason we want to [restore more habitat] is these terns keep wanting to nest in the port.” With limited coastline, especially in and around San Pedro Bay, there is intense competition for space between industrial operations and wildlife habitat.

The climate crisis and its associated mass extinction event are intensifying choices between habitat and industrial land use. But the situation is more than a simple competition for space. Fossil fuel-driven heating stresses wildlife, leaving species with even less capacity to absorb habitat loss. The terns are a perfect example: where they can nest is sensitive to movements of fish; warming oceans make access to the southern California coast even more important to their reproduction than it once was.

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has committed to a plan to conserve 30% of land and marine areas by 2030. But what will happen to the remaining 70% of California? It’s important to think about how to regulate non-conservation areas, too. Ideally, the 30×30 plan would be accompanied by a commitment to not relegate any land or marine space to being a “sacrifice zone” privileging industrial activity. Animals and people are adaptable—and do not necessarily need “pristine” conditions for living. But they do need enforced standards that allow them to perch comfortably and breathe easily.

To protect human and animal life alike, we have to confront the zero-sum logic where goods movement crowds out space for flourishing life. The first step should be rethinking the very concepts of “wild” and “developed” spaces alike, with the aim of finding a path to an economic future less dependent on both unsustainable “growth” and sacrifice.

The post What Environmental Conservation Looks Like at America’s Biggest Port appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Torrey Pines Natural Reserve is located in what is now called San Diego, the traditional and unceded lands of the Kumeyaay people, where I spent my first years of life. A famous golf course up the road, which occasionally hosts the U.S. Open, takes its name from the Torrey pine—as do several local schools. My memory of the reserve is a blur of family hikes and elementary school field trips, a composite out of sequence. Although my family moved away when I was in third grade, Torrey Pines State Beach and Natural Reserve formed a corner of the world that we came back to year after year.

This is what I remember: in order to even arrive at the first trailhead, you would hike up a steep, Sisyphean hill with sparse refuges of shade. The sand at the beginning of the trail was very warm and loose, and would always get in your shoes. If you were lucky, a cool ocean breeze would come along and wipe away the heat that liked to mellow on the trail, populated by lizards, bees, and the occasional squirrel. In springtime you could also see yellow cactus blooms and carpets of purple flowers and pinkish buckwheat, all contrasting dramatically with the deep blue ocean. Torrey Pines is a good place to remember that you are a body—not just that you have a body—sustained by earth, air, and sea.

During a recent visit with my husband, Ben, I was amused to discover that the “Sisyphean” hill could be briskly hiked in 10 minutes, and that one of the “giant” walls of white, partially eroded sandstone was no more than 12 feet tall. It felt like someone had taken a tilt-shift lens to my mental picture of the landscape, leaving it smaller—even toylike—and thus a bit less mythic and more in need of care. Still, the sand remained warm at my ankles, and I was now tall enough to feel more ocean breeze. The healthy Torrey pines at the start of the trail looked just as I remembered them: a bit scraggly, windswept into unique forms and dotted by large pine cones.

My heart sank as we turned a corner that overlooked the ocean and green estuary below. The vista was framed by an unsightly collapse of dead trees left in place, like rough skeletons folded over after a battle. I knew that the Torrey pines had struggled with bark beetles for some time, marked by large, black plastic traps strewn throughout the park, reminding me of solemn lanterns. But I remembered smaller patches of dead trees—not an entire hillside. Was this another detail that had been dilated by memory and distance?

Yes and no. A combination of drought, fire, and beetle infestation has indeed reduced California’s two Torrey pine colonies (the other is in the Channel Islands) from 9,000 trees in the 1970s, dwindling to 3,000 today. So when I visited as a child in the early ’90s, the diminishment of Torrey pines was already well underway. At school, I absorbed the urgent calls to “save the rainforests” and “save the whales.” Yet whereas those losses were more abstract, the Torrey pines were my first encounter with something being left to die. I remember wondering why no one was doing more.

Of course, the individual conservation stories of my childhood pale in comparison to the climate crisis children grow up with today. I thought about these different scales of disaster when we came across a sign that explained how historic levels of drought were making the Torrey pines even more vulnerable to bark beetles. Although there were plenty of bark beetle traps around, the sign explained that conservationists couldn’t give the trees extra water to help combat infestations because it would interfere with a “natural ecological process.” Although I recognized the impracticality of watering the huge park, this reasoning didn’t make sense to me: why justify one form of human intervention (extermination via bark beetle traps) but not another (more water)? If climate change driven by human carbon emissions is intensifying California’s experience of drought, then we have already been intervening in Torrey pine ecology, in a negative way. Limiting action to the invisible hand of “natural ecological processes” obscures other possible ways of imagining care.

For example, many Indigenous traditions offer ways of thinking about human agency as a beneficial part of nature and ecological processes, rather than separate from nature. In Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist and Potawatomi member Robin Wall Kimmerer explains how sweetgrass “likes” to be selectively harvested; it is measurably healthier when someone cuts it partially back. In California, a similar case is being made for bringing back Indigenous burning practices in fire-prone landscapes, like Yosemite National Park. Under what conditions did the Kumayaay leave the Torrey pines at today’s reserve, and how did they care for them during past droughts? This is a gap that the reserve’s official website entirely skips over.

Although I failed to find an answer, I discovered that a few trees didn’t wait to be watered, or moved, through human intervention. The local conservation nonprofit Nature Collective notes that several trees have unexpectedly “escaped into coastal wildlands including San Elijo Lagoon Ecological Reserve,” which is located about seven miles north of Torrey Pines Natural Reserve. Ecologists suspect that scrub jays may have been harvesting seeds from Torrey pines in nearby gardens, resulting in new germinations.

While I worry for the pines and the ecology they support on the ocean bluffs, I smile to think of them “escaping” into a brackish lagoon through the work of enterprising scrub jays. These rogue trees are a reminder that other living beings are ecosystem engineers. They intervene in their environments, creating niches and habitats. The rogue trees also show how preserves are temporary and porous things. If we pay close attention, the Torrey pines not only convey stories of damage and danger, but also introduce small, surprising spaces of unexpected abundance.

If memory itself is a kind of nature preserve, safeguarding the recollections of childhood, perhaps the pines show us an alternative to waiting for deterioration to set in. Memory is something that can still grow and change, that should be cared for, and that can even escape its historical boundaries. Maybe an old memory can take up residence in the lagoon of a new experience, or seed a new connection.

As we walked back down the trail that day, Ben noticed a granite bench under some shade, and suggested we sit down to admire the lagoon view. The breeze smelled like salt, and we watched the Amtrak train go by. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped there ever before.

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Yesterday, science journalist Michelle Nijhuis, author of the new book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, visited Zócalo with Cynthia Barnett, author of Rain: A Natural and Cultural History. Their conversation, presented in partnership with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, explored the history of conservation and how the efforts of earlier generations doing this work still resonate in today’s world.

Nijhuis recounted several anecdotes from her book, which was celebrating its publication day. She shared stories of Elinor Ostrom, the political economist whose theories of commons argue that humans can develop sustainable systems to regulate shared resources, in addition to calling attention to the vibrant life of Rosalie Edge. Edge, a dedicated suffragist, became a devoted conservationist later in life after discovering a love for birds, and her research on hawks provided valuable datasets to Rachel Carson in her work against pesticides decades later.

Nijhuis also spoke about ecologist Aldo Leopold, and how his killing of a mother wolf inspired the “land ethic” philosophy he went on to promote. Barnett related that tale to the recent hunt of wolves in Wisconsin that far exceeded a quota set by state wildlife officials. “I think there’s something really unethical about killing an animal with that kind of cruel enthusiasm,” Nijhuis said.

She was, however, careful to differentiate sport killing from subsistence hunting and stressed that the mainstream conservation movement would do well to integrate subsistence hunters’ concerns, as the conversation turned toward groups often excluded from the conservation movement. “The conservation movement, at its worst, tends to treat humans as this kind of homogenous force, usually a negative homogenous force, and that leaves out most of humanity,” Nijhuis said. Such attitudes, she said, obscure the successes of strategies such as community conservancies in Namibia, which have successfully protected rhinos and elephants, and allowed local communities to disentangle conservation efforts from threats to their livelihoods.

Barnett, the moderator, pointed out that Nijhuis never used the word “de-extinction” in Beloved Beasts. Was that intentional? Yes, said Nijhuis. De-extinction—which alludes to techniques that use an extinct species’ DNA in combination with similar, extant species to create new animals—can help by increasing the genetic diversity of specific animal populations; however, the term is often “held out as an easy answer to what is, again, an extremely complex problem.”

“Conservation is not as simple as just making more animals,” Nijhuis added.

In closing, Nijhuis and Barnett stressed the importance of working to save species before they become endangered. Although it can be easy to feel depressed about Earth’s future, Nijhuis said that it’s important not to lose hope. “There have been extinctions, there will be extinctions, there will be more losses,” she said, “but just because we can’t save everything, doesn’t mean that everything is lost.”

Quoted with Michelle Nijhuis:

“[The term ‘de-extinction’] is a reversion to our very early ideas about conservation—that it’s just about saving single species, almost apart from their role in the ecosystem. And that if we can bring back the passenger pigeon, our job will be done. What we’ve learned over the past century is that conservation is about so much more than that.”

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Maya farmers in the area, who rely on rainfall to nourish crops, offer up different prayers. For over 4,000 years, Maya families, commoner and wealthy, have relied on water from the skies. Without rain, crops are decimated, river trade ceases, and drinking supplies diminish. Extended dry seasons create a massive tinderbox where one lightning strike can destroy everything in a blazing inferno.

In my anthropological work in Central America, I have spent nearly 20 years looking at the role that water played in Maya history. Water and environmental crises that arose in the region more than a thousand years ago shed light on key parts of the Maya belief system, which offers some useful perspectives on responding to climate change in the 21st century.

The Maya managed to build an early civilization that farmed beans, corn, and squash—sometimes using advanced techniques like terracing and raised fields. More famously, during the Classic Period from the third to the late ninth century in the southern Maya lowlands (comprising present-day northern Guatemala, Belize, and southeastern Mexico), the Maya built hundreds of urban centers. Each center had a king, as well as royal temples and elaborate tombs, palaces, inscribed monuments, and large reservoir systems.

The most powerful kings emerged and thrived in areas with large amounts of fertile soils for agriculture. Such places didn’t necessarily have fresh water nearby. In fact, the two largest Maya centers with the most powerful kings, Tikal in Guatemala and Calakmul in Mexico, emerged in areas without lakes or rivers. But successful Maya royals had to have access to water to retain control.

As well as being sources of water, these centers became the sites of community interaction, including markets, ballgames, and ceremonies that took place in large open areas surrounded by temples and the royal palace. The region had a fantastic variety of plant and animal life, which was widely scattered, as were farmsteads and subjects. Reservoirs brought people together, fulfilling both agricultural and political needs.

While lots of rain falls during the seven-month rainy season, much of it seeps into the porous limestone bedrock. In areas without lakes or rivers, the Maya devised means to divert and contain water beginning over 2,000 years ago, eventually resulting in the development of intricate catchment systems centered on large reservoirs. From the third to the late ninth century, classic Maya kings depended on these reservoirs to attract subjects to urban centers during the five-month dry season between February and June.

Quarrying the reservoirs also provided stone to build monumental temples, palaces, and ball courts next to them, allowing kings to directly control their access. The Maya accomplished all of this with only stone tools, human labor, and ingenuity.

Across millennia, the Maya also lived their worldview, a cosmology of conservation in which humans constituted one of many elements along with animals, birds, trees, clouds, stone, and earth. Humans were not seen as superior to other life forms or elements in this system, and they had a responsibility to maintain the world they shared.

This relationship is expressed even today in the nature of current Mayan languages. Among the Tojolab’al Maya of Chiapas, Mexico, for instance, their linguistic structure de-emphasizes the role of the individual as an actor and instead emphasizes a collective “we.” That “we” includes clouds, plants, rivers, mountains, and animals. They do not have terms for “religion” nor “nature,” as these concepts are already integrated into their daily interactions with the world.

This cosmology and the Maya transformation into many kingdoms worked in sync for centuries. As the population grew, the Maya expanded their water systems, which became inextricably linked to urban layout—dams, walkways, and channels—and royal power. Reservoirs supplied water to tens of thousands of people in larger centers for nearly a thousand years.

Yet the more that Maya kings relied on increasingly complex water systems to support their political economy, the more vulnerable they and their subjects became to disruptions. And disruptions did come, in the form of several multiyear droughts beginning early in the ninth century.

Maya farmers, who had contributed their labor, services, and goods for access to water during annual droughts, ceased to do so when kings failed them as water managers. Gods and ancestors were believed to have deserted royalty, which had not maintained beneficial long-term relations with the environment.

An urban diaspora resulted, as hundreds of thousands of Maya abandoned hundreds of centers and kings in the dry southern lowlands. They never returned.

We know the long-term Maya cosmology and the land management strategies that accompanied it worked on a practical level, because Maya culture did not die out with the demise of kingship. Maya farmers emigrated in all directions and started new lives near lakes, rivers, and coastal areas. Temples and palaces were surrendered, eventually becoming overgrown and swallowed back into the rainforest, while existing political structures vanished. Kings disappeared for good in the southern lowlands, as people carried their languages, their cosmology, and their agricultural methods to new areas, where they have farmed the land sustainably for more than a thousand years post-collapse. Millions of Maya currently live in Central America and elsewhere.

The Maya paid attention to diversification in ways that might be familiar to us today. For instance, we are taught to diversify our financial portfolios to avoid risk, as well as our diets and exercise regimens to preserve our health. The Maya had a similar concept, except that it was applied on a daily basis to maintaining universal balance.

One way of maintaining balance was through forest management. Hundreds of items from tropical forests were used for food, medicine, construction materials, and tools. As one student of mine said several years ago when one of my Maya field assistants was showing her uses of various trees and bushes, “The jungle is like a refrigerator.”

The Maya plant their home gardens and fields to mimic the diversity seen in the jungle, which likewise serves as a risk management strategy. The Maya also limited their interaction with the environment: They did not hunt, cull, or farm in ‘sacred’ places, such as pilgrimage destinations located along ceremonial circuits. Consequently, flora and fauna flourished, which promoted biodiversity and conservation.

I work in one such area—Cara Blanca in central Belize. There, openings in the earth, such as caves and bodies of water, are considered portals to the otherworld where Chahk resides and people communicate with ancestors and gods via prayers and offerings. People lived near shallow Cara Blanca lakes, but only periodically visited cenotes (deep collapsed sinkholes fed by groundwater) to commune with gods and ancestors.

These pilgrimages increased in number and scale during the century-long period of droughts. For the first time, the Maya infringed on a sacred place. They built water temples and other ceremonial buildings. However, when conditions worsened as droughts wore on, they never built houses nor farmed there. Even then, their worldview emphasized maintaining a balance, sometimes at short-term expense to their own well-being.

The Maya cosmology of conservation is not often found in our industrial world, which embodies a worldview in which nature is divorced from culture, prioritizing humans over everything else in a manner that is becoming less sustainable each day. What the Maya learned, which we continue to struggle with today, is that ignoring long-term climate crises for political gain is short-sighted, and ultimately destructive to a political system. More centrally, maintaining an ecosystem is not merely the responsibility of a society’s leaders but requires sustainable practices—and sometimes sacrifices—from everyone.

Of course, the Maya made mistakes and overused resources at times. But they learned from their mistakes, repositioning their actions to avoid upsetting the balance of their world. Today, adopting and updating their approach would be a good start in the vital task of saving not only ourselves but our planet.

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For roughly 10 years, I have studied the legacy of the 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. Even after a decade, I continue to be astounded by how regularly Roosevelt is invoked in politics and beyond.

Today, TR is ubiquitous. If you follow sports, you may have seen Teddy Goalsevelt, the self-appointed mascot for Team USA soccer who ran for FIFA president in 2016. Or you may have watched the giant-headed Roosevelt who rarely wins the Presidents’ Race at Washington Nationals baseball games. If you enjoy the cinema, you will likely recall Robin Williams as Roosevelt in the Night at the Museum trilogy, or might know that a biopic starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Roosevelt is slated for production.

In politics, Roosevelt has become the rare figure popular with both left and right. Vice President Mike Pence recently compared his boss Donald Trump to Roosevelt; in 2016, candidate Hillary Clinton named the Rough Rider as her political lodestar. Environmentalists celebrate Roosevelt as the founding father of conservation and a wilderness warrior, and small business interests celebrate his battles against large corporations.

And more than a century after he was shot in Milwaukee during the 1912 presidential campaign, Roosevelt remains a target; last year, his statue in front of the Museum of Natural History in New York was splattered in red paint in protest of its symbolic relationship to white supremacy, among other things.

Roosevelt’s high profile is no mere accident of history. Shortly after Roosevelt’s death, two memorial associations organized and worked to perpetuate his legacy.

One of these organizations sought to tie Roosevelt to the politics of the early 20th century, and cast him as a national icon of Americanism. At that time, Americanism stood for patriotism and civic-mindedness, as well as anti-communism and anti-immigration. This ideology helped Republicans win back the White House in 1920, but it also galvanized the first Red Scare.

The second memorial organization rejected the political approach to commemoration, choosing to represent Roosevelt’s legacy in artistic, creative, and utilitarian forms, including monuments, films, artwork, and by applying the Roosevelt name to bridges and buildings. Of course, some of these activities had implicit political angles, but they generally avoided association with overt causes, in favor of historical commemoration. When it came to fundraising, the apolitical organization raised 10 times as much income as the political one, and within ten years the two organizations folded into a single memorial association that abandoned political interpretations. Roosevelt became bipartisan and polygonal.

This is not to say Roosevelt’s legacy lost all meaning. Quite the opposite; our perception of Roosevelt has endured a number of declines and revivals. And, through the rounds of historical revision and re-revision, he has maintained certain characteristics.

His civic-minded Americanism endures, as does his record as a conservationist and a progressive. Roosevelt still evokes an image of an American cowboy, a preacher of righteousness, and a leading intellectual.

Most interestingly, these elements of his legacy are not mutually exclusive. Invoking one does not require us to exclude another. For example, Barack Obama promoted the Affordable Care Act in 2010 by memorializing Roosevelt’s advocacy for national healthcare in 1911. Obama could recall Roosevelt’s progressivism while avoiding the Bull Moose’s mixed record on race relations or his support of American imperialism. In short, commemorators can take from Roosevelt what they want and, consequently, his legacy grows ever more complex and elastic.

The upcoming centenary of Roosevelt’s death in January 2019 offers us an opportunity to understand more about how presidential legacies are shaped by successive generations. Images of former presidents come from various sources, and because they can act as a powerful emblem for any cause, their images proliferate without much scrutiny.

Politicians are well aware of this. Sarah Palin, a right-wing Republican, co-opted the legacy of Democrat Harry Truman in her 2008 vice-presidential nomination speech, and Barack Obama had a penchant for invoking Ronald Reagan. In a political swamp full of alligators, summoning the ghosts of dead presidents is relatively safe ground.

Likewise, commercial advertisers take great liberty with the past. Beer and whiskey producers have long used presidents as brand ambassadors (Old Hickory bourbon and Budweiser are good examples). Automobile companies have named vehicles for Washington, Monroe, Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, and Roosevelt.

These contemporary invocations remind us of the real value of legacy, however it might be interpreted. The past has meaning for the present, and that meaning can be translated into advantage. Truth is not the highest value in the contest between presidential ghosts.

Happy Warrior: Teddy Roosevelt in 1919, the last year of his life. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Despite being the subject of scholarly historical biographies that document their lives with precision and care, American presidents are dogged by half-truths, myths, and arbitrary citations in public memory. At a time when our political climate is referred to as “post-truth,” and a celebrity tycoon who has mastered the art of self-promotion sits in the Oval Office, it is worth reflecting on how these legacies are produced.

If, as philosopher Williams James once said, “The use of a life is to spend it for something that outlasts it,” the former American presidents have lived boundlessly productive lives, with legacies that far outlast their tenure. But because their legacies are produced by successive generations, they often tell us more about the agents of commemoration than the men who sat behind the Resolute Desk.

Examining presidential legacies helps us solve a historical problem: It allows us to see who shapes our perceptions of the past. Memorializers lay claim to historical narratives and create the illusion of public memory, invoking select elements of our shared past as shiny baubles to emulate and admire. So by understanding these myths, the mythmakers, and the motives of memorialization, we can see a laminated past with countless layers. The more myths and the more layers, the more insight we gain into the ways the past connects with the present, and the present with the future.

The “real” Theodore Roosevelt is lost to us. He is an imagined character, even to family. Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson Archie met his grandfather only once. Still, every time he visited Sagamore Hill—his grandfather’s home in Oyster Bay, Long Island—he sensed his ghost. Archie felt that TR’s spirit looked over the kids as they played. On numerous occasions Archie reflected on his grandfather’s likely expectations for his family and even attempted to model his life on that conception. “We knew him only as a ghost,” Archie related, “but what a merry, vital, and energetic ghost he was. And how much encouragement and strength he left behind to help us play the role Fate has assigned us for the rest of the century.”

Indeed, conjuring Roosevelt’s ghost gives us another means of observing the last century, a period of time that Roosevelt himself never saw. Because so many have invoked Roosevelt in the way Archie did, examining his legacy helps to illustrate the motives and judgements of those who remember the past. Theodore Roosevelt’s ghost continues to haunt public memory because we continue to conjure it. TR has been dead for a century, but we refuse to let him rest in peace, believing the use of his life can help us achieve our ends.

The post Why Both Liberals and Conservatives Claim Theodore Roosevelt as Their Own appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Brower, once head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth, is a towering figure in the late 20th century environmental movement—and in my own life. One crucial moment in our relationship came at my parents’ annual holiday party in December 1964. I was 22 and about to graduate from Berkeley and join the Peace Corps for a stint in a Turkish village. We knew the Browers because my mother, Beth, had been friends with David’s wife since the 1930s. I have no recollection of what we were talking about, but Dave interrupted to say, “You have a nice speaking voice. Would you be willing to narrate a film for the Sierra Club?” I gulped and said, “Sure.”

Brower was the first executive director the Sierra Club ever hired, beginning in 1952. He led successful campaigns to block two dams proposed inside Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, helped spark the creation of Point Reyes and Cape Cod National Seashores and Kings Canyon National Park, and launched the Sierra Club into a successful book-publishing program with oversized word-and-photograph volumes celebrating special places the club was working to save. He increased the membership of the Sierra Club nearly ten-fold and was a familiar figure on Capitol Hill, a skilled lobbyist and publicist for nature.

By the time of that holiday party, Dave was approaching the midpoint of his career and was embroiled in a new fight to the death over two proposed hydroelectric dams in the Grand Canyon, a venture spearheaded by President Lyndon Johnson’s administration.

Brower was giving no ground on these dams, especially after he and his conservation allies had acquiesced to the government’s plan to dam Glen Canyon, just upstream from the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. The move had been a tradeoff to save Dinosaur National Monument, and it was a decision Brower would regret for the rest of his life. Glen was nearly 200 miles long with only the gentlest of rapids, dozens of side canyons of soaring Navajo sandstone, more beautiful than the Dinosaur canyons it was sacrificed to save. The film he asked me to narrate celebrated Glen Canyon, and mourned its loss.

After narrating the film I did my stretch in the Peace Corps, ending in the summer of 1967 with a $5-a-day tour around Europe. From London, I wrote Brower a letter offering my services to the Sierra Club, but claiming no relevant education or experience. Just enthusiasm.

Brower seldom answered his mail. He was, however, known for his long memory, and kept nearly everything on paper for future reference. One of his tenets was that a phone call is nearly always better than a letter, because letters take too long to reach their destinations and get put into piles to be acted on later.

Upon my return from the Peace Corps, I got a job at Head Start. I met a talented young photographer who, when he learned I knew Brower, asked if I’d see if Brower would be willing to look at his work. I phoned, and Dave asked me to drop by his house up the hill in Berkeley later that evening.

The house had been built in 1947 after Brower returned from the war in Italy. River-polished rocks covered most of the horizontal surfaces, and photos and maps adorned the walls. A macaque monkey named Isabelle, rescued from the psychology department at UC Berkeley, roamed the house along with two or three black lab mixes.

Around the dinner table that evening, with plenty of scotch under our belts, Brower asked me to craft a book manuscript from journals and magazine articles written by Norman Clyde, a legendary octogenarian Sierra mountaineer, who also happened to be visiting the Browers. I gulped again, and said, “Yes.”

I went to work for the Sierra Club in May 1968. This turned out to be Brower’s final year at the club, as he had gotten into trouble with his board of directors for various faults, some real, most political. After a vote by the members of the Sierra Club, Dave resigned the following spring and I was fired along with several other partisans.

Dave immediately put the unpleasantness behind him. The rest of us refugees could complain for hours about the injustice we’d just lived through, but Dave had more important things to spend his energy on. He would bravely say that what had just happened was a mitosis, as when a cell doubles itself by dividing in two.

Midway through 1969, Dave, along with a handful of former Sierra Club staffers and volunteers, started Friends of the Earth. It was meant to complement the Sierra Club and other existing organizations, to do the work the club didn’t want Brower to do in its name. This would include a vigorous international program, expansion into campaigns involving energy policy, the protection of public health, pollution abatement, and other concerns beyond forests, parks, and wildlife.

The organization was small and scrappy, and made noise by defeating federal subsidies for a Boeing-built supersonic transport aircraft, delaying construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline for several years (resulting in a far safer pipeline), and leading the crusade against nuclear power, aiming its fire first at the Diablo Canyon reactors on the central California coast.

The Sierra Club board had agreed not to oppose the Diablo proposal in order to save the Nipomo Dunes nearby. A minority on the board thought this a dreadful decision, given Diablo Canyon’s remoteness and beauty. A fierce internal battle erupted within the club. Brower’s opposition to Diablo, in fact, had been one big reason he was chased out of the Sierra Club, the old guard arguing that the club had given its word; others arguing that the club was duty-bound to oppose despoliation of precious stretches of pristine coastline.

At the time, the Sierra Club’s opposition to Diablo was simply because of where it would be built. Later, Brower and many others came to oppose nuclear power altogether because of the plants’ vulnerability to terrorism and natural disasters.

Things went well for a long spell, but in 1986 Friends of the Earth, with finances in bad shape and a deeply divided board, closed up shop in San Francisco, forcing Brower off the board and laying off the staff, leaving only a small operation in Washington, D.C. He must have been discouraged, but again he refused to dwell on the past.

Instead, Dave and several others went to work building Earth Island Institute, which Dave had started a few years prior in case Friends of the Earth decided to dispense with his services. Earth Island is an umbrella that shelters and nurtures dozens of small organizations working on a wide variety of projects in every corner of the world.

I, for my part, took a job with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and stayed in touch with Brower, who by then was approaching 80 years of age. We’d meet occasionally for lunch or drinks; he was always full of ideas and suggestions for new projects.

As I neared retirement in 2008 I was casting about for a big project and Brower influenced my life again. Dave had written two ramshackle autobiographical memoirs as well as a borderline manifesto titled Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run. However, at the time of his death in November 2000, no one had written a proper biography about him. More distressingly, he was being forgotten. When I talked with young environmental lawyers they only vaguely recalled his name. “I really must do this book,” I thought, “And I hope that it helps keep his story alive.”

The post Sixteen Years After His Death, a Renowned Environmentalist Won His Longest Fight appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Hypothetical in the sense that very few of us spend any time around tigers outside of zoos, though we interact with images of tigers on a daily basis, depending on what type of cereal we eat, sports team we root for, or comic strip we read.

Necessities in the sense that most of us would agree that the world really, really needs tigers; that tigers must remain lurking in the jungle, with their stripes rippling under the dappled light. The existence of tigers is a certification that wildness still exists and that conservation works. If we are going to live in skyscrapers with antibacterial countertops, use Skype for transcontinental chitchat, and actually dine on a substance called Soylent, we need to know that somewhere these gorgeous, powerful, and unpredictably violent animals still roam. The further we live from danger, the more important it is that the tigers be out there.

Tigers in India are a conservation success story, a bright orange stripe in what has otherwise been a century of heavy extinction. A hundred years ago, India had tens of thousands of tigers, but by the early 1970s they had dwindled down to a mere 1,200. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi started Project Tiger in 1973, relocating 200,000 people away from designated tiger zones, and creating buffer zones between tigery jungles and more developed areas. In 1975, tigers were listed as an endangered species. Tiger numbers have risen and fallen over the years but in January of 2015, there were 2,261 tigers in India—70 percent of the world’s wild tigers. (There were about 13,000 non-wild tigers in 2010.)

The Paris Climate Accord signed in December made preserving tropical forests a key strategy for dealing with climate change, and Project Tiger and other initiatives in the Sunderbans, the giant mangrove swamp on the border of India and Bangladesh, seem to offer a successful model for that: Careful stewardship can preserve whole biological zones, complete with beautiful wild predators. But on closer inspection, Project Tiger is also a cautionary tale about what happens when tigers (and conservation) are a bigger priority than the humans who live nearby.

Some people have paid a very high price for the world’s few tigers. People who live in the buffer areas around the Sunderbans have suffered from so many deadly tiger attacks that there are about 3,000 so-called tiger widows in India and 10,000 in Bangladesh. A few weeks ago, I happened across a journal article titled, “Ecopsychosocial Aspects of Human-Tiger Conflict: An Ethnographic Study of Tiger Widows of Sundarban Delta, India,” published in Environmental Health Insights earlier this year. The study was written by Dr. Arabinda Chowdhury and three colleagues who work in an emerging field called ecopsychiatry.

Dr. Chowdhury, a psychiatrist who spends part of his time working for the National Health Service in the U.K., is particularly concerned about the psychological cost of human-tiger conflict. From 2001 through 2006, he and his team surveyed more than 3,000 households in the Gosaba area, which is right at the edge of the tiger reserve, then did psychiatric evaluations of 49 tiger widows, spending as long as three days with each woman.

Before they ever came face-to-face with a tiger, these women’s families were very poor. Encroaching seawaters have made fields salty, forcing farmers to find other ways to earn money. Entering the tiger zone to get wood, hunt for honey, or catch tiger prawn seed have become the main local sources of income, but they require paying the government for a permit. Men from poor families haven’t been able to afford the permits so many sneak in at night. In the Indian area of the Sunderbans, about 40 people—mostly those sneaking around without permits—are attacked by tigers every year.

After they lose their husbands to tigers, widows become much poorer. The measure of extreme poverty is living on $1 per day, but many of the widows and their children in the survey survived on just $6 per month. They frequently starved and ate foraged roots and scraps from better-off families. Because many of their husbands were killed while working illegally, they were not able to have funerals or publically mourn them for fear of punishment by authorities. The widows had few skills: Of 65 tiger widows in one survey, only three could read.

But the widows’ poverty has been amplified by another factor. In that region tigers are “not just an animal, they’re a god-like concept,” as Dr. Chowdhury put it, and tiger deaths are seen as signs of the wrath of the forest goddess Bonobibi. Families and communities shun tiger widows. One woman told the team that she was waiting until her children were grown to kill herself. “The meaning of life has changed completely after his death. The relatives became distant, [the] community looks down on us and excluded us from any social festival.” The psychiatric team diagnosed many of the widows with major depressive disorder and dysthymic disorder, and (using a series of questions) determined that the women’s scores on a test of stigma were approximately twice those of other widows in the area.

The idea that we can measure a conservation project by a simple metric—number of tigers—gets complicated when you look at those stigma scores of tiger widows. Saving tigers is a worthy goal, but it requires political will to make sure that the people who live close to the tigers have enough resources to keep them out of harm’s way. (And to make sure that measures to protect tigers, like requiring expensive permits, do not harm the poorest.) The plight of the tiger widows is just the top layer of a much larger problem: a lack of electricity, clean water, transportation, health care, or industry surrounding the conserved areas, where the World Bank estimates that 1,700 children under 5 died in 2008 alone from dirty water and poor sanitation. The charismatic tiger brings our attention to the tiger widows, of course, but the toll of filthy water is many times higher. Conservation needs a moral compass that considers human costs.

India has been debating how to better balance conservation and development for decades, and in 2006 the country passed legislation on the rights of forest people, but that was not extended to the Sunderbans. Since the study, Dr. Chowdhury says, some things have improved in the buffer zone, and a Bangladeshi group called LEDARS has helped many tiger widows on the other side of the border. In central India, a nonprofit called Satpuda works with more than 80 villages near tiger reserves to provide jobs, medical care, and education—in addition to doing tiger conservation. Dr. Chowdhury has a dream of training people in villages to do basic psychological counseling as part of a medical team, while encouraging highly skilled psychiatric professionals to visit during their vacations. But it will require a lot of political will to address the deep problems in the area: poverty, population growth, changing climate, and the human-tiger conflicts.

The Western environmental movement of the 1970s aimed to protect wild animals from humans, but the next environmental movement can’t succeed morally or practically unless it also protects and enhances the lives of the poorest humans. When we finally get down to combatting global warming, we also need to tackle development aggressively. This will mean facing up to the real-life tensions between the ideal of living “naturally” in nature and letting nature live.

Ironically, the best approach for humans may be to simply leave nature to the tigers. Indian academics estimate that if sea levels continue rising in the Sunderbans and strong tropical storms keep hitting the area, it’s going to be too dangerous for human beings to continue living there and as many as 13 million climate refugees from the mangroves in India and Bangladesh could flee. There’s a growing discussion that the better solution in the long run may be to move the humans to urban areas with electricity, clean water, jobs, and access to education.

Then, like us, these Sunderbans exiles may live in dense cities, work in high rises, chat long- distance, and eat strange manufactured foods. And the tigers can continue to roam wild. Somewhere out there.

The post The Campaign to Save India’s Tigers Ignores the Human Cost of Conservation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Before a full house at the Heard Museum, New York University historian Andrew Needham, author of Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest, suggested that Phoenix had an advantage when it comes to questions of urban sustainability. The city couldn’t have grown as it did after the Second World War without reckoning with its desert environment.

“Phoenix has thought about these issues longer than other cities have,” said Needham. “One of the reason why people ask the question, ‘Should Phoenix Exist?’ is because of the interaction between the built environment and the natural environment here.”

Needham and the other two panelists—former Phoenix Mayor and Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, and Sarah Porter, director of ASU’s Kyl Center for Water Policy at Morrison Institute—emphasized that Phoenix’s record of sustainable design is mixed, depending on whether the topic is power or water.

Because water was so scarce, and because Arizona was in competition with other places (like California) for it, Phoenix did better in building sustainable structures. “Arizona… created a water system that has several reinforcing infrastructures that can mitigate for failure. That can make Arizona a resilient place,” said Needham.

But power was plentiful, and so Phoenix came to rely on coal and coal-fired plants from the Navajo nation hundreds of miles to the north. That power has had all kinds of costs—for the environment and for the Navajos, who, Needham argued, haven’t gotten the full value of the energy they provided. It also fueled energy-intensive suburban development in Phoenix—and the idea of a growth that could continue forever.

That said, the panelists argued that Phoenix is, in many ways, “a marvel,” as Needham called it. Goddard, the former mayor, said, “we created an entirely new type of urban living.” But he added that the city needed to be more mature—with everything from new sources of energy (“the era of coal and the long-distance transmission is just about at an end,” he said) to landscaping that is more appropriate for a desert.

“We’re just now beginning to mature,” he said, adding. “Do we make a prototype of what a city is going to be? I think we do, so we better do it right.”

Porter, of the ASU Kyl Center for Water Policy, said that, “in comparison with other Western cities,” Phoenix got water right. She noted two timely anniversaries this year: the 30th anniversary of the very first Central Arizona Project water delivery, and the 35th anniversary of Arizona’s groundwater management act. (California, by contrast, only regulated groundwater for the first time last year).

Those two acts made the water of Phoenix and Tucson secure, but change is necessary to deal long-term with drought, Colorado River water shortages, and the impact of growth, panelists said. Porter said cities need to include water plans as part of their economic development plans; the city of Chandler, Arizona, has recent taken steps to create a tiered water system that gives the city the power to limit high-water users.

She said the changes in water and sustainability would require more engagement from people in Phoenix, from changes in their own behavior to pressuring elected officials. “When was the last time you asked a candidate for council his thoughts about the city water plan?” she asked the audience. “We’ve tended to leave water up to the experts, but we can’t do that anymore.”

Goddard said that legal standards for water would have to be rethought; water rights are tied to using water, which discourages conservation, he said. He added that Phoenix has an opportunity—provided by its transportation system—to rethink its land use policies that have encouraged low-density housing and sprawl.

“You don’t have to have a half acre backyard and a pickup truck to be happy,” he said, pausing for laughter. “I know that’s revolutionary in this community.”

The event’s moderator, Arizona Republic columnist Robert Robb, took that moment to pose what Phoenix scholar-lawyer-author Grady Gammage, Jr. has called “The Bob Robb Question”: Given that outdoor water usage is half of water use, and that projections of shortage over 25 years show excess demand, why not raise water prices until you eat up that excess demand?

Porter called that a good question. But Goddard noted the political peril; when Tucson raised water prices dramatically to encourage reductions of usage, “I think the entire council was recalled.”

During a question-and-answer session with the audience, many of the queries focused on the particulars of water, water conservation, and the practice of banking water in the ground. Is water spiritual? one questioner asked (It is, especially in a desert, said Goddard).

The panelists suggested that people should appreciate the wonders of the desert more. “We do not honor the most biodiverse desert in the world often enough,” said Porter.

“The Sonoran desert is very beautiful,” said Goddard, while the hills in New England are “redundant—they have all that extra green on them. We take our mountains pure.”

The post Phoenix Is a Survivor appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Muir was focused on the preservation of nature. “In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness,” he wrote. To him, a place like Yosemite was the “people’s cathedral” and he had faith that if people experienced it, they would become converts to the cause of preserving wilderness. He felt that the National Park system was the only sure way to protect forever these sacred places. The 52 million acres of National Park land are his gift to us and hope for both our future and the wilderness he cherished.

I’ve roamed many of the lands Muir set aside for us and have also taught about the American environmental movement and John Muir for a number of years. And I know that 21st-century America presents deep challenges to Muir’s legacy. In 1914, federal debt stood at 4 percent of gross domestic product. Today it is an astounding 70 percent. The capacity of the federal government to acquire and manage wilderness lands is diminishing and there seems little chance of a reversal. Since 2000, the portion of the federal budget allocated to the National Park Service declined by about 40 percent relative to other programs.

Muir preached to an overwhelmingly white elite that had the means to disengage from the cities when they desired, who worked the levers of power to save his beloved wild lands. Today, 95 percent of Californians now live in urban areas and whites have made up a minority of our state’s population since 1999. The numbers of visitors to our National Parks who are African-American or Latino are far underrepresented relative to their proportion of the U.S. population today. And some projections suggest that visitor numbers in general will decline despite a rise in total population over the next century. Membership in environmental advocacy groups such as the Sierra Club (which was founded by Muir) and the Nature Conservancy—which some hope can rescue park lands—is overwhelmingly white and aging. In the case of the Nature Conservancy, the current average age of new members is 62. The constituency for conservation as we have known it is melting away.

The author in the John Muir Wilderness. Photo courtesy of J.M. MacDonald.

If we want to preserve America’s appreciation of nature and support for wilderness preservation, we must focus on cities and those who live in them. What easier way is there to expose people to nature than right in their own backyards? As a boy, my parents took me to Yosemite and it made an impression, but I spent more time at home in San Jose playing along the banks of Penitencia Creek in Alum Rock Park and Coyote Creek in Kelley Park. All of this led to a love of nature and a life devoted to working on the environment.

If they work together, it can actually be affordable for cash-strapped agencies to set aside new land for conservation that’s accessible for an urban population. Take, as an example, the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. Through a joint partnership of federal, state, and local government and private parties, 450,000 acres have been put aside for conservation and recreational uses. This has been done incrementally over a 36-year period and costs are shared between the partners. Thanks to these efforts, mountain lions are again roaming the hills above Hollywood.

Entrance to the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. Photo courtesy of Glen MacDonald.

Millions of visitors also have easy access to diverse communities of plants, birds, mammals, and fish at places like San Bruno Mountain State Park in the midst of the San Francisco Peninsula, and the Guadalupe River Park Conservancy and Coyote Creek Trail that run through the very heart of Silicon Valley in San Jose. San Bruno Mountain is a refuge for endangered butterflies such as the San Bruno Elfin, Mission Blue, Callippe Silverspot, and Bay Checkerspot, while Chinook salmon migrate up the Guadalupe River and other charismatic species such as the California beaver, wild turkey, and grey fox have been newly sighted roaming San Jose’s riverside parks.

If you build it, will they always come? In 2013, the Santa Monica National Recreation Area had 633,000 visitors and San Bruno Mountain had just over 55,000. A good start, but these are urban areas with a combined total population of more than 20 million people. Clearly more needs to be done to engage people with the natural world they are part of—even in the midst of the city. Several organizations are leading the way, such as Outdoor Afro with its local nature hikes to the redwood groves above Oakland and the Santa Monica Mountains or the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles with its new three and a half acres of Nature Garden in the heart of L.A. and emphasis on developing young citizen scientists to study urban nature. Even Muir’s venerable Sierra Club has joined the effort with its Inner City Outings program.

By expanding on Muir’s vision to value and explore the nature that is right here in our cities, we just might be able to build a new constituency and preserve his legacy. In the 21st century the fate of nature in California is more likely to be determined by the young Latina girl who becomes fascinated by a butterfly in a reclaimed brownfield than by John Muir and the distant peaks of Yosemite.

The post The Next John Muir Is Chasing Butterflies in the Heart of L.A. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I have worked on California water issues for the past 15 years. I’ve noticed that, while people often disagree about water infrastructure and water rights and water policy, virtually everyone with whom I have come in contact agrees on at least one thing: Californians should have a better understanding of where our water comes from.

For too many, the fact that water comes out of their taps is the extent of their understanding. That’s not good enough, for two reasons. First, the state’s future depends on the ability of all of us to use water more efficiently and wisely. Second, the people of California themselves, through their votes, will play a major role in our water future.

Future generations could be better informed if the governor declared a California Water Awareness Day. Given the stakes, no student is too young to start on his or her water education. Here’s one way to do it.

Teachers, from kindergarten to eighth grade, as well as high school social studies teachers, would be required to dedicate one day each spring to water issues. Curriculum would be age appropriate and would cover the following:

1. The basics of the water cycle.
The massive evaporative engine of the Pacific Ocean fuels wet storms that move across California in the wintertime. As the ocean air mass meets land, the coastal range, and the Sierras, it is forced upward in elevation. As the air gains elevation it cools—and the water vapor condenses out in the form of rain and snow. Much of the moisture seeps into the ground slowly and collects in groundwater basins. Some collects in our rivers, streams, and lakes. And some ultimately flows back into the ocean, completing the cycle.

2. Our Mediterranean climate
Mediterranean climate patterns, and the ocean currents that produce them, exist in only a few parts of the world—including ours. This is the reason California has such severe wet and dry cycles. Our wet months run from late October to May. From June to September, very little (if any) rain falls. In addition to this annual dry period, natural drought cycles that last several years are common. Today’s drought, one of the most severe on record, is a part of our regular hydrologic condition in California. Understanding droughts and how to respond to them are important skills for Californians.

3. Our water management system, and the importance of time
Because all of our rain comes in the winter months, and most of our water use for agriculture and irrigation occurs in the summer, California has built a massive water infrastructure system to store the winter runoff and deliver it later in the year. This system also moves water from north to south because most of the state’s rainfall hits in the north, and most of our population is in the south. California also imports water from the Colorado River.

The California Awareness Water Day course would describe the overall water balance for our state and its water infrastructure, and would discuss the challenges we face in ensuring a safe and reliable water supply. The ecological impacts of this water infrastructure would be discussed, with an emphasis on issues related to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the Colorado River.

Teachers would cover regionally specific issues, including the sources of local water supplies and how students and their families can use water wisely and conserve. Students would also learn how climate change and population growth will further challenge an already stressed system—a lesson that could be taught in such a way as to inspire bright young minds to learn more and contribute solutions.

Over many years, an emphasis on water would ensure that Californians have a better understanding of their water supply—and better equip them to make decisions about how to manage that supply. As the current drought highlights the need for better water management, it’s time for our leaders to launch a California Water Awareness Day so that future generations are better prepared to take on the challenge.

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