Vegetable roof

Check out this awesome flickr set of a friend's friend's very verdant rooftop garden in Chicago. Some great ideas and some really beautiful produce.

full sun + great air circulation + exceedingly inventive methods for keeping plants from getting thirsty = spectacular results

Once I get a rooftop that I can use, I will be referring to these pages again...

Ghost net retrieval

A great photoessay on fishing net removal efforts in Washington state:

Musings on urban blight

First, a photographer interested in documenting the Gowanus Canal, something that I had thought about doing before I realized he'd already done it. I don't have the evidence with me here on this computer, but the similarity in some of the pictures we've taken is kind of eerie.

Second, SF-based designers who want to make something of their city's empty lots. Kind of reminds me of my backyard garden.

Clean water and culture

Two notes for today:

First, last night I was lucky enough to attend an artist's talk/book launch party hosted at the Aperture gallery and celebrating the release of Eirik Johnson's second monograph, Sawdust Mountain.  For four years, Eirik photographed in Washington, Oregon, and northern California, working to elucidate the complicated and fragile relationships between the region's ecology, industry, and individuals that harvest and/or preserve natural resources.  The images paint beautiful, desperate portraits of a region in transition and inherently reference water (whether they depict a fisherman cleaning a slamon along the Sol Duc River or a fresh clearcut in Nemah, Washington).  Take some time and check them out here.

Second, I haven't been following the moves of the Clean Water Restoration Act particularly closely, but I did notice today that, late last week, Ducks Unlimited came out with a statement of support for the Act.  In addition, the Grand Junction Sentinel reported Monday that other groups, including Trout Unlimited and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership have expressed similar support.  Dissent remains among the sportsman community (here, for example), but the support of organizations like DU, TU, and TRCP is crucial, especially since many farmers' organizations that have expressed concern with the bill (here, here, and here, for example) are located in regions where organizations like DU and TU are most active (check out DU priority regions here, and TU's conservation projects here, for example).  For the latest on the CWRA, go here.

Of conflict and culture

California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is, in many ways, a useful arena in which to study the water struggles that may face the world in coming decades.  The Delta and its water are subject to competing interests: while the ecosystem supports sensitive endemic species and an array of other ecologically- and commercially-important organisms, agricultural interests and water resource management agencies seek to utilize the system to mitigate California’s dry climate and promote economic growth.  Shifting patterns of precipitation and climate change complicate the situation.  The competition for water, exotic species invasion, widespread pesticide use, and increases in stormwater runoff has caused myriad ecological impacts, including the listing of the delta smelt as a federally-threatened species.  The result has been a protracted and complicated legal battle, and pieces included in Friday's San Francisco Chronicle and Sacramento Bee suggest that despite a resolution reached in December 2008 to reduce water exports, the fight for water is not yet over.

On a slightly different, but related, note photographer Lukas Felzmann has examined California's inland waterways, wetlands, fields, and industrial agriculture landscapes from an interesting perspective.  Check out a review of, and images from, the resulting book here and order it here.  It is phenomenal.