Category: Community_Land_Water_CN NEWS_ARCHIVE

Just eight weeks after I bought a place in the Virginia countryside, I was busted by the light police. First came an email from somebody who lives across the valley from me. “Your new place has a lot of intense white, all-night exterior illumination that I don’t recall before,” he wrote. “From our front windows, it sort of looks like the scene in ‘E.T.’ where the spaceship has landed.”

A few miles west of San Diego is a stretch of ocean that’s rather unremarkable from the surface. The water is cold and blue. There’s some green seaweed peeking out.

Virginia doesn’t have a megadrought like some parts of the United States, but it has water problems all the same: Homes and businesses in the Hampton Roads region, in the southeastern corner of the state, are drawing groundwater faster than it can be replenished. The situation has gotten so bad that the earth is sinking in some places.

Last year, legislators in Washington state passed a law to bolster the urban forestry work of the Department of Natural Resources. The agency’s urban and community forestry program, which had just two staffers in 2020, will grow to nine positions once the department finalizes new hires.
Those new staffers, along with a new state-funded grant program, will supercharge the department’s efforts to inventory tree canopy in Washington’s communities, help cities maintain their trees and determine where to plant new ones.

The Klamath Irrigation District in Southern Oregon plans to defy a U.S. government order issued last week for a halt to water deliveries to farmers in the drought-stricken basin.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation manages the Klamath Project, which includes Klamath Irrigation District and serves 266 square miles (689 square kilometers) of farmland around the Oregon-California border. A limited allocation of water was allowed for irrigators from Upper Klamath Lake this year because of extreme drought.

States in the Colorado River basin are scrambling to propose steep cuts in the water they’ll use from the river next year, in response to a call by the federal government for immediate, drastic efforts to keep the river’s main storage reservoirs from reaching critically low levels.

When Don and Lynn Ireland moved to Cherry Creek 3, they were a bit frustrated by the fact that the entire community shared one single water meter. This meant everyone was responsible for the community’s full bill. The two began to look into why so much water was being used and sought to encourage water conservation within their community. Their chief aim was to replace the turf lawns and juniper plants that covered the landscape with native plants. They also planned to build a community garden, replacing a large amount of turfgrass.

Nauru, lying about halfway across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean between Australia and Hawaii, is the world’s smallest island nation. But in the emerging industry of deep-sea mining, it punches far above its weight.

Climate scientists and marine advocates are calling on governments worldwide to look beyond green policymaking when it comes to climate change. They say a critical shade is missing in the fight against global warming.

Earth’s ongoing climate crisis has put a trio of critical stony coral species on a path towards an uncertain future that could have dire ramifications for their underwater biodomes, according to new research released Monday.