Water Resources

Fellows Jim Downing (Executive Editor) and Meredith Niles (Guest Editor) collaborated on a special issue of California Agriculture focused on the implications of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA, the package of bills signed into law by California Gov. Jerry Brown in September 2014. Niles and Fellow Esther Conrad also have articles in the issue.

Vermont has a problem. The state is $1.2 billion short of the funding it will need to meet federal targets for reducing pollution in state waterways. To solve that problem, Gov. Phil Scott suggested a creative solution last week in his budget address: Turning the pollutant into a commodity and selling it out of state. The pollutant is phosphorus, a primary ingredient of fertilizer, which is widely used in farming. ...

YOU HAVE NO real way of knowing if your town, your family, or your children face the kind of water contamination that exposed everyone in Flint, Michigan, to lead poisoning. Not because Flint is an outlier–it may, in fact, be the norm—but because no one has enough data to say for sure. ...

Rising sea levels, as well as droughts and earthquakes, threaten the levees protecting the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta, which supplies 25 million Californians with fresh water. But the state’s solution isn’t to build higher but lower—150 ft below the earth.

Here are 20 ideas that could fix L.A. ... 12. Exhume our creeks.

“Keep navigable waters clean.” It sounds straightforward, but in practice it’s anything but. For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency has struggled with that task, after the Clean Water Act in 1972 gave them the authority to regulate “navigable waters.” But “navigable” doesn’t cover small streams and wetlands, and water in those areas has a habit of flowing downhill into other, larger bodies of water. Whether the EPA could regulate all that water before it reached someplace navigable was never clear.

From sessions on climate action and solid waste to ocean acidification and green infrastructure, the 2017 Maine Sustainability & Water Conference on Thursday, March 30 at the Augusta Civic Center will feature an expanded agenda on urgent topics affecting Maine, New England, the country, and the globe.

Environmental regulations save our country money, provide jobs, and ensure the health of all animals, plants and the humans who see clean air, water and soil as an American right. The EPA needs a leader who will defend that right, write Dianne Kopec and Fellow Aram Calhoun.