Tomgram: Chip Ward, Leave It to Beaver(s)

If you want to be unnerved, just pay a visit to the U.S. Drought Monitor and check out its map of the American West with almost all of California stained the deep, distressing shades of red that indicate either “extreme” or “exceptional” drought. In other words, it could hardly be worse. California is now in its third year of drought, with no end in sight; state agricultural losses are estimated at $2.2 billion for 2014 alone; most of its reservoirs are less than half full; the Colorado River basin, which supplies water to "about 40 million people and 4 million acres of farmland in seven states," including California, is compromised; and California's first six months of 2014 have been the “hottest ever... nearly five degrees warmer than the twentieth century average.” The drought’s arms extend north through Oregon ("severe&quot into Washington, where it’s already been the fire season from hell -- and it’s just beginning. They also reach east through Nevada as far as Utah and straight across the Southwest in various shades of yellow, orange, and deep red.

Tom Dispatch’s western contingent, environmentalists Chip Ward and William deBuys, have had the stresses of climate change, rising heat, drought, wildfires, desertification, and someday the possible abandonment of parts of the Southwest on their minds (and so on the minds of TD readers) for years now. These days, the chickens are coming home to roost -- but not, it seems, the beavers. Ward, a Utah environmentalist and the former assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library System, has long focused not just on how our American world is being ravaged, but on how to protect and restore it. In today’s post, he offers a reminder that sometimes such restoration can come in small packages and that even the most modest of natural geo-engineering can disturb vested interests. Tom


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