https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/opinion/college-board-sat-ap.html
“Every student needs to understand that, as Coleman put it, “our country was argued into existence — and that is the first thing that binds us — but also has some of the tensions that divide us. So we thought, ‘What can we do to help replace the jeering with productive conversation?’”
Thomas Friedman
Love a river story:
Gen. George Washington needed a great idea. He got it from an English-born patriot named Thomas Machin.
Machin knew water. He had been an apprentice canal builder in England, and, as a captain in an artillery company he was called by Washington to help defend the river at the Hudson Highlands. The river was narrow there, and since ancient times armies had placed sharpened logs, scuttled ships, and other debris in a narrows to block passage. But here the river was too deep. Machin had his a-ha moment: Why not forge an iron chain and float it across the river, anchoring it at either shore?
https://www.americanrivers.org/2018/04/most-endangered-rivers-victory-washingtons-skykomish-river/
“This week, after seven years of opposition to a hydropower proposal put forth by the Snohomish County Public Utility District (SnoPUD) for the South Fork Skykomish River, local activists, tribes, paddlers, river recreationists, and anglers got some good news at the April 10 SnoPUD meeting, when the SnoPUD commission and staff agreed to cancel the Sunset Falls hydropower project and request the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to close the docket on the current application.”
Finally! Falls would have been reduced to a trickle if hydro project approved.
Look like IJC could rectify this somehow with the state of NY.
“It’s a big deal,” said Dawn Wellman, sector manager for environmental health and remediation at the national lab in Richland. “At a scaled version we have done what they will do at full scale at Hanford.”
The vitrification plant — or Waste Treatment Plant — at the Hanford nuclear reservation has been under construction since 2002, with a court-ordered deadline of 2023 to start treating some of the 56 million gallons of radioactive waste in underground tanks.
Much of the waste, which is left from the past production of plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program, is planned to be vitrified, or turned into a solid glass form for disposal.”
“The West Lake Landfill contains thousands of tons of radioactive material from the World War II-era Manhattan Project that was dumped at the site in the 1970s, where it has languished ever since amid other waste. The latest plan calls for excavating 70 percent of the radioactive waste from the site — a far cry from a 2008 solution proposed by the George W. Bush administration to cover and monitor the waste.“
https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/paleo-bell-river-north-americas-vanished-amazon
A generalized reconstruction of Paleo-Bell River drainage and evolution of other major rivers in western and northern North America, after James Sears and others. By the Miocene, the Paleo-Bell River Basin reached its greatest extent. Rifts like the Rio Grande and Great Basin created an ancestral Colorado River that was yet to establish a course to the Pacific (location 1). Instead, it flowed north from the Grand Canyon region through structurally controlled valleys and into the larger Paleo-Bell River Basin via an ancestral Yellowstone River, whose gravels cap the Cypress Hills. This route was blocked by eruptions of lava in the Snake River Plain (location 2) associated with the Yellowstone Hot Spot. Repeated glaciation starting about 2.6 million years ago diverted north-flowing rivers like the Paleo-Yellowstone along ice sheet margins (location 3) to form the Missouri River. The ice sheets also disrupted the Paleo-Bell River Basin, causing river sedimentation to cease in the Saglek Basin. The Mackenzie River Basin was created, leaving the Saskatchewan/Nelson River Basin as the last remnant of North America’s Amazon. Credit: K. Cantner, AGI and Lionel Jackson, based on Sears, GSA Today, 2013.
“The complex, unique geology of the Los Angeles Basin, with its interlocking and overlapping ridges and valleys, resulted in a wildly unpredictable river that often sent torrents of water tearing over its banks.
Not long after California became a state in 1851, the water needs of a booming population stressed the Los Angeles River to its breaking point. Meanwhile, the fitful river endangered the settlements multiplying throughout the floodplain. After catastrophic floods in 1914, 1934, and 1938, the city, at the recommendation of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, agreed to straighten the riverbed and pave it with concrete, deracinating whatever plant and animal wildlife was left. A complex of aqueducts, dams, and reservoirs was built to import most of the city’s water; today, it delivers about 430 million gallons daily.”
Restoration of this watershed is a priority to many who live in and around LA.
Lake Levels 