California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA

NEWSROOM

Headline

SoCal History Monday: A Deep Dive Into The SoCal Waters Of Aqueducts, Aquifers And Underground Basins

Over the past several centuries, Los Angeles has gone from a small farming community to one of the world’s biggest metropolises. In the early days, farming communities were able to reply on surface water from lakes and rivers. But as the population grew, that changed. We needed more water so we began to tap into groundwater resources, which at times were run dry by a lack of regulation. As we began to pave over much the natural land, these underground basins had no way to replenish from rainwater that would otherwise seep into the earth. Today, LA residents rely on a complex and highly managed system of aqueducts, wells, rivers and basins. Joining us today on AirTalk is Greg Pierce, director of UCLA’s Water Resources Group and Stephanie Pincetl, professor at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

download

Blog

Fall 2023 musings about pursuing a PhD from Professor Stephanie Pincetl

It has been interesting talking to prospective PhD students. Clearly motivated to engage with the issues of environment and increasingly that of environmental justice, it seems most wish to be able to measure impacts in order to better describe their effects on environmental justice communities. Few, if any, ask the why questions, questions about how these situations arise, about the structuring forces that created inequalities and profoundly unequal environmental impacts involving the poisoning of communities.

UCLALaKretzHall

Headline

Opinion: How wildfires in Algeria and California reveal colonial origins of the ‘Mediterranean climate’ — Stephanie Pincetl in the LA Times

It’s time now, though, we recognize that Algerian landscapes, like those of California, are colonial ones. These landscapes were transformed to fit an European idea of Mediterranean-ness. The consequences of this misunderstanding of natural ecosystems as preserved by Indigenous peoples, and of the damage inflicted in these regions are now evident in the wildfires in North Africa.

Algeria fire ap

Headline

Cities’ thirst nearly killed these California lakes. Not so fast, said our epic wet winter. Dr. Pincetl quoted in the LA Times.

Stephanie Pincetl, a professor at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, told me that she also sees positives to this wetter reality. “We thought we could overpower nature and reengineer it with no consequences. We are seeing that that is not true over time, and I think the resurgence of these lakes is another example of that. Maybe going forward, we should be a little more respectful and find ways to accommodate, to at least some degree, the coming back of these water bodies, and what they mean, not only spiritually and for subsistence for Native peoples, but that they offer extraordinarily valuable habitat and offer ways to recharge groundwater — a lot of important reasons why they should be allowed to persist.”

PG&E crews travel by airboat in June to decommission power poles in a flooded pistachio orchard in Corcoran, Calif., which lies in the Tulare Basin. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)