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Drought deepens South Africa’s malaise
Posted by New York Times: Norimitsu Onishi on December 27th, 2015
New York Times: Under a midmorning sun that augured punishing heat later in the day, a handful of cows stood still inside a small pen, their ribs protruding. Too weak to reach the nearest grassy field some miles away, some munched on tall grass that their owner had cut from a strip of land along the highway, in a desperate attempt to save his cattle from the drought afflicting the land.
The owner, T. J. Koee — a former miner and a full-time cattle farmer for the past 16 years — listed the drought’s toll this...
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In California, the Snow Tells the Future for the Water Supply
Posted by New York Times: Norimitsu Onishi on February 8th, 2013
New York Times: Along Highway 50 in the Sierra Nevada, elevation 6,820 feet, a California winter ritual unfolded here on a recent morning. In the snow-blanketed meadow of a local homeowner’s backyard, reporters representing news organizations from across the state followed a man on skis who kept plunging an aluminum tube into the snow. Leading the pack was Frank Gehrke, California’s chief snow surveyor, the man responsible for measuring the Sierra Nevada’s snowpack, the source of a third of this state’s water supply....
Vast Oil Reserve in California May Now Be Within Reach, and Battle Heats Up
Posted by New York Times: Norimitsu Onishi on February 4th, 2013
New York Times: Secure in this state’s history and mythology, the venerable Midway-Sunset oil field near here keeps producing crude more than a century after Southern California’s oil boom. Many of its bobbing pump jacks are relatively short, a telltale sign of the shallowness of the wells and the ease of extracting their prize. But away from this forest of pump jacks on a flat, brown landscape, a road snakes up into nearby hills that are largely untouched — save for a handful of exploratory wells pumping oil from...
United States: Hetch Hetchy Valley Measure Pits Bay Area Against Environmentalists
Posted by New York Times: Norimitsu Onishi on September 10th, 2012
New York Times: It is one of the oldest environmental battles in the United States, and it involves one of the country’s most famous national parks, one of its most liberal cities, leaders of Silicon Valley and a perennial source of conflict in California: water. In 1913, Congress approved the construction of a dam and an eight-mile-long reservoir, called Hetch Hetchy, in the northwest corner of Yosemite National Park to supply cheap water to San Francisco. But the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, which submerged a valley...
In Rush to Find Gold, Indonesians Defy Dangers
Posted by New York Times: Norimitsu Onishi on July 8th, 2011
New York Times: On an otherwise verdant and untouched mountain, a patch of orange and blue tarpaulin stood out incongruously near the summit, the telltale sign of an illegal gold mine. The footpath leading there, freshly carved out of the thick bush and pockmarked with stones, suggested that the mine was new. Women with 50-pound sacks of rocks on their heads clambered down the path, carrying the loads to a nearby village where they would be crushed by hand and by machine, mixed with water and mercury, in a search...