reinvention

This blog, much like its owner, has recently undergone yet another wholesale reinvention. In my latest incarnation, I'm a newly minted lawyer not yet in possession of either a license to practice law or any idea what the hell I'll be doing with my life after I take the Texas Bar Exam next month. (I won't even know if I passed until some point in November.)

What I'd like to do is something in water law, which ended up being one of my two areas of expertise in law school. As you may have heard, California is at present in the midst of what is likely its worst drought ever. On the one hand, many of its residents are fundamentally reassessing what it all means in the larger scheme of things, as it's become amply clear that California cannot possibly continue with its status quo -- one in which, among scores of other problems, most of the residents of its state capital don't even have water meters, and wealthy residents with sizable lawns react to the governor's mandate of a 25 percent across-the-board reduction in water use by using even more water than before. Meanwhile, here in Austin -- which only in the past few weeks was rescued from its four-year drought by a days-long (weeks-long?) "rain bomb" that hurt nearly as much as it helped -- we've long had mandatory lawn-watering restrictions (once a week, and only at night, for the past several years) and an annual "shaming" ritual of the ten biggest residential water-wasters. (I assume it will come as no surprise that Austin's most infamous cheater repeatedly made the list.) The city is second only to Santa Fe in what I suppose one could call "hydrological progressivism.

In any event, California needs help, to state the obvious, and what many people don't understand is that its water problems are rooted almost entirely in law. While yes, obviously a lack of precipitation coupled with climate change-related snowpack depletion in the Sierra Nevada range has played a role, the state has countless fundamental problems that very little to do with rain levels; one of them is the abjectly asinine idea of encouraging widespread farming in an area that only gets 10 inches of rain per year. Worse, said farming includes growing almonds, one of the most water-intensive crops commonly grown. Worse still, California has no controls whatsoever on usage of subterranean aquifer water, so the farmers whose land is parched are quite literally sucking them dry -- solely to keep producing bullshit like almonds! So: we'll see what, if anything, I can do to help. I've put out a few feelers, but I'm kinda in a holding pattern until I at least take the bar (at the end of July).

The most perverse part of California's water problems, however, may be the fact that Texas -- one of the most notorious abusers of the American environment on whole -- has a vastly more progressive system of water management! Unlike California, we have various groundwater conservation districts and river authorities covering nearly every inch of the state ... well, except for an area in suburban Austin that was mistakenly left out of these districts -- resulting in an ongoing "water war" -- but that's a long story, and this blog entry has already gone on long enough.

Anyway, the next year or so will undoubtedly include some rather seismic changes in my life, so stay tuned if you want to hear all about it. It won't all be glamorous international travel and whatnot -- though I say that having recently returned from Dubai (another long story) . . . -- but I already know at least one truth about my time on this third rock from the sun: for some reason it almost always manages to stay interesting. (In good ways and bad.)