To close out 2015, we've asked our local neighborhood writers to choose their favorite stories from the past year, and to explain why they loved them so.
Today, we hear from Upper Haight editor Camden Avery.
My favorite story from this year was the piece on the California drought and its impacts on (and from) San Francisco. I think one of the great things about San Francisco is that it exists largely as this sort of political or economic island, but in this case it was important to identify the ways that San Francisco's environmental behavior participates in the California landscape and depends on it, rather than the ways in which it sits apart. It's so easy to talk about San Francisco as the apex or the exception to California at large, even when we know we're doing it, but that makes it all the more important to be able to interrupt that dream once in a while and make ourselves accountable for, say, the city's environmental policy.
Below is an excerpt from the original story, published on May 3rd, 2015.
The water still flows down from the shrinking shores of Hetch Hetchy to the sprinkler-fed lawns of San Francisco city parks. But after the fourth year of little rain and almost no snow, California is going into a state of emergency.
Governor Jerry Brown has ordered a mandatory 25 percent statewide reduction in residential water use.
Snowpack in the Sierras, which feeds California's surface water for the remainder of the year, was this April at an all-time low in recorded history, lower even than the faltering snowpack concurrent with the 1977 drought in California ...
Continue reading Camden's favorite story of 2015, "Is San Francisco Part Of California's Water Crisis?"
