MONTCLAIRThe new water conservation education center couldn’t have come at a better time.

As California officials spread the message of water conservation in a time of drought, local water agencies hope the center may further drive the message home.

The new Water Conservation Campus, at Chino Basin Water Conservation District headquarters in Montclair, held its grand opening last weekend. Officials hope the new center, 4594 San Bernardino St., will be a place for people, local leaders and business to learn about new landscaping techniques and water conservation.

“We did a strategic plan, that concluded in 2008, and at the conclusion of the strategic plan, we said that if we were really going to promote true water conservation and change people’s habits, we’re going to have to put our money where our mouth is and show people what can be done and not just demonstrate it,” said Eunice Ulloa, general manager of the Chino Basin Water Conservation District.

The San Bernardino County special district has been delivering water collected in catch basins back into the Chino Basin underground aquifer for more than 60 years. The new $8 million campus expands upon a district office facility built in 1991 and includes a new education center for children, a maintenance building, a landscape demonstration garden.

“For the first 40 years, we spent most of our time focused on basins, and then we needed to get a bigger office, so this is the second generation office,” said Geoffrey Vanden Huevel, a district board member. “We began to say we need to begin to educate the public to have a different water ethic because the way we have been doing things is not sustainable.”

Vanden Huevel said California is in constant drought, “we’ve got to recognize we’re in a different environment.”

“We started with a demonstration garden to demonstrate to people how to save water and the idea is that over time, most of the water bill for homeowners is spent on landscaping,” he said. “That’s where the savings could come from.”

District officials said the main campus building is 40 percent more energy-efficient than state requirements. The building includes an exhibit space where people can learn how to save water.

The site is irrigated with recycled water, uses permeable asphalt and concrete designed for 100 percent water retention and percolation, and has a 42 kilowatt voltaic solar array that provides power to the much of the facility.

The district operates through the use of county property taxes. Money from the sale of unused catch basin property 10 years ago was used to pay for the construction of the new facility.

Ulloa has invited schools to bring their students to the center to learn about water conservation, with children being good ambassadors of the knowledge back to their parents. She’s also invited local businesses, such as the Lewis Group of Companies to hold their company meetings at the center.

“We realize we can’t keep doing business the way we’ve done in our past,” said Randall Lewis, principal of the Lewis Group of Companies, a major developer in the region. “If we don’t change the way we run our businesses and plan for apartments and shopping centers, we’re going to run out of water.”

Lewis, speaking at the grand opening of the center on Saturday, encouraged other business owners to hold their executive meetings at the center.

“Have your group meetings here,” Lewis told a large crowd, that included business owners and state and local elected officials. “It would be the best way to share the (water conservation) ideas with your organizations.”

Information: call 909-626-2711, or visit www.cbwcd.org

Does this week’s winter weather have you looking forward to spring?

The 48th Annual Omaha Home Garden Expo may help to cure your winter blues. The expo unites with the Omaha Lawn, Flower and Patio Show to showcase the latest products and services for the home – inside and out.

The event begins today and continues through Sunday at CenturyLink Center Omaha. The exhibits will be open from 5-9 p.m. today, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

Admission is $8 for adults, $4 for children 12 and under, and free for children under 5.

Visitors to the show will find a wide variety of products and do-it-yourself ideas, interior decorating trends, contractor services, energy-saving products, patio furniture, lawn and garden equipment, room additions, windows and doors, siding, roofing, fireplaces, bathrooms, kitchens and more.

Landscaping ideas are also part of the show. There will be a showcase of locally grown plants and products made in the Omaha area, and a front yard landscape display that educates homeowners on building a beautiful and functional landscape.

If you have gardening questions, you can visit the “Ask the Master Gardener” answer desk. The show’s Garden Theater will have informative programs on a variety of gardening topics.

This year’s featured celebrity entertainment includes George Stella, also known as “The Good Carb Chef.” He will appear on stage at 7 p.m. today and 2 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Friday.

Stella, who you may have seen on the Food Network or Dr. Oz, is a best-selling author and chef who will demonstrate fresh foods and secret recipes for low carb diets.

Stella lost 265 pounds in the late 1990s. His wife and two sons followed his weight loss by losing a combined 560 pounds by adopting a low-carb diet. He has shared his family diet secrets through a series of best-selling cookbooks, most recently, “Real Food, Real Easy.”

HGTV stars Amy Matthews and Jared Walker Dostie also will appear at the show.

Matthews is host of HGTV’s “Renovation Raiders” as well as DIY Network’s “Sweat Equity” and “This New House.” She will share design ideas and do-it-yourself tips to take rooms from drab to fab. Her presentations will be at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 2 p.m. Saturday.

Walker Dostie is a carpenter on HGTV’s “Rate My Space” and “Mom Caves.” He will present new home design trends, and custom furniture and carpentry ideas at 6 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. He will soon by featured on a new show to launch on the Food Network called “Save My Bakery.” He will help give bakeries a makeover from the inside out.

Guests to the show also can take in musical entertainment near the fountain café and food court.

Belles Whistles, an acoustic country duo, will play from 4:30-8:30 p.m. Friday and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. Kim Eames will play an acoustic mix from 5-8:30 p.m. today and noon to 4 p.m. Friday. The Steve Thornburg Group will play jazz and blues from 3:30-7 p.m. Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday.

Other show attractions will include an exotic animal show and a kid zone with inflatables, face painting, balloons and more. Show times for the exotic animal show are 7:30 p.m. today, 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. Friday, 1:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. Saturday, and 1:30 p.m. Sunday.

Despite recent sporadic rain, California is still in the worst extended drought in its brief recorded history. If more storms do not arrive, the old saying that California could withstand two droughts — but never three — will be tested for the first time in memory.

There is little snow in the state’s towering Sierra Nevada mountains, the source of much of the surface water that supplies the state’s populated center and south. The vast Central Valley aquifer is being tapped as never before, as farms and municipalities deepen wells and boost pump size. Too many straws are now competing to suck out the last drops at the bottom of the collective glass. 

The vast 4-million-acre farming belt along the west side of the Central Valley is slowly drying up. Unlike valley agriculture to the east, which still has a viable aquifer, these huge farms depend entirely on surface water deliveries from the distant and usually wet northern part of the state. So if the drought continues, billions of dollars of Westside orchards and vineyards will die, row cropland will lay fallow, and farm-supported small towns will likewise dry up.

There is a terrible irony to all this. Never have California farm prices been higher, given huge Pacific export demand. Never have California farmers been more savvy in saving water to produce record harvests of nutritious, clean, and safe food. And never has farming been so central to a state suffering from the aftershocks of a housing collapse, chronic high unemployment, overregulation, and the nation’s highest sales, income, and gas taxes.

Yet there are really two droughts — nature’s and its man-made twin. In the early 1980s, when the state had not much more than half its current population, an affluent coastal corridor convinced itself that nirvana was possible, given the coastal world-class universities, the new dot.com riches of Silicon Valley, the year-round temperate weather, and the booming entertainment, tourism, and wine industries.

Apparently, Pacific-corridor residents from San Diego to Berkeley had acquired the affluence not to worry so much about the old Neanderthal concerns like keeping up freeways and airports — and their parents’ brilliantly designed system of canals, reservoirs, and dams that had turned their state from a natural desert into a man-made paradise. They have become similar to the rarified Eloi of science-fiction writer H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, who live dreamy existences without any clue how to supply their own daily necessities.

Californians have not built a major reservoir since the New Melones Dam more than 30 years ago. As the state subsequently added almost 20 million people, it assumed that it was exempt from creating any more “unnatural” Sierra lakes and canals to store precious water during California’s rarer wet and snow-filled years.

Then, short-sightedness soon became conceit. Green utopians went further and demanded that an ailing three-inch bait fish in the San Francisco delta receive more fresh oxygenated water. In the last five years, they have successfully gone to court to force millions of acre-feet of contracted irrigation water to be diverted from farms to flow freely out to sea.

Others had even grander ideas of having salmon again in their central rivers, as they recalled fishing stories of their ancestors from when the state population was a fifth of its present size and farming a fraction of its present acreage. So they too sued to divert even more water to the sea in hopes of having game fish swim from the Pacific Ocean up to arid Fresno County on their way to the supposedly ancestral Sierra spawning grounds.

The wages of both nature’s drought and human folly are coming due. Unless it rains or snows in biblical fashion in the next 60 days, we could see surreal things in California — towns without water, farms reverting to scrub, majestic parks with dead landscaping — fit for Hollywood’s disaster movies.

Instead of an adult state with millions of acre-feet stored in new reservoirs, California is still an adolescent culture that believes that it has the right to live as if this were the age of the romantic 19th-century naturalist John Muir — amid a teeming 40-million-person 21st-century megalopolis.

The California disease is characteristic of comfortable postmodern societies that forget the sources of their original wealth. The state may have the most extensive reserves of gas and oil in the nation, the largest number of cars on the road — and the greatest resistance to drilling for fuel beneath its collective feet. After last summer’s forest fires wiped out a billion board feet of timber, we are still arguing over whether loggers will be allowed to salvage such precious lumber, or instead should let it rot to enhance beetle and woodpecker populations.

In 2014, nature yet again reminded California just how fragile — and often pretentious — a place it has become.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book is The Savior Generals, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books. You can reach him by e-mailing [email protected]. © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

LIHUE — Fifteen-year-old Princeville resident Talia Abrams has a vision not only for Kauai, but the entire state and beyond — edible landscapes in public places.

Not in a Willy-Wonka’s-chocolate-factory, made-entirely-of-sweets type of way. Abrams wants them to be nutritious, delicious, sustainable and for everyone.

“I just want edible landscape to be spread out all over,” she said. “If you’re hungry and you want healthy food it would just be around everywhere.”

The young lady’s vision is being supported by nearly half of the 51 members of the state House of Representatives.

As a result of Abrams’ motivation and hard work, a bill — one she wrote at age 14 — aimed at establishing a community food forest program in the state Department of Land and Natural Resources is moving through the House.

And Abrams, a lifelong home-school student and vegetarian, said she couldn’t be more excited.

House Bill 2177 was introduced last month by Rep. Derek Kawakami, D-Wailua-Haena, and has been co-sponsored by 23 other House representatives, including Kauai Reps. Dee Morikawa, D-Koloa-Niihau, and Jimmy Tokioka, D-Koloa-Wailua.

Kawakami said he was approached by Abrams last session about her interest in learning more about the legislative process and how to get started on a bill that would allow DLNR to create a program much like what has been implemented in Kalihiwai.

“She worked hard in drafting a bill and we were more than happy to introduce the bill on her behalf,” Kawakami wrote in an email. “In the future, we will be working with more schools in similar efforts. Not only do some of the best ideas come from our keiki but it is a great way to introduce and involve them in civics.”

The Kalihiwai Food Forest covers two acres on Kauai’s North Shore and boasts thousands of root, ground, shrub and tree plantings. The one-year-old project is a collaboration between Malama Kauai and Regenerations International Botanical Gardens.

If passed, the measure would appropriate funds and require the DLNR to “work collaboratively with local government and community organizations to provide sources of healthy food statewide.”

“Community and urban gardens, concepts which have been adopted statutorily in states like New York, California, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Maine, may provide a solution to the problem of increasing food costs and the dwindling availability of undeveloped land,” the bill states.

“By identifying and utilizing public lands, particularly those near existing community gathering places such as parks and community centers, to create community food forests that adopt edible landscaping concepts, the State may be able to provide additional sources of low- or no-cost food to residents, while also utilizing developed land for community sustainability purposes.”

The act would go into effect July 1.

On Wednesday, the House Committee on Water and Land voted 9-0 that the measure be passed with minor amendments. The bill now moves on to the House Committee on Finance, its final referral before it could move on to the House floor.  

The background

Talia, the daughter of Ernest and Meryl Abrams of Princeville, said the idea came to her when she was listening to a radio show about a low-income family. With only $12 per day to spend on food, the family was forced to eat cheap meals at fast food restaurants.

“I decided I really wanted to do something,” she said.

Last year, at age 14, she drafted the bill for an assignment prior to attending the Christian non-profit TeenPact Leadership School in Honolulu. Later, she took the bill directly to Kawakami, who promised her he would introduce it during this year’s legislative session.

“He was really interested in it,” she recalled.

North Shore resident and teacher Felicia Cowden, who Abrams described as a “mentor,” said the bill is designed to adapt to any community, with the community deciding what’s best for its own needs.

“It can be as small or as big as the community grows it to be,” she said. “Every community would have its own influence on the size, the style, the funding.”

Cowden said the food forests could also be used for grief counseling, with individuals or families planting and caring for a tree in honor of a lost loved one. Or, portions of an area — for example, the bike path along Kauai’s Eastside — could be adopted and lined with fruit-bearing trees.

“A lot of places around, they have trees that are completely useless,” Abrams said. “But if they could just be fruit trees, or native ones or edible, then I think it would help us all out.”

Positive momentum

Abrams’ reaction Wednesday after hearing that her bill passed through committee was short and sweet.

“It’s amazing!” she said.

“When I first started, I didn’t think it would go anywhere. I was 14!”

A total of 47 pieces of testimony were submitted prior to Wednesday’s hearing. All but one voiced strong support.

“When the young people of today are bright enough to understand that THEY are our future, we need to LISTEN,” wrote Ann Evens. “This is a STEP towards helping all communities take the important step forward toward healthy self-reliance.”

Sean Lathrop wrote that the state of Hawaii “could become an example for the entire country by adopting and implementing this bill.”

And Peter J. Martin, president and CEO of TeenPact, testified that the bill is not only good for the people of Kauai, but also “shows Talia that even through she cannot yet vote, her voice can be heard.”

DLNR Chair William Aila testified that while the department supports the bill’s intent, it does not feel it is necessary since the Forest Stewardship Program and the Kaulunani Urban and Community Forestry Program are already in place.

“The Department believes that through these two existing programs, the goals for House Bill 2177 could be met without creating a new program,” he wrote.

Backup plan

Should the bill not make it through the legislative process, Abrams is prepared. In fact, she has already sat down to discuss the idea with Kauai Mayor Bernard Carvalho Jr., and has pitched her proposal — signed by 150 community members — to the Kilauea Neighborhood Association.

“If the bill doesn’t go through, I will still somehow make it a community thing,” she said with confidence.

In her own submitted testimony, Abrams said she was honored to see her bill introduced and that her dream is to help feed the people she sees in the park who she knows are hungry.

 “Please pass this Bill because I want to help people have healthy food to eat, even if they can’t afford it,” she wrote.

• Chris D’Angelo, environmental reporter, can be reached at 245-0441 or cdangelo@thegardenisland.com.