Ecology

The Grand Canyon is about to take a bath, and National Park Service officials who oversee the natural wonder are worried. Federal flood control managers, led by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, this week plan to unleash millions of cubic feet of water from behind Glen Canyon Dam to "flush" the huge canyon bottom with a simulated springtime flood. Bureau of Reclamation and U.S.

As blizzards whipped across nearby High Sierra peaks, ecologist William Platts lifted off in a helicopter here and headed north, about 1,000 feet above a river that looked as if it were throwing a tantrum. Beneath him, the squiggle of green was overflowing its banks, inundating a patchwork of oxbows, marshlands, forests and sagebrush. Culverts were nearly filled to capacity, and mats of dislodged tules and muck hurtled down the river.

Environmentalists were elated when the state made a blanket decision to save an all but extinct coastal plant. But their joy evaporated when officials decided that the best way to preserve the endangered Ventura marsh milk vetch was to cover a corner of the Ballona Wetlands in Playa del Rey with an actual blanket.

A coalition of environmental groups filed a federal lawsuit this week alleging that U.S. wildlife agencies violated endangered species protections in their support of the proposed toll road through San Onofre State Beach. The suit, filed Wednesday in San Diego County District Court, calls the conclusions of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service biased, potentially leading to an "ecological disaster."

As an adolescent, Andy Lipkis had to breathe steam each day at his Baldwin Hills home to soothe his lungs. When he learned in 1970 from a U.S. Forest Service report that the smog burning his lungs was also contributing to the destruction of trees in the Los Angeles area, the knowledge planted a seed. At 15, Lipkis founded TreePeople, a local nonprofit group that in the nearly four decades since has become an innovative leader in the "urban foresting" movement.

Rick Halsey is in search of senile shrubs. He rolls up California 79 in his Chevy pickup across the high tablelands of eastern San Diego County. Past a little adobe chapel from the Mexican era, he turns onto an unpaved road. He bumps along in low gear as the road rises into the granite mountains as a brilliant sliver of scarified earth, passing through gnarled stands of manzanita, red shank and chamise. In a shallow basin called Indian Flats, he comes to an abrupt stop.

Oysterman Jim Aguiar had never had to deal with the bacterium \o7Vibrio parahaemolyticus\f7 in his 25 years working the frigid waters of Prince William Sound. The dangerous microbe infected seafood in warmer waters, like the Gulf of Mexico. Alaska was way too cold. But the sound was gradually warming. By summer 2004, the temperature had risen just enough to poke above the crucial 59-degree mark.

Thousands of hungry goats roamed Catalina as recently as a decade ago, gobbling every green leaf and shrub in sight, the island's de facto brush clearance program. After years of angst-filled debate over the voracious nonnative goat population, the animals were killed or removed so that natural chaparral and scrub could flourish. In this record dry year, the return of thick native vegetation along with nonnative grasses provided an abundance of wildfire fuel.

From atop Pepperdine University's hilly seaside campus, Californians' changing approach to the local landscape is dramatically apparent. The school's older lower campus is a sweeping green expanse of lawn set with decorative, often nonnative trees, all irrigated by Pepperdine's own treated wastewater. Above, the dry slopes surrounding the newer 49-acre Drescher Graduate Campus are devoid of any signs of foreign lushness.

A congressional panel warned Monday that the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the state's key crossroads for water exports to Southern California, teeters on the verge of crisis. The panel, consisting of Democrats on the House Natural Resource Subcommittee on Water and Power, also called for swift action to address ecological problems plaguing the delta.