The $152 million project would be situated in Golden Gate Park and would be used to water that park, Lincoln Park and the Presidio golf course.

The proposal is the culmination of a long campaign by conservationists to push San Francisco officials to reduce the city´s reliance on pristine water from the Tuolumne River in the Sierra Nevada. Rising water use resulting from areawide population growth has greatly depleted the population of salmon and other fish in the river.

Bear Necessities: Human encounters with bears are far more common than they need to be, and the root cause of these scary and sometimes tragic incidents is almost always people not disposing of their trash properly. So this item from the Bozeman [Mont.] Daily Chronicle is a welcome development.

Allied Waste Services and a local conservation group have teamed up to create a program to reduce the amount of garbage left sitting outside drawing bears in the mountain resort town:

"To help Big Sky residents and businesses [keep garbage away from bears], Allied Waste has amended its collection routes and times. ... In areas where bears have been raiding human trash, the trash company will collect trash later in the morning, which means residents can move their trash cans outside in the morning, rather than leaving them out overnight.

"In addition, Keystone Conservation has given trash pickup customers bright yellow weatherproof tags for their cans that include a reminder to store trash indoors until the morning of garbage pickup, and Allied´s phone number."

Pete Fehrenbach is managing editor of Waste & Recycling News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.