I recently came back from seeing the folks at Nest Labs in Palo Alto, California. Great people, great bundle of products - more on that later. But that's not what's on my mind right now. Driving back and forth from San Francisco International Airport and Palo Alto, I was looking at an endless landscape of brown. This is San Francisco, you know, the foggy, rainy part of California. Instead, Northern California has experienced record warmth and sunshine, turning the hills into brown grass and desiccated trees and brush. I came across a terrific article in, of all places, BuzzFeed, written by Michelle Nijhuis, who has also written for more traditional outlets such as National Geographic. Nijhuis tells the tale of the North American Water & Power Alliance, an idea developed by Ralph Parsons, the founder of the consulting engineering firm Parsons Corp., to pipe massive amounts of water on a continent-wide scale from places where there's a lot of water, such as Canada and the Great Lakes, to places where it was scarce in the West. It was the early 1960s when we all believed in the power of engineering big things, like going to the moon.
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