jfleck at inkstain

A few thoughts from John Fleck, a writer of journalism and other things, living in New Mexico

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Elephant Butte

Elephant Butte Dam was one of the first big concrete dam’s in America. It currently doesn’t have much water behind it. My column: An enthusiastic crowd wandered the top of Elephant Butte Dam on Jan. 7, celebrating, with good reason, the structure’s role in New Mexico history. But it must have been hard to ignore [...]

The Jevons Paradox and greywater reuse

Hey lazyweb – anybody know if someone’s looked rigorously at the question of greywater use in the context of a Jevons-like paradox? Putting together some notes for a talk this weekend to the Xeriscape Garden Club of Albuquerque (Sat. 10 a.m. at the Garden Center if you’re in town), I’ve been thinking anew about the question [...]

Water’s for makin’ beer?

In response to the latest abuse of the Twain whiskey/water non-quote*, this: * Breitler 2011

Vegas housing woes

A couple of notes from Las Vegas, NV, the front line of the housing collapse, that have significant implications for the region’s long term water future: New home sales in 2011 were one tenth the number at the peak of the housing boom in 2005. The Las Vegas Review Journal quoted Pat Mulroy the other [...]

Water in the desert: rainwater harvesting in the Manzanos

River Beat: a forecast for decline on the Colorado again this year

It’s all fun and games until you actually have to measure snow. The US Bureau of Reclamation’s first 2012 Colorado Basin reservoir forecast (the “24-month study”, pdf) projects a decline in total storage in lakes Mead and Powell, the Colorado River’s largest storage reservoirs, of 844,000 acre feet, or 2.76 percent. There are two ways [...]

Amid uncertainty, IID bumps up fallowing $’s

While archaeological metaphor can be instructive, I think we make more progress in understanding the fate of the Southwest under conditions of aridity and water scarcity by looking at what’s happening now, in the places that are really running short of water. What are people actually doing today? Which is why the Imperial Valley of [...]

Commodity prices and the economics of fallowing

One of the most promising strategies for water conservation in the arid west involves fallowing of agricultural lands. Done badly, it has earned the pejorative nickname “buy and dry”, as cities buy up ag water rights, take the land out of production and shift the water to urban toilets and taps. But done right – [...]

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Albuquerque water use down in 2011

It’s not a big drop, but in the face of drought and modest population growth, Albuquerque’s water use dropped in 2011. From the morning paper: The drop was tiny — less than 1 percent. But with Albuquerque weathering one of its driest years in history in 2011, the consumption drop is significant, said Katherine Yuhas, [...]

Dust and North American megadrought

The Lamont-Doherty group that has done so much to help our understanding of the factors that drive multi-decadal droughts has added a nice piece to our understanding of the issues. In a paper in review (for which they’ve done a nice accessible writeup), Ben Cook and colleagues looked at a number of drivers for long-duration [...]

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