Kudos to the University of San Diego’s Watchdog Institute for producing, and to the Imperial Valley Press for running, an excellent look at what’s at stake in the upcoming Imperial Irrigation District election. IID, the irrigation agency formed in 1911 to take over the interests of commercial water developers on the California side of the …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: “This makes ‘Chinatown’ look like high school.”’ »
The JAWRA blog had a post Friday on something that I’ve found maddeningly difficult to explain to newspaper readers: the cases where water conservation efforts don’t really save the water one intuitively thinks they do: Lining a canal, for example, may seem like “saving” water, but not if the leakage is replenishing a stressed aquifer. …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: When Saving Water is Not What It Seems’ »
From this weekend’s newspaper (sub/ad req), a piece about UNM’s Museum of Southwestern Biology taking responsibility for the remarkable early twentieth century plant collection of Brother Gerfroy Arsène Brouard: A Smithsonian scientist eight decades ago joked that the mosses and lichens of northern New Mexico were sure to suffer before the determined onslaught of Brother …
We arid climate types like to think we own water problems, but a new EU report serves as a reminder that they’re universal. People build their infrastructure and societal systems around the water they’ve got and then bump up against limits. From EurActive: The report shows that some member states have begun to suffer “permanent …
Continue reading ‘It’s not just the dry places that are going dry’ »
When the Colorado River Compact was negotiated in 1922 to divide the river’s flow among the seven western U.S. states that span its basin, the representatives of the upper basin states were driven by the realization that they weren’t using much water at the time, but some day they would want to. Under western U.S. …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: The View From the Head of the Stream’ »
From the morning newspaper (sub/ad req), a look at water flowing through the woods: Michael Porter made an auspicious discovery one morning this week in the waterlogged Rio Grande woods — silvery minnows. For a week, high flows have brought water into newly created habitat on the river’s west side, south of Central, and the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: More Water in the Desert than Usual’ »
If you’re in Albuquerque, it’s a great weekend to go out and see your river. The Rio Grande is flowing at nearly 6,000 cubic feet per second through the city right now (Saturday evening, 5/22), courtesy of a spike flow to help Rio Grande silvery minnow spawning. The high flows allow water to get out …
Continue reading ‘Water in the Desert: High Flows on the Rio Grande’ »
Reading the late 19th and early 20th century literature of the Colorado Desert, one could be forgiven for thinking there was a certain inevitability of the massive irrigation works that so changed the Salton Sink (renamed with characteristic enthusiasm as “Imperial Valley”.) It still seems inevitable. It was the time of manifest destiny, of “reclamation”. …
Continue reading ‘Not Everyone Thought Irrigating the Salton Sink was a good idea’ »
Greetings from the not-so-wilds of Taos, New Mexico, where I picked up this morning’s Albuquerque Journal to find this (sub/ad req), on the surprising discovery of PCBs in the Rio Grande just downstream from the main Albuquerque storm water outfall: If the nuclear weapons lab were responsible, dealing with this problem would be simpler. Attentive …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: PCBs in the Rio Grande’ »
A couple of stories recently caught my eye, in which “drought” is blamed for what is largely an issue of water overconsumption. The first was a City News story on San Diego water supply. The reporter said this: California and the Colorado River basin have been in a years-long drought, which has forced reductions in …