Communities continue to face different groundwater realities, different economies and different views about water management. But as groundwater challenges become harder to ignore, many are reaching the same conclusion: Waiting for someone else to solve the problem isn’t a strategy. Faith Kearns on new Arizona research on rural community response to groundwater challenges
Two literary frames of recent usefulness: Both are literary creations aimed at the widest possible audience – Holmes a fictional character created by Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilder a fictional character created by Billy Wilder. Holmes’ value is epistemic, Wilder’s (like my old standby “What would John McPhee do?”) involves narrative structure, arc. Wilder made a …
My office mate, pal, and podcast co-host Rin Tara and I switched things up for this week’s episode of our Water Matters! podcast, with Rin interviewing me about the Berrens-Fleck project Ribbons of Green. Among other things, Rin zeroed in on “gardens,” a theme that sits at the heart of the book. From the introduction: …
On the implications of total Mead-Powell storage reaching record lows: The big questions that are implied by where we’re at are ones that absolutely need to be addressed, but they’re not going to be addressed now. I mean, we can’t even have functional conversations about how to reduce consumptive use. – Jack Schmidt, quoted by …
“Your fatal habit of looking at everything from the point of view of a story instead of as a scientific exercise has ruined what might have been an instructive and even classical series of demonstrations. You slur over work of the utmost finesse and delicacy in order to dwell upon sensational details which may excite, …
On Sunday, the Colorado River passed a grim milestone. Total combined storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell dropped to a historic low. It was my Wilburys colleague Jack Schmidt who noticed the milestone: On Sunday, July 12, the surface of Lake Powell was 3524.32 feet above sea level, and the surface of Lake Mead …
People are finally starting to say the quiet parts, the parts so many Upper Basin people have been grumbling about in private, out loud. Via an incredibly important Heather Sackett story: Colorado Sen. Dylan Roberts, a District 8 Democrat who represents several Western Slope counties, including Eagle, Grand, Garfield, Routt and Summit, asked Colorado’s lead …
Continue reading ‘Cracks in the Upper Colorado River Basin wall’ »
While pulling together some data today for our latest Water Matters podcast, I was surprised by the dry streak we’ve been in. The last above average monsoon here was 2018. (Episode posts tomorrow – 6/23 – I’ll try to remember to update the post with a link. Update: the episode) Also, I’ve been trying to …
Continue reading ‘Recent Albuquerque monsoon history: dry’ »
Via Alicia Inez Guzmán at Source New Mexico, we learn that the federal government is no longer paying the cost of monitoring Rio Grande flows at the intake to Santa Fe communities’ Buckman Direct Diversion as part of a joint effort to ensure that contamination from nuclear weapons work at Los Alamos National Laboratory doesn’t …