Helpful piece by Luke Runyon on steps toward accounting for Lower Colorado River evaporation and riparian system losses. During a September Colorado River symposium held in Santa Fe, both Interior Department Secretary Deb Haaland and Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton told attendees that the issue of evaporation and transit loss in the Lower …
Continue reading ‘Accounting for Colorado River evaporation’ »
I don’t see how this ends well. Most of the major players – the ones that matter, anyway, by which I mean Arizona, California, and the federal government – appear boxed in by constraints they can’t seem to overcome, while the water in the Colorado River’s big reservoirs is circling the drains. Arizona’s giving up …
Continue reading ‘The Colorado River at the end of water year 2022: a status report’ »
The game is to ride everywhere, where “everywhere” involves dividing our world into squares ~300 yards on a side and visiting them all, and “riding” sometimes involves what one might call “walk-a-bike”. Sooner or later, you end up in places like this. It’s a pretty fun game.
By Eric Kuhn, John Fleck, and Jack Schmidt With most forecasts pointing toward another below-average winter of precipitation in the Rocky Mountains in 2022/2023 and with total basin-wide reservoir storage now less than 20 maf (less than 17 months of supply at the rate water has been consumed in the basin since 2000), it is …
A paragraph from the new book Bob Berrens and I are writing about the Rio Grande and the making of modern Albuquerque: To understand a community – any community – you can start with its water. Collective problem-solving, collective action, lies at the core of community, and our relationship with our water requires us to …
Continue reading ‘Collective Action and the Ribbons of Green’ »
The White House announced today it has appointed Anne Castle as the federal representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission. Anne is former Assistant Secretary of Interior For Water and Science, where she helped steer the federal boat through chaotic Colorado River rapids. She’ll be an important asset now that the rapids seem that much …
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Count me among those in the Colorado River community who was disappointed last month with the lack of Department of Interior action on its threats should the states not come up with a plan to sufficiently reduce their water use. But let’s remember the core issue here: the states of the basin, especially the Lower …
Continue reading ‘A reminder that the federal government does not use Colorado River water’ »
As we watch the quivering uncertainty about the nature of the federal threat on the Colorado river, it is perhaps worth a look at past moments of progress in Colorado River governance, and also past roadblocks. Anne Castle and I ran this stuff down for a paper we published last fall. Some history shows a …
Saw the Birds above from the train window yesterday, and went back today on my new ebike for a closer look. The ebike is primarily an accommodation for my age and failing knee, allowing me to ride more longer when I feel like it – hauling groceries, or books and laptops to work, or searching …
If we have learned anything from the current crisis on the Colorado River, it is that we have to know what we’ll do next if the current thing we’re doing isn’t enough. That’s a bloggy shorthand for a deep argument that Eric Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, and I made in comments we submitted this week in …