By Jack Schmidt and John Fleck John C. Page, Commissioner of Reclamation, reported to Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, in announcing the growth of Lake Mead, that the indications are enough water will be caught and stored by Boulder Dam this spring to put the operations of the Boulder Dam plant on a …
In the AI era, knowledge best expands when the best thinkers in every field understand what the frontier is in their field, what AI does not yet know, what humans do not yet know. Hollis Robbins
The latest European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts got some ink/bits for their strong forecast for a wet winter in California (h/t Daniel Swain), but what do they say for us? Sorry for the blocky look, but when you drill down, the map gets pretty coarse – these are big pixels. But the headline is …
Continue reading ‘“Super” El Niño meh in the Rio Grande and Colorado River headwaters?’ »
Near-extinct oryx are returning. Farms are prospering as irrigation water reaches fields for the first time in decades. Farmers are even nurturing new trees on their land. Once a byword for drought and famine, the African Sahel region on the southern flank of the Sahara Desert now has more water than it has for decades. …
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, …