I said some stuff about water markets in this Q&A with Drew Beckwith of Western Resources Advocates: Beckwith: That’s certainly an NGO concern, that an unbridled market does not take into account the environment and that water would just run uphill towards money. Fleck: This is a problem with thinking about markets, right? A market …
Through much of Albuquerque, the Rio Grande flows between levees at a grade slightly higher than the surrounding valley floor. As a result, storm water must be pumped over the levees into the river’s central channel, with a string of pumping stations and big pipe outfalls like this, on the east side of the river …
Continue reading ‘Flood plain connectivity, Rio Grande style’ »
McClatchy’s Stuart Leavenworth has details on the nominee to be of Deputy Interior Secretary, one of the key positions top the federal bureaucracy that helps manage western water: His name is David Longly Bernhardt, and he’s worked as the top lobbyist for California’s Westlands Water District, the largest agricultural entity of its kind in the …
Continue reading ‘we have a Deputy Interior Secretary nominee’ »
My UNM faculty colleague Caroline Scruggs and soon-to-be-graduate of both Community and Regional Planning and the Water Resources Program Jason Herman have a new paper on the costs of treating and reusing wastewater. Caroline and her students have been looking closely at the issue in the context of small inland communities, which are increasingly eyeing both …
Continue reading ‘Costs, benefits of direct and indirect potable reuse’ »
From the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association on the question of who speaks for Arizona on Colorado River issues: View note
The feud within Arizona over who’s in charge of the state’s Colorado River water – the state Department of Water Resources or the Central Arizona Water Conservation District – escalated this week. This is from an April 25 “cease and desist” letter (obtained by me through a state public records act request) from the Arizona …
Continue reading ‘who’s in charge of Arizona’s Colorado River water?’ »
78.33 percent of the United States is in “not drought or abnormally dry” conditions in this week’s Drought Monitor. That’s the best we’ve seen since June 2010. In writing this note, I am reminded of the linguistic dilemma posed by our lack of a good word for “not drought”.
Amid the Colorado River water management attention last week rightly focused on the fact that a wet winter in the Upper Basin means a big release this year from Lake Powell to help refill Lake Mead, I missed another bit of business that may be even more important. The Bureau of Reclamation’s planning model is …
Continue reading ‘declining Lower Colorado River Basin water use’ »
Lovely Felicity Barringer piece on our language of water. My favorite bit: In a bone-dry landscape like the Navajo reservation at the corner of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, water names proliferated. Places like Tohatchi and Toadlena, New Mexico or Tonolea, and Tolani Lakes, Arizona, begin with tó, the Navajo word for water.
Riding my bike late this morning, I stopped to admire a roadrunner in the trail. As you can see from the picture, it’s a ratty bit of trail (Gritty? We have more words for the sublime than the mundane.) flanked by the freeway to the north and a treeline to the south bordering old farm …