Friday’s announcement of an 85 percent California State Water Project allocation was, tentatively at least, good news for Lake Mead. When the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California gets a small supply from up north via the State Water Project, it needs more Colorado River water. Conversely, with a big State Water Project supply coming …
Happy to report that my book, Water is for Fighting Over and Other Myths About Water in the West, has received a Gold Medal in the “IPPYs”.
The University of New Mexico water posse had a great visit yesterday with Christopher Scott, the new director of the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona. Scott spoke a couple of times and met with students at our Community and Regional Planning program, who have been doing a lot …
Reconciliation ecology, the field’s founders say, “says we still have time to save most of the world’s species. But to do it, we must stop trying to put an end to civilization and human enterprise. Instead, we need to work on the overwhelming bulk of the land — the places we humans use. We need …
Continue reading ‘“reconciliation ecology” in the rice fields of California’ »
The environmental group American Rivers today declared the Lower Colorado River America’s “most endangered river“. The web page announcing this is fascinating. The pictures are not of iconic desert canyons and pristine rivers. They are of farmers. Growing food. A reminder of the multiplicity of values with which we embrace the importance of rivers.
tl;dr The claims of “Fill Mead First” advocates that we could save hundreds of thousands of acre feet of water a year while draining Lake Powell and consolidating all the Colorado River’s water in Lake Mead don’t hold up. The longer version…. There’s this joke. Two economists are walking down the street when one spots …
Continue reading ‘Glen Canyon Dam and the $10 bill on the sidewalk’ »
One of the great joys of bicycling socially is route sharing. Albuquerque is a great bicycling city. We’ve got a nice network of trails that are completely separated from streets, including one along the Rio Grande that runs the whole length of the metro area. We’re seeing more and more facilities on the streets as …
Continue reading ‘“I just found this route a couple weeks ago….”’ »
We’ll be analyzing lessons from California’s drought for a while yet. But what I view as the most important lesson is already clear. The L.A. Times’ Bettina Boxall, one of the state’s most experienced and respected water reporters, summed it up thus: [O]n the whole, this intricately plumbed state proved to be surprisingly resilient in …
Continue reading ‘California’s remarkable resilience in the face of drought’ »
We still have some slots available for fall 2017 in the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program. When I left my career in journalism, it was for the chance to join a community of people at the University of New Mexico who are passionate about water. We’re looking for students who think that way …
Continue reading ‘slots still available for UNM Water Resources Program fall 2017’ »
David Owen makes an interesting point in this New Yorker piece: Just as proximity makes people think that Las Vegas is the principal cause of the decline of Lake Mead, it also makes them think that any further decline in the lake will be a problem mainly, or even only, for Las Vegas. But that …
Continue reading ‘Does Las Vegas have the most reliable water supply in the Colorado River Basin?’ »