Kirk Yazzie, his wife and three children, ages 2 to 9, live in a one-room house in Thoreau that uses a solar-powered water pump that draws water from a cistern to a tap inside their home.Before the demonstration project started two months ago, Yazzie said he hauled water from St. Bonaventure’s well across town. “I …
Continue reading ‘In Indian Country, where pickle buckets count as water infrastructure’ »
Elephant Butte, one of the first big dams built by the then-Reclamation Service (now Bureau of Reclamation), is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. As the graph above shows, its reservoir ended the 2016 water year Sept. 30 at less than 7 percent full. The reservoir’s ups and downs through history show the great variability …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Butte Reservoir and climate change’ »
There’s an important point I try to make when I’m out in public talking about the 2014 Colorado River Delta environmental pulse flow: the amount of water used and the size of the landscape that got wet, compared to the once-vast delta, is tiny. I get excited about the pulse flow, when water managers on …
Discussions about climate change and water supply in the western United States risk getting bogged down in pursuit of uncertainties. Those uncertainties are real, but there’s a bunch that we already know, and it’s sufficient to help us form policy responses, according to a new summary paper from the Colorado River Research Group: Assuming the …
Continue reading ‘Climate change in the Colorado River Basin’ »
A new study published last week by Heather Cooley and colleagues at the Pacific Institute concludes that water conservation remains the cheapest water supply alternative as compared to the big new sources widely discussed, things like storm water capture, desalination, and recycling/reuse: Urban water conservation and efficiency are the most cost-effective ways to meet current …
Continue reading ‘New study suggests water conservation remains the cheapest alternative’ »
Current public attention to efforts by the Standing Rock Sioux to protect their water supply by blocking construction of an oil pipeline has drawn attention to Native water rights issues. Anne Strainchamps at Wisconsin Public Radio’s To The Best of Our Knowledge had me on last week to talk about the broader issues. One of my …
Scientists have dubbed decades-long periods of aridity in southwestern North America “megadroughts“. We’ve had them in the past, and research has long pointed toward an increasing risk of them as the climate warms. New research published last week by Cornell’s Toby Ault and colleagues has generated a wave of scary headlines – A Mega-Drought Is Coming to …
Continue reading ‘Greenhouse gases and southwest “megadrought”’ »
After a great day-and-a-half gathering of the New Mexico water nerds in Silver City (the 61st annual New Mexico Water Conference, put on by New Mexico State University’s Water Resources Research Institute, I took a leisurely drive this afternoon along one of my favorite stretches of the Rio Grande. The Hatch Valley (more formally known as …
An excerpt from my book, published by Earth Island Journal: a case study in how “cheap talk” – the relative informality of a “working group” without obligations – helped calm conflict between environmentalists and water managers on the Lower Colorado: In the short run, the relative informality meant that there was no concrete, institutionalized way …
Continue reading ‘How “Cheap Talk” Helped Environmentalists and Water Managers Find Common Ground’ »
There is something manifestly silly about the assertion, in table 5a of the Bureau of Reclamation’s 2015 Colorado River Accounting and Water Use Report, that the Imperial Irrigation District diverted 2,455,649 acre feet of water from river at Imperial Dam that year. Park of the core curriculum for our University of New Mexico Water Resources Program …