Archive of entries posted by jfleck

Some optimistic words on the Colorado Basin from Doug Kenney

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The University of Colorado’s Doug Kenney is sounding genuinely optimistic in this recent take on the Colorado River’s problems over at Carpe Diem West: Throughout the basin, a lot of really good innovations are occurring. Conservation has, rightly, emerged as a credible management tool, and not merely something for the hippies to talk about. Cooperation …

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Collaboration on New Mexico’s Rio Grande

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A new environmental water sharing governance experiment is underway this late summer on the Rio Grande in central New Mexico in an effort to keep stretches of the river wet for ecosystem benefits. Ollie Reed sketched out the details in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal: Sandia, Isleta, Santa Ana and Cochiti pueblos each donated 100 acre-feet …

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Lower Colorado Basin water savings not as big as I thought

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So I need to correct something that I wrote a month ago. Tony Davis took a deep dive into the Bureau of Reclamation’s data and concluded in a story published this morning (I think accurately) that water conservation savings in the Lower Colorado River Basin will not be as large as I and others have been …

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Absent deep water use cuts, repeat of the drought of 2000-05 would drain Lake Powell

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I’m generally an optimist about our ability to solve our water problems of the western United States, but the drought of 2000-05 provides a boundary condition to my thinking. In my post-journalism life, one of the most interesting projects I’ve been working on is a study for/by/with Colorado’s West Slope basin roundtables of the risks …

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New Pacific Institute report on water demand forecasting

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One of the centerpieces of the argument I make in my book, Water is for Fighting Over: and Other Myths about Water in the West, is that changing patterns in water demand (specifically, that we’re using a lot less of it than we used to, across all sectors of the economy) create significant new flexibility in …

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River District Annual Water Seminar, Sept. 16 in Grand Junction

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The Colorado River District has a great agenda again this year for its annual Water Seminar:  “Colorado River Waves of the Future: Fitting the West to the River’s New Normal“. ProPublica’s Abrahm Lustgarten is the lunch speaker, talking about his excelent “Killing the Colorado” series/documentary, which won special recognition award in this year’s Stanford Knight-Risser Prize …

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A socioeconomic stratification in US water infrastructure?

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We all know about the problems of Flint’s water supply, and the relationship between poor communities and infrastructure problems. We also know about the more general decay of our water infrastructure. Robert Glennon has knitted those two problems together with an interesting argument: Episodes such as Flint undermine the public’s confidence in the safety of …

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Book Day: Water is For Fighting Over, and Other Myths….

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My friends in the University of New Mexico water community, faculty and students, threw a party for me last night to welcome me as the new director of UNM’s Water Resources Program and celebrate Book Day Eve. A bunch of Albuquerque water people came too. It was a blast, nobody got drunk and trashed the …

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