Apparently in celebration of this week’s official release date for my book Water is for Fighting Over: and Other Myths about Water in the West, Lake Mead overnight crept above the magic elevation level of 1,075 feet above sea level. That’s number attached in policy and, more importantly, the public mind to the notion of shortage on …
Sandra Dibble’s latest on the proposed Rosarito Beach desalination plant highlights a point that’s central to the introductory water policy and management class I help teach (/me waves to WR571 students!). Getting the technical stuff right in water management only gets you part way down the road. Getting the institutions right can be a bigger …
Continue reading ‘It’s not just about the technology. It’s about the institutions.’ »
One hears a great deal in the current climate of U.S. environmental politics about the charge of federal overreach. My University of New Mexico colleague Reed Benson has a different take: My concern, in fact, has been the opposite: agencies often don’t fully use the authority they have to address environmental concerns or protect other …
A seven word sentence – eight if you think “gonna” should count for two. It is my measure of my mother, the number of words she can string together into a sentence without break. The sentence does not have to make sense to me to count. It merely has to have an internal grammatical coherence, …
On its centennial, there is no question in my mind about the central role of the U.S. National Park Service in my life’s trajectory. I’ve written often about my experience as a young boy, standing on the Grand Canyon’s south rim, wandering the view spots craning my neck for those fragmentary vistas where you can …
Continue reading ‘The centennial of the National Park Service’ »
This did not happen at my old job:
With a wave of stories in the last few days about the provision of running water to the community of East Porterville, in California’s Central Valley, I wanna re-up this important Citylab story by Laura Bliss. East Porterville has been the poster child for drought in California as national and international media descended to tell …
If I go out and ride for an hour, my brain function after is definitely better. I like to think up creative water solutions when I’m riding. That’s John Currier, chief engineer of the Colorado River District in Glenwood Springs, in a fun story on the crazy bicycling habits of Currier and his colleagues Eric …
Continue reading ‘The solution to the West’s water problems’ »
My embarrassing affliction – obsessively clicking on my book’s Amazon page to try to infer how well it is selling – is apparently common among new authors. But I noticed something the last couple of days that made me clutch. There are no two books more important as predecessors to Water is For Fighting Over than …
Continue reading ‘Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought’ »
We have faculty affiliated with the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program working on public acceptance of wastewater recycling and reuse. We have faculty who make beer. This is a story for us: Pima County water officials want to organize a statewide brewery competition where beer-makers compete using purified wastewater…. The goal of the …