When I’m in Phoenix, I always try to squeeze out some time to go birding at the Gilbert Water Ranch, a constructed wetland where practical water management has been turned into a lovely urban amenity. A fascinating new project by Arizona State University graduate student Riley Burnette (pdf) attempts to quantify the role that the …
According to this piece by Andrew McGill of CityLab/The Atlantic, the average American yard has shrunk by 26 percent since the 1970s, as homes get larger while lots get smaller: The shrinking lawn is actually an economic compromise. Americans want bigger houses, but since every additional square foot balloons the cost, homebuilders are keeping prices …
There was a weird moment this afternoon when I was writing something and needed to dig out a reference from my book. (I do this a lot. It’s all there, the book has a lot of footnotes.) For a split second I started to follow the usual path on my hard drive to the final …
Continue reading ‘My book is now a thing that exists in the physical world’ »
The removal of two dams on the Elwha River, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, has been rightly celebrated as a major achievement – returning a river and its fish to their old channel. But there is much to learn, also, about how difficult it is to change the course of a water system when society has …
Continue reading ‘Elwha Dam Removal – a reminder that changing water management systems is hard’ »
CORTEZ, CO – The Spring Creek Extension Ditch Company got the OK this week from Colorado’s Southwest Basin Roundtable for a $29,000 grant to replace a 75-year-old siphon on the Spring Creek Ditch, where it crosses the Pine Valley Canal. The ditch company has been delivering water to farmers southeast of Durango since 1901. There …
Albuquerque friends, here’s a chance to help a group of University of New Mexico colleagues on research important to our water future:
Repartimientos de agua is how community acequia systems operate in times of water scarcity. Custom originally arose out of conflict and the ongoing elastic process of negotiation and reconciliationitself, of meeting year after year to divide the water according to agreements forged in crisis long ago. Acequieros believe that water scarcity should be shared equitably …
Continue reading ‘Repartimientos de agua: New Mexico’s tradition of water sharing’ »
This 2010 paper by Peter Gleick and Meena Palaniappan planted the seed, and as I worked on my book I found examples everywhere – geographies and economic communities that are using less water even as they were growing. I blogged about it, as one does, one thing led to another, and when I finished the book …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: The Great Decoupling of the West’s Water’ »
My friend Scot Key offered me double the rate they pay here at Inkstain (this is a joke, we are bloggers, we do it for “exposure”) so I’ve got a new post up over at his Better Burque. We mostly ride bikes and complain about how much this or that sucks, especially poorly designed and executed …
Continue reading ‘A new home for some stuff I write now and then’ »
One of my University of New Mexico Water Resources Program colleagues frequently points out what they call “green versus green issues” – environmental tradeoffs that are often under-examined because our environmental discourse focuses on one set of values without sufficiently incorporating other values. Today’s inbox missive: removing dams from the Snake River in the U.S. …
Continue reading ‘Green versus green: removing Snake River dams’ »