The Tour de France headline we’ve been waiting for
Reichenbach Falls: Frenchman Pierre Rolland and Swiss Sebastien Reichenbach were also among those who crashed on slippery roads.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
“I flood.” UNM’s Basia Irland and the voice of a river
Remarkable piece by UNM water professor emeritus Basia Irland: I flood. That is what I — and all my cousins — do from time to time. It is part of our rhythm. In their hubris, humans build cities and towns right on our banks, then get upset with us when our waters rise and destroy …
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Urban water, urban birds
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 …
The shrinking of the American lawn
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 …
My book is now a thing that exists in the physical world
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 …
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Elwha Dam Removal – a reminder that changing water management systems is hard
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 …
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Why water management in the Upper Colorado River Basin is so different from the Lower
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 readers: chance to help UNM water research
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: New Mexico’s tradition of water sharing
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 …
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Stuff I wrote elsewhere: The Great Decoupling of the West’s Water
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 …
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