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’ »
Apropos of nothing other than that Lissa asked and USDA Quickstats answered, turns out US hops acreage is at record levels in 2016:
Jay Lund (UC Davis) wrote an interesting piece this week offering some water management geographic comparisons – how does California stack to other geographically similar regions? This is an interesting approach, because a lot of water governance rhetoric is inward facing – we see our own problems, but don’t do a good enough job of …
Continue reading ‘Some points of comparison for California water’ »
Smart Faith Kearns on the headlines this week about the “discovery” of a bunch of groundwater beneath parched California: [O]n a symbolic level it’s really just fascinating how often we get caught up in stories being saved — by a good winter, a new dam, new water. I wish I didn’t find it so depressing. …
Continue reading ‘On California’s “new” groundwater and the hope for a savior’ »
Seems we’ve been at this for a while: update @jfleck it's tipping points all the way down — Brett Walton (@waltonwater) June 29, 2016