The Rio Grande through Albuquerque has been rising for the last week or so, and is now about to make a good-sized jump in flow as water managers push some extra flows from storage behind upstream dams to encourage our beleaguered silvery minnow to spawn. From a notice sent out this afternoon by Mary Carlson …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s Rio Grande has lots of water in it right now’ »
I ended up by happy accident on a morning bike ride yesterday at Albuquerque’s sewage treatment plant outfall, which is the largest Rio Grande tributary between the Rio Chama and the U.S.-Texas-Mexico border. It’s just a short run from the culvert you see to the river, which is immediately behind where I was standing when …
A couple of my friends, journalists, have started a neat new side project: The guys said they were from Puebla, a picturesque state in central Mexico whose colonial capital is a tourist gem — although much of the countryside is impoverished. Puebla has a long tradition of sending men and women north: There are so …
Continue reading ‘the future of journalism has different names’ »
For those of us in the western United States accustomed to the large scale movement of water from one river basin to another via tunnels, pumps, and the like, the current discussion about water supplies for Waukesha, Wisconsin, is a fascinating case study. As I write this, I’m drinking from a glass of Albuquerque tap …
Continue reading ‘On the Great Lakes, a trans-basin diversion discussion’ »
Today’s long lead outlook from the Climate Prediction Center is enough to make a southwestern water manager long a second consecutive busted forecast*. With La Niña in the offing, the maps show creeping brown across the Four Corners states by August and not letting up until late spring of 2017: * Last winter’s forecast, for a …
Continue reading ‘A drying trend forecast for the Southwest’ »
California sprang to action in its fourth year of deep drought because water management professionals and state leaders recognized that California’s water-scarce condition could be the new norm. They accepted the scientific consensus that it could get considerably worse. The way out of the trouble was to convince state residents of the need for collective …
Continue reading ‘In California environmental management, signs of hope’ »
Conference May 20 organized by my University of New Mexico water colleagues, especially Kerry Howe at UNM’s Center for Water and the Environment and Adrian Oglesby at the Utton Center: The drought has eased somewhat in New Mexico but might be returning, and uncertainties regarding our future remain. This 1-day conference will focus on federal …
Continue reading ‘Institutional Constraints to Water Management in New Mexico’ »
It is not hard to find and highlight problems. Solutions are more difficult stories to tell, because they often manifest themselves as things that just work, unnoticed by the very fact of their practical efficiency – “Problems scream, solutions whisper,” as a new friend working on “solutions journalism” recently told me. Thus it is, for …
Continue reading ‘Optimism, problems journalism, and solutions journalism. And groundwater.’ »
OK, not really “news”, but I made you click, and this is the Internet, so let’s proceed: Scientists believe the avocado, with its enormous wood-like seed, evolved to be eaten by enormous animals that lived thousands of years ago. One of these animals would chow down on some avocados and either leave partially-eaten fruit (and …
For those following efforts to cobble together an expanded Colorado River water conservation deal (that’s all of you, right?) there are a couple of important issues to unpack in Ian James’ excellent interview published yesterday with Kevin Kelley, general manager of the Imperial Irrigation District. Imperial, the largest single water using agency on the Colorado, …