Living by a creek in Vail, an open window, the lullaby: I loved that sound, what Wallace Stegner, in one of his many books, called “The Sound of Mountain Water.” In those same years I often kept my window open at night, lulled to sleep with the sweet discourse of a billion water molecules sloshing, …
Continue reading ‘Allen Best on the lullaby of spring runoff’ »
More than a dozen Native American communities in the Colorado River Basin have yet to have their legal entitlements to a share of the river’s water quantified, according to a new report from the Colorado River Research Group. With the river’s water already over-appropriated (meaning users, largely non-Indian, have built farms and cities that have …
At the risk of driving faster than is prudent on a twisty mountain road at night, the new 2016-17 climate outlook released yesterday does not look particularly encouraging for the Colorado River Basin: That’s December 2016 – February 2017. Browns mean odds are shifted toward dry. A reminder that the maps can be a little …
Continue reading ‘New outlook shifts odds slightly toward dry 2016-17 across Colorado River Basin’ »
It’s a bait and switch. The answer is “no”. (It always is when it ends with a question mark. See Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.) But as I report in my water newsletter, there are some encouraging signs that we’re moving in the right direction. You can subscribe to the newsletter, which is supposed to come …
Continue reading ‘Have we stabilized the Colorado River’s water supplies?’ »
I’m not sure I would be as sanguine as this Coachella pepper packer about the long term availability of water: The process of producing peppers is both simple and complicated. “Workers, water, weather–those are our three big headaches,” Aiton says. Aiton says while water is a concern in the state, it’s not as critical in …
Continue reading ‘With Colorado River water, growing peppers’ »
Some years ago, my adult child gave me a pair of rainbow unicorn socks. They’re really nice, comfy socks, but in a complicated way. They are quite literally comfy – thin and stretchy, made of a high quality fabric. More than that, the rainbows and the unicorns are for me an assertion of comfort in …
Continue reading ‘some thoughts on my rainbow unicorn socks’ »
I’m working on a couple of projects right now in which I’m trying to help policymakers effectively communicate complex science (involving drought, climate change, and water availability, but that goes without saying, right?) in political and policy processes. Paul Cairney suggests the constraints: In debate, evidence is mentioned a lot, but only to praise the …
Continue reading ‘the role of science and evidence in decision-making processes’ »
tl;dr The Phoenix kerfuffle over a Nestlé bottled water plant is an example of people distracted by a facile but meaningless caricature of the problem they think they care about. longer: When University of New Mexico Water Resources Program graduate student Sara Gerlitz* was looking at Arizona water management over the last year, she zeroed in …
Continue reading ‘Nestlé, Phoenix water, and the bicycle shed problem’ »
I got an education this year in the nuances of global toxic materials regulatory regimes when I served on UNM graduate student Rachel Moore’s masters committee with Caroline Scruggs, a professor here at the university who’s worked for years in this area. (The paper on their work is here.) Caroline showed up in the Albuquerque …