Archive of entries posted by jfleck

A farmer’s defense of the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement

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The Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement embodies one of the great experiments in collaborative watershed management under contested conditions, with a complex web of sometimes conflicting interests among agriculture, indigenous communities, fisheries, environmental flows, and power production. It also demonstrates one of the great risks in collaborative water management in the arid West: everyone has to …

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Albuquerque’s water use down another 3.4 percent in 2015

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I keep asking my friends who manage municipal water systems in the West how low their communities’ water use can go. None of them really know, which is fascinating. Their customers’ water use just keep dropping. I’ve been following a couple of communities particularly closely – Albuquerque (because it’s my home town) and Las Vegas …

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Albuquerque recovering stored groundwater, historic first for New Mexico

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Albuquerque yesterday (Oct. 15) began pumping groundwater from an aquifer in the city’s northeast heights, the first time aquifer storage and recovery in New Mexico has reached the “recovery” phase. New Mexico is late to this party – states around us have been doing this for years. But it’s a huge milestone in water management …

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Climate change in New Mexico

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New Mexico journalist (and friend of Inkstain) Laura Paskus today launched a year-long look at climate change in New Mexico. From the opening installment: As the region continues to warm, snowpack will continue to decrease, the snow line will move higher in elevation and farther north, and winter snows will start later and end earlier …

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Lake Mead forecast to drop another 5 feet in the coming year

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Even with a dose of bonus water transferred from the Upper Colorado River Basin’s storage account to the Lower Colorado River Basin’s storage account, Lake Mead is forecast to drop another five feet between now and the end of September, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s first forecast of the 2015-16 water year. We’re …

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It’s hard to explain my daughter’s art, except that she’s good at it

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We’re Approaching Global Warming All Wrong & How To Use Conspiracy Theories To Fix It — Thinkpiece Bot (@thinkpiecebot) October 13, 2015 Sometime yesterday afternoon, my “grandbotchild” @thinkpiecebot passed a milestone: my daughter Nora Reed’s digital art now has more Twitter followers than I do. The bot is a thousand lines of code that is …

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Colorado River salinity program showing its age

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In the latest High Country News, Stephen Elliott reports on the tribulations of the Paradox Valley desal unit run by the Bureau of Reclamation to help reduce salt load on the Colorado River: Without the unit’s deep injection, the salt that covers the desert valley floor at Paradox, and the thousands of tons of it …

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