Lissa spotted this California desert treat this morning at Trader Joe’s in Albuquerque: It’s a cantaloupe from Fisher Ranch in Blythe, Calif., owned by Bart Fisher, vice president of the Palo Verde Irrigation District board and chairman of the Colorado River Board of California. I pronounce this a fine use of senior Colorado River water …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River produce in Albuquerque (courtesy Fisher Ranch)’ »
Tony Perry in the Los Angeles Times had a good story this weekend talking about the agreement between the Palo Verde Irrigation District and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to move ag water to city use in the cities’ time of need: Next year the agreement between MWD and the Palo Verde Irrigation …
Continue reading ‘Palo Verde: what Colorado Basin water problem solving looks like’ »
This is part of a Library of Congress collection of photographs taken as part of the Historical American Engineering Record surveys, an amazing body of documentation of America’s built environment. The pictures in this LOC on line archive aren’t dated, but my best guess based on clues (a distinctive URL) is 1987. Mead was close …
Brian Devine has one of the smartest takes on visceral outrage and deep underlying problems associated with the Animas mine release: All development of the natural environment carries risk to our water resources. I suppose it’s human nature to ignore that fact and instead focus on the bright orange river staring you in the face. …
A new paper by Megan Miller and Manoochehr Shirzaei at Arizona State describing subsidence in the Phoenix area offers some interesting new data for thinking about the implications of groundwater management. Subsidence is bad, and groundwater pumping is what causes it. Having the ground surface drop is bad all around, cracking building foundations, messing up roads, and such. …
Continue reading ‘Phoenix subsidence and groundwater pumping’ »
The notion of using “Las Vegas” and “sustainable” in the same sentence might give a lot of westerners the heebee jeebees, but there’s an interesting case to be made that its water management decisions over the last decade have pointed it in that direction. The Economist, in a look at Vegas water performance in its …
Continue reading ‘The Economist gives Las Vegas points for water management’ »
The idea of installing smart water meters is in vogue these days, with the idea that water users, if made more aware of how much water they’re using all the time (rather than just when they get their monthly bills), will use less: In the spring of 2005, the City of Aurora, Colorado offered residents …
Continue reading ‘Real time water meter data causes people to use more water, not less’ »
Brett Walton: The value of the California drought, painful as it is, is that the state’s citizens are beginning to ask the sorts of questions that might previously have been confined to a conference room. Who gets water? How much? Who decides? What is valuable – economically, socially, ecologically – about rebuilding a wetland, or …
Continue reading ‘The hidden value of the California drought’ »
The Imperial County Agriculture 1965, one in a series of reports I’ve been reading on the history of ag production in the California desert, has an insanely cool picture on its cover that sent me down the NASA rabbit hole. It’s kind of grainy, a picture of Imperial from space labeled “Gemini V Official NASA …
Continue reading ‘Imperial, Coachella, and the Salton Sea, from Gemini V, August 1965’ »
I’ve been busy writing the last few weeks (writing a book turns out to be hard) but surfaced today to send off my never-quite-weekly water newsletter. You can subscribe here.