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.
Pulling together some New Mexico water use numbers today for one of my University of New Mexico colleagues, I was reminded of a cool paper from a few years back by Peter H. Gleick and Meena Palaniappan of the Pacific Institute that contained this striking graph: It’s two times series – U.S. gross domestic product and …
Continue reading ‘Decoupling water use from growth: the New Mexico example’ »
How is it that residents of Southern California’s urbanized coastal plain (sort of) have voting rights in an irrigation district clear across the state? Pull up a chair…. At its Aug. 17 meeting, the Water Planning and Stewardship Committee of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California takes up this item: View note Let’s …
Continue reading ‘Water governance is weird, PVID-MWD democracy edition’ »
The pictures out of Durango today of mine waste in the Animas River are horrifying, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency is rightly taking a beating for the catastrophic mine waste leak: The overall message from federal regulators was “we’re very sorry.” “This is a huge tragedy and it’s hard being on the other side …
Continue reading ‘Governance and the Animas River mine waste mess’ »
I’ve got a piece over at Water Deeply on Arizona’s latest latest self-destructive Colorado River Basin outburst and the clash between state-by-state domestic politics and the realities of management at the Colorado River Basin scale.
What does the growing El Niño oceanic pattern mean for the Colorado River Basin? Best to just shrug, and say the statistics are too small to say much of anything conclusive. In the nine El Niño years since the 1960s, three have been wet, three have been in the middle, and three have been dry. Here’s a …
Continue reading ‘What does El Niño mean for the Colorado River Basin?’ »
Those unfamiliar with the volcanoes on Albuquerque’s west side will have to take me at my word when I assert that they are not normally this green:
I would say “warm climate” is a fair description of the Imperial Valley in California’s southeastern corner. It’s 109 degrees there this afternoon (43C). Below is a great addition to my collection of adverts as the real estate boosters tried to lure folks to the desert during that oddly magical time when waves of immigrants …
Continue reading ‘Imperial Valley, circa 1903: “an unlimited amount of water”’ »