Smart words from Annie Snider on tomorrow’s Senate hearing on western water problems and drought: There are no silver bullets, and few, if any, of the opportunities that do exist are cheap. Details on the hearing here.
Many Navajo homes lack running water. Many more draw from shallow wells with poor quality water and resulting health problems. Now, my friends Olivier Uyttebrouck and Roberto Rosales report, this community could also lose its hauler, the grandma who trucks in the only clean water available: As she pulls up outside a house, residents quickly …
A month that Eric Kuhn of the Colorado River Water Conservation District in western Colorado called a “miracle May” has left the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs in much better shape than we might have expected given the glum projections of doomsayers like me. Precipitation across the Colorado River Basin has been well above average, …
Mount Holyoke’s “Academic Minute” has a nice interview with Park Williams, who’s been using tree rings to flesh out the story of the current drought in the context of historic droughts, as it pertains to forests in the Southwest: I study the year-by-year records left by these rings, and they tell a fascinating story more …
My friend Phil King, a professor at New Mexico State University and water advisor to the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, has been following the water down through the Rio Grande southern New Mexico valleys as irrigation season starts: For those unfamiliar with water management practices in Southern New Mexico, this is an odd place. …
Continue reading ‘Rio Grande flows again through southern New Mexico’ »
Abrahm Lustgarten and Naveena Sadasivam at ProPublica have launched their eagerly awaited western water series with a great piece today on the impact of agricultural subsidies on water use in the Colorado River Basin. They focus on cotton, which uses a lot of water and, they argue, only gets grown because of the structure of …
Continue reading ‘ProPublica on the Colorado River Basin solution space’ »
Kathleen Ferris of the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association on the difficulty of comparative water use analysis: [C]omprehensive information on conservation and reuse implemented to date is not available. Each of the water providers within the ten metropolitan areas track information about their conservation programs differently. For example, water use in central Arizona is tracked by …
Continue reading ‘The difficulty in U.S. municipal water use comparisons’ »
In 1952, Robert Gottlieb and Margaret FitzSimmons explain in their 1991 book Thirst for Growth, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California essentially extended a promise to the communities it served: build away, we’ll get you the water as needed. It came in the form of the “Laguna Declaration” (so named because of the lovely …
I’m not great with plants, so feel a little silly for not realizing the green plants in the foreground (which I’ve been seeing in our Albuquerque riverside bosque for years) are alfalfa. But after spending time in alfalfa farms recently, I snapped to the connection and sent a picture to Tim Lowrey, a University of …
Amid the rhetoric of doom, California agriculture has so far been growing its way through drought: Even as many farmers cut back their planting, California’s farm economy overall has been surprisingly resilient. Farm employment increased by more than 1 percent last year. Gross farm revenue from crop production actually increased by two-tenths of 1 percent …
Continue reading ‘California ag showing remarkable resilience’ »