From Brett Walton’s piece on a proposal to divert water from the Gila River in New Mexico (in the Lower Colorado River Basin), an old school argument for building western water infrastruccture: Gutierrez does not believe that the unit cost for water — what a city or a farmer will pay for an acre-foot — …
Continue reading ‘On the Gila River in New Mexico, a “field of dreams” argument’ »
The long awaited “Moving Forward Phase 1” report on opportunities for managing water in the Colorado River Basin plopped into public view this afternoon. I’m going to use the prerogative of a journalist no longer beholden to daily deadlines to wait until I’ve actually had time to review and think about the 448 page report about …
Continue reading ‘A window of opportunity to move the Colorado River dialogue forward’ »
With critics saying there’s no way New Mexico can get 14,000 acre feet of water from the Gila River, as promised in the Arizona Water Settlements Act, Avelino Maestas reports that state officials are talking about a second diversion, on the San Francisco: The Gila River may not be able to supply the 14,000 acre …
Daniel Crawford and Scott St. George at the University of Minnesota have collaborated on another fascinating attempt to use music to communicate data about our warming world: Todd Reubold at Ensia has more on the project.
Since I left my job at the Albuquerque Journal, I’ve not been devoting the obsessive attention to local water that I did when I was, y’know, paid to. But a boy has to have a hobby, right? So this week I emailed David Morris at the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority requesting a copy …
Continue reading ‘Albuquerque’s water use continues to decline’ »
Pat Mulroy in the Las Vegas Sun on the interconnected west-wide artificial watershed we’ve built for ourselves, and why efforts to solve the Sacramento Delta’s problems matter to the rest of us: From the vantage point of Sacramento, the Colorado River may seem distant and disconnected to the challenges in the delta. Yet, the two …
Continue reading ‘Mulroy: We’ve built one giant watershed’ »
I’ve the privilege of giving the commencement talk for the University of New Mexico Biology Department’s graduation ceremony tomorrow, and I’m nervous as hell. It’s such an honor to be asked, and feels like such a hopeless task – hard to match words to the measure of the importance of the day. (“A commencement speaker …
Tom Philpott, who through his Mother Jones pieces has aimed aimed his considerable knowledge of our food system at California’s water problems, sets his sights this week on the Imperial Valley of southeastern California where, as he notes, “Imperial Valley’s farms gets 3.1 million acre-feet annually—more than half of California’s total allotment and more than …
OtPR today offers a list of generally poor rural communities that have seen domestic wells go dry as relatively affluent almond farms pump down regional aquifers to keep their orchards alive during the drought. It’s not hard to see why this is wrong: This economic model, in which powerful outsiders come in, displace the natives …
Continue reading ‘An example of why groundwater regulation is hard’ »