California almonds
The price California farmers can get for their almonds doubled between 2007 and last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Strong incentive to plant more trees, drought notwithstanding:
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Dams, water, and the Arizona state seal
Arizona’s state seal is a fascinating bit of iconography in light of the state’s uneasy relationship with aridity and developed water. A dam, a river and irrigated land are given center stage – water projects as state destiny. Today I learned the seal’s details are actually enshrined in the state constitution: In the background shall be …
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In drought, would peripheral tunnels doom the Sacramento delta?
Doug Obegi lays out an interesting argument about the implications of drought for the “Bay Delta Conservation Plan”, the California plan to build great water-carrying tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for farms and cities to the south. On paper, the tunnels would be largely dry during drought years, to preserve salinity balance in the …
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Has drought halted California’s ag boom?
USDA estimates of revenue from California crop production (excluding horticulture) in recent years. I know just enough about this data to be misleading or dangerous, so I make no claims, but it sure seems interesting. Source: USDA NASS
Pat Mulroy and “the tragedy of the anticommons”
Lea-Rachel Kosnick, in a paper a few years back, described the “tragedy of the anticommons”. In a classic “tragedy of the commons,” every pumper is sticking their straw into an aquifer and sucking it out, with no incentive to conserve because the other folks will just take the rest anyway. In the “anticommons” example, there …
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John Wesley Powell and climate assessment, then and now
An interesting paper compares the 19th century work of John Wesley Powell in measuring the climate of the West, and suggesting policy responses, with 21st century efforts to assess and advise with respect to climate change. Powell argued for constraints on development while the science needed to better understand the region was carried out. It …
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Western water visualization
Dean Farr Farrell has made a great visualization tool of western U.S. reservoir levels.
Water in the West MOOC
Anne Gold and Eric Gordon at the University of Colorado are doing what looks like a very cool MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on Water in the West: We begin our journey with an overview of the geography of the Interior West and its extreme contrasts, from snow-capped high mountain peaks to bone-dry deserts. We …
jfleck’s water news – are we over we overreacting to California drought?
Succeeded in hitting my Monday morning target for this week’s water news. One of my readers complained that I’m writing too much to keep up with these days (I’ve got a lot of ideas, which I bake halfway and then slop onto Inkstain. You’re my test market.) The newsletter was an attempt to provide a …
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New Mexico water policy: on muddling through
My former newspaper colleague Win Quigley came over to the UNM Water Resources Program offices the other day to talk to Bruce Thomson and I about central New Mexico’s water problems and the virtue (or inevitability) of muddling through: “We know how to do this. Humans are adaptable,” Fleck said. “When people have less water, …
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