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 …
Continue reading ‘jfleck’s water news – are we over we overreacting to California drought?’ »
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, …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico water policy: on muddling through’ »
Aaron Citron, with the Environmental Defense Fund, argues that identifying farmers as our water problem – They use 80 percent of our water! – is wrong: [F]armers and ranchers are the original environmentalists, water conservationists and land stewards. They have been, and continue to be, among the first to develop innovative water efficiency solutions, and …
There’s a famous 1969 photo by Ernst Haas of Route 66 in Albuquerque, scrubbed by a summer rain, looking east toward the mountains. I’m not smart enough to have been imitating, so this isn’t homage. But if you click on the link (I’m not going to embed the image, respect for copyright) you can see …
The little town of Huron, California (Fresno County, population 7,000) is on the brink of running out of water. Its plight to illustrates a broader point about “running out of water”. First, its story courtesy of the Central Valley News, which reports that Huron could run out of water by July: Huron, a rural farming …
Kindra McQuillan at High Country News interviewed Dan Beard, former head of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, on his provocative new book Deadbeat Dams: Why We Should Abolish the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and Tear Down Glen Canyon Dam: (Dams) distract us. We’re mesmerized by the construction of new facilities, as if it’s going to solve …
Jeff Michael published some new data today suggesting California agricultural has been more resilient and less damaged by the current drought than I expected. “[T]here is virtually no difference in farm employment between 2014 and 2013 in the 3 counties that are thought to be most devastated by the drought,” Michael wrote. But perhaps I …
Continue reading ‘California farming in drought: a “robust corpse?”’ »
Reading Alex Breitler’s story yesterday about Stockton, for the first time in history, restricting the days of the week residents can water their lawns, I was reminded of this bit of business from Las Vegas: In 1950, the municipality began restricting lawn watering. During the next two years the city employed the alternate day method, …
Continue reading ‘The history of odd/even day watering restrictions’ »
Brian Devine gets how awesome this could be: @jfleck If you could mount it on buoyant outriggers it would make the sweetest Lake Havasu party boat EVER — Brian Devine (@bedevine25) March 19, 2015
Today’s long lead forecast from the Climate Prediction Center is pretty sweet: That’s May-July, and here’s a reminder about what the color blobs mean, because that swatch of green across New Mexico, where I live, can be a bit misleading. The CPC divides climatological history into three bins – 1/3 dry, 1/3 the middle, and …
Continue reading ‘For the parched southwestern U.S., a good forecast’ »