The University of Arizona’s Mike Crimmins: But the real answer might be for Arizonans and other people of the southwest to adapt to living under drought conditions. “We expect it to be a lot wetter than it is and it should be,” Crimmins said. “Just look around, the landscape tells the story. This is not …
At Costco over the weekend in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I snapped this iPhone picture of California almonds, lots of them. I was planning the joke even before I took it about imported California water, on sale here in the desert. Which is true. Takes a lot of California water to make these almonds. But upon …
Brett Walton reports this morning on the initial cost estimates for a pipeline/canal thingie to move Missouri River water to western Kansas: By all measures, it would be a mammoth undertaking. A 360-mile canal to move Missouri River water uphill across Kansas would cost $US 18 billion to build and $US 1 billion per year …
Continue reading ‘The Hard Path: moving water costs a lot’ »
My Albuquerque Journal colleague Win Quigley, intrigued by the coyotes in his Albuquerque Country Club neighborhood, near downtown, visited with the Bosque Environmental Monitoring Program’s Dan Shaw and wrote this: [C]onsider the country club neighborhood, Shaw said. Kit Carson Park and the country club golf course abut the irrigation ditch, which abuts Tingley Beach, which …
Continue reading ‘We don’t get to decide nature’s boundaries’ »
A few years back, I put on my “water beat reporter” hat and went to Santa Fe for the spring legislative session to track some bills that I found interesting. The newspaper has a team of skilled legislative specialists who I’ve always been able to lean on, but it was fun to bring my water …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico water policy and the problems of a part-time legislature’ »
The negotiation of the 1922 Colorado River Compact governing the allocation of water from the West’s great river, and the ratification process that followed, was a politically delicate process. Precisely how delicate is made clear in a fascinating exchange of letters 10 years after between Colorado attorney Delph Carpenter (the compact’s primary architect) and Norcutt …
Continue reading ‘Transparency and the Colorado River Compact’ »
That corner in Winslow Arizona, the one with the pretty girl and the flatbed Ford? Actually happened in Flagstaff, the truck was a Toyota.: Browne was traveling through Arizona when he began working on the song. But the scene about the corner and a girl in the Ford was written by Frey after Browne related …
Continue reading ‘The West has always been, in part, a thing of our imagination’ »
In honor of Aldo Leopold’s birthday, some jfleck abqjournal nostalgia with this old favorite from 2009, in which I tracked down a bird in the University of New Mexico’s research collection that Leopold “collected” back in 1919: Years ago, my parents gave me “Aldo Leopold’s Wilderness,” a slim volume of Leopold’s early writings. In it …
If we don’t get things right, water conservation can actually make us less resilient in the face of variability and climate change, the University of Arizona’s Christopher Scott and colleagues argue in a recent paper. It’s the case for being wary of “demand hardening”, and it raises interesting questions about current Colorado River Basin conservation …
Continue reading ‘To what extent does water conservation reduce resilience?’ »
Gary Woodard argues that we need to stop worrying so much about running out of water and do a better job instead of planning for the fact that we’re using less: Stories about the alarming state of water in the West seem to be everywhere. Prolonged drought, scant snowpacks, receding reservoirs, rampant groundwater overdraft, and …