The January forecast is out. It is too early to panic, but not to early to have this concern duly noted: With a bad snowpack so far, even a wet spring may not be enough to forestall the fifth consecutive year of below-average runoff on the Rio Grande, according to forecaster Angus Goodbody with the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: another dry year on the Rio Grande?’ »
Interesting tidbit out of California’s San Joaquin Valley: Pasture owners around Oakdale willing to go without water will be paid for fallowing their land this year, Oakdale Irrigation District directors decided Tuesday. The water saved by idling fields will be sold to thirsty out-of-county water agencies. OID landowners volunteering for the deal could collect millions …
This looks like a story about forest health, fire risk, and restoration. And in a way, I guess, it is. But beyond the specifics of the challenges they’re trying to address, the underlying governance issues that the folks at the Rio Grande Water Fund are tackling are the fascinating part: What McCarthy did next sets …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: watershed health and governance models’ »
Reed Benson has read the CRomnibus, the ginormous federal spending bill approved late last year as Congress was heading out the door, and helpfully digested some of the key water policy bits so the rest of us don’t have to. For the Colorado River, the bill… allows the Bureau to “fund or participate in pilot …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River federal policy in the CRomnibus’ »
Elephant Butte Reservoir, the main storage reservoir on the Rio Grande that provides irrigation and municipal water for southern New Mexico, the El Paso, and Juarez areas, starts the new year at just 13 percent capacity, down a hair from last year at this time. Some data points as we ponder a new water year …
Continue reading ‘The sorry state of Elephant Butte Reservoir’ »
Lest our city shrivel and die, we must have more water, we must built a great new aqueduct to the Colorado. William Mulholland, Los Angeles, 1925, as quoted in Vincent Ostrom’s Water and Politics
Arizona’s superwaterwonk Sharon Megdal on the Colorado River’s “structural deficit”: We have a problem. Arizona, California and Nevada together use more water than normally flows to us. This is called structural deficit. It’s like living on a budget that regularly exceeds your income. The piece has lots more in it, a good lay primer on …
Continue reading ‘Megdal on the lower Colorado’s “structural deficit”’ »
Santa Fe’s oft-proclaimed “oldest inhabited home in the U.S.” may not even by the oldest house in Santa Fe, because tree rings! The building at 215 E. De Vargas St., famously named “the oldest inhabited home in the U.S.” byHarper’s Weekly in 1879, may not even be the oldest in Santa Fe. Tree-ring testing appears to …
Continue reading ‘The oldest house? Really? Tree rings strike again’ »
Brett Walton: California, its hand forced in 2014 by a nasty drought, brought its groundwater laws out of the Gold Rush era and into line with nearly every other state in the Union. New York’s Democratic governor banned fracking for natural gas, in large part because of concerns about water pollution. Kansas debated how to …
Continue reading ‘Are U.S. states finally responding to the press of water scarcity?’ »
It was only a quarter of an inch, but boy’s gotta shovel the snow when he has a chance, eh? Happy new year.