As near as I can tell, the American Civil Liberties Union has no particular stake in water policy. But the venerable champion of free speech is wading into the rancorous New Mexico debate over the possible diversion of water from the Gila River. Lauren Villagran writes (behind surveywall): The American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday …
I like how Mary Z. Fuka described yesterday’s John Fleck 2.0 launch party – I’m a “literary startup“. I need a clever name with some sort of capital letter in the middle or something. And a logo. I need a logo, right? This morning, the day after I finished up the last stories of a …
Fourteen years after Hoover Dam’s gates were closed, U.S. Geological Survey scientists found earth’s crust beneath the dam had sunk 4 inches because of the weight of its impounded water: That’s from Geological Survey Circular 346, First Fourteen Years of Lake Mead, 1954 (pdf), ht Kyle House
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’ »