I guess it’s as good as any starting place here to say that Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism is one of the best book’s I’ve read. I come at this from the privilege of growing up in white American suburbia. Baptist’s book suggests this is my story, that the …
In the Colorado River Basin, I’ve been arguing that if you want to think hard about water policy, you have to be thinking hard about alfalfa. Out in California’s Central Valley, as Felicity Barringer explained last week in her last story for the New York Times (sad face), you’ve got to be thinking about almonds: …
Continue reading ‘Almonds, water policy and cropping decisions’ »
The standard Bureau of Reclamation map of the Colorado River Basin has a series of red-dashed slivers beyond the physical boundaries of the basin itself, the places where we’ve chosen to artificially extend the watershed’s boundaries. In the process, we have created entire communities dependent on the success or failure of the basin’s water management …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: first-ever San Juan Chama Project shortfall’ »
With a sub-par snowpack once again in New Mexico’s high country, I got a Twitter question this morning about the last time we’d had a good snowpack. My favorite came in 2008, when I was just starting to track this sort of thing closely: SAN MARCIAL— Water was already lapping at the side of the …
Continue reading ‘On New Mexico’s Rio Grande, a brutal four years’ »
With just a few days left, it looks like Lake Mead will end 2014 down 19 feet, which would be the second biggest one-year drop of the “modern era” (the years since completion of Glen Canyon Dam upstream damped down the river’s ups and downs). With inflow largely regulated by Glen Canyon Dam and outflow largely …
Continue reading ‘Lake Mead in 2014 headed for second biggest drop in modern era’ »
John Van Dyke, in his epic visit to the deserts of western North America a century ago, wrote harshly of their springs: Occasionally one meets with a little stream where a fissure in the rock and a pressure from below forces up some of the water; but these springs are of very rare occurrence. And …
Continue reading ‘the dwindling of California’s “wretched little mud-holes”’ »
Annie Snider left an excellent summary in our Christmas stocking of the state of play on the Colorado River. Lake Mead approaches the end of the Calendar year at elevation 1,087 feet above sea level, which is nearly 20 feet below last year at this time, as basin water managers scramble to build new institutional widgets …
Continue reading ‘Lake Mead: 40 percent full, or 60 percent empty?’ »
In March, President Obama nominated New Mexican Estevan López, who at the time was head of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, to head the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. It was a big deal in a number of ways, not least of which was that, in replacing Mike Connor, López would be the second New Mexican …