I spent a thoroughly fascinating couple of days last week at a workshop organized by the University of New Mexico’s Utton Center (legal wonks thinking about water institutions) on resilience in New Mexico water management. It was a lot of fun, made all the more so by the fact that I was invited Thursday evening …
Continue reading ‘Change, stasis and (or?) resilience in New Mexico water policy’ »
In central New Mexico, the salt cedar beetle seems here to stay, enforcing the Law of Unintended Consequences: Introduced in the 19th century to protect railroad bridge abutments, praised for its ability to protect riverbanks from erosion, vilified for alleged water-sucking ways while simultaneously defended as wildlife habitat, the story of the Eurasian tamarisk – …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: an inordinate fondness for beetles’ »
tl;dr The new Colorado River conservation program may not conserve a whole lot of water. But growing the “civic community” needed to solve the basin’s water problems may be far more important. Longer Version: The Colorado River Pilot System Water Conservation Program crept forward last week, in the process demonstrating an endearing quirk of Colorado …
Continue reading ‘The newest Colorado River management widget: the “System Conservation Program”’ »
In the latest episode of “whos’ not running out of water in California?” we join Ian James for a visit to the Coachella Valley: [V]ast amounts of water are still flowing as usual to the farms of the Coachella Valley, soaking into the soil to produce lemons and tangelos, grapes, and vegetables from carrots to …
Continue reading ‘Coachella: More California drought resilience’ »
To follow up on my post earlier in the week asking that we look beyond Porterville to California communities that aren’t running out of water, and think about what they’ve done to build resiliency in drought, here’s Steve Scauzillo: In 1991, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which imports water from Northern California and the …
Moving large quantities of water long distances is expensive. But there are alternatives: The third-generation dairy farmer was forced to idle a quarter of his 1,200 acres in Tulare County, land that once also bristled with wheat and alfalfa. Now he is buying feed from out of state, paying record-high prices to contractors in Nevada, …
I imagine that if I was a reporter in California, trying to cover the drought, I’d end up in Porterville too. It’s the little community in Tulare County where the taps have gone dry. Jennifer Medina of the New York Times took us there this week, and for residents of a nation used to running …
Continue reading ‘Understanding California’s drought: the “Porterville problem”’ »
To water many western valleys will involve drying up the streams that flow through through them, and this physical fact ought to be faced frankly and honestly. That’s Elwood Mead, sounding an awful lot like a proto-environmentalist, in his 1903 book Irrigation Institutions. Mead, who headed the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation from 1924 to 1936, …
[W]idespread knowledge and well-informed citizen support are not necessarily required for implementation of effective climate policies. From “Does effective climate policy require well-informed citizen support?”, Rhodes et. al, Global Environmental Change, Volume 29, November 2014, Pages 92–104
In my world, the 1976 tree ring analysis of the Colorado River’s long term flow done by Charles Stockton and Gordon Jacoby stands as one of the great works of policy-relevant science. But by the time I came on the scene, “Stockton and Jacoby”* (pdf) was just a marker, a signpost along our path to …
Continue reading ‘Gordon Jacoby and the Colorado River: “predicting hydrologic bankruptcy”’ »