From this morning’s newspaper, a column about a day with a research team studying the Cooper’s hawks that are making an increasingly comfortable living around my city: Cooper’s hawks are primarily woodland birds, and we have built an expansive urban forest across the Northeast Heights. The urban neighborhoods on the east side of the river …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere – the Cooper’s hawks of Albuquerque’ »
update: With the latest hourly reading, the elevation of Lake Mead has dropped to 1,081.84 feet above sea level, the lowest it has been since the reservoir was being filled in the 1930s: Previously: Last night at midnight, the surface elevation of Lake Mead dropped to 1,081.89 feet above sea level, half an inch above …
Continue reading ‘Lake Mead at 1,081.89 feet above sea level and dropping: Is this unprecedented?’ »
California state senator Darrel Steinberg on the California water bond: In the water world, you can’t always get everything you want, but there’s a whole lot in this bond that California needs. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on (I think) taking a lot of drugs and getting laid: You can’t always get what you want …
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Helen Ingram and colleagues on a few necessary conditions for a good solution to water management issues: Good policy design contributes to three key public needs: progress in problem solving that will make tomorrow’s challenges easier than today’s; representation of sufficient interests, so that the policy has a positive balance of support and is politically …
Continue reading ‘Characteristics of a good water policy solution’ »
It’s monsoon season here in New Mexico, which means thunderstorms popping up here and there and, one hopes, everywhere around the state. In my blog stats, I notice that around this time of year I frequently get traffic for people searching for things like “how much rain did Albuquerque get today”. I’m writing this as …
Continue reading ‘How much rain did Albuquerque get last night?’ »
There are many things that represent the profound, ambiguous complexity that is the United States of America – full of ambitious arrogance, profound success and the inevitable clumsiness when power combines with unintended consequences. Hoover Dam is one of them.
[View the story “California drought” on Storify]
I’m not sure “Utah shouldn’t build that pipeline because California might need our water” sounds like a winning political argument, at least if you’re having the argument in Utah. I’m not saying it’s not accurate. Overdevelopment of Upper Colorado River Basin water right now clearly poses a risk of colliding with the Upper Basin’s obligation …
Continue reading ‘Utah and California, sharing a watershed’ »
No Endangered Species Act litigation required for this project on the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico: The Rio Grande is recovering some native vegetation with irrigation water typically used by farmers. The International Boundary and Water Commission oversees water treaties between the United States and Mexico. But lately the agency has invested in river …
Continue reading ‘What water sharing and collaboration can look like’ »