Peak Cheap Water?
We’re not running out of water in the West. What we’re running out of is cheap water in the West. – Jeff Mount
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Pollution cleanup as a solution to water supply shortfalls
As Southern California looks at its next water supply steps, one of the top items on its agenda is cleaning up groundwater contamination. It’s cheaper than building more storage. So says MWD’s Jeff Kightlinger: I think you’re going to see the next wave of investments over the next decades in Southern California focused around issues …
Continue reading ‘Pollution cleanup as a solution to water supply shortfalls’ »
Our increasingly efficient use of water
Another reason for optimism about our ability to solve our water messes: [I]n most regions, the water needed to feed one person decreased even if diets became richer, because of the increase in water use efficiency in food production during the past half-century. Global Changes and Drivers of the Water Footprint of Food Consumption: A …
Continue reading ‘Our increasingly efficient use of water’ »
The Four Corners is a complicated place
The Four Corners is a very big, very arid, and very complicated place.
George Maxwell, Colorado River irrigation and the “Asiatic menace”
When I first ran across the rantings of George Maxwell as the Colorado River Compact was being developed in the 1920s, their racism seemed almost comical. Here he is in a written submission to the 14th Meeting of the Colorado River Commission, Nov. 13, 1922 (pdf from University of Colorado): The flood menace must not …
Continue reading ‘George Maxwell, Colorado River irrigation and the “Asiatic menace”’ »
Little Water
The aptly named “Little Water,” on the Navajo Nation in northwest New Mexico. The weather station at Canyon de Chelly, which looks like it’s about 30 miles away across the border in Arizona, has recorded 1.52 inches (3.86 cm) of rain so far in 2014, which is less than half of mean precip through May …
a stupendous achievement by means of irrigation
In no part of the wide world is there a place where Nature had provided so perfectly for a stupendous achievement by means of irrigation as in that place where the Colorado River flows uselessly past the international desert. – William Smythe, Sunset Mangazine, 1900, quoted in Eric Boime, “Beating Plowshares into Swords”: The Colorado …
Continue reading ‘a stupendous achievement by means of irrigation’ »
Someone built this a long time ago
Back from Mesa Verde and filing my pictures, there is this: More impressive to me, in some ways, than the big stuff. Eight centuries ago, some people went to a lot of trouble to climb up to that upper alcove and build a little wall. Maybe they built more. I don’t know.
Water is different than other industrial raw materials, but how, and why?
NPR’s Dan Charles had a nice piece on California’s drought this week digging down a layer into how farmers are actually responding to California’s drought. They are: Fallowing fields of annual crops like corn to ensure they have enough water for their permanent crops, like almonds. Sarah Woolf takes me on a tour of her …
Continue reading ‘Water is different than other industrial raw materials, but how, and why?’ »
You can’t use negative water – the dilemma of water policy planning by projection
Kyle Mittan had some nice straight talk recently in the Tucson Weekly from the University of Arizona’s Sharon Megdal about Arizona’s projections that it’ll need another million acre feet per year of water by 2060: “A million acre-feet is a lot of water,” she said. “But is that the right number, or is that symbolic …