The Four Corners is a complicated place
The Four Corners is a very big, very arid, and very complicated place.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
14-plus years of drought in New Mexico
Inspired by these insanely cool California drought visualizations from Circle of Blue, here’s a drought history in New Mexico over the last 14 years:
Nature or not?
Mule deer, in the grass outside the Far View cafeteria at Mesa Verde National Park. Is this nature? Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world’s leading questionnaire tool.
Endangered species and the question of federal discretion
Simply put, no environmental law has had as much impact on western rivers–or created as much controversy–as section 7 of the ESA. – Reed Benson I’m on record as arguing that the Endangered Species Act is a terrible water management tool, while simultaneously being not terribly effective as an environmental tool. But you manage water …
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