An homage to Ansel Adams: Moonrise over the Ballpark
Disclosure: I digitally altered the original. The moon was moved.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
The National Environmental Policy Act in western water
The National Environmental Policy Act – NEPA – is a weird bird. It’s one of the earliest of a suite of U.S. environmental laws that took shape in the 1960s and ’70s as environmental values grew into a substantive element of our nation’s politics. It doesn’t actually protect anything, but it does require the U.S. …
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tossing out of the light
I’ve quoted before Don DeLillo’s great description of how, at a night baseball game, under the lights, “the players seem completely separate from the night around them.” At our Albuquerque Isotopes’ home opener this evening, the players’ home whites seemed impossibly white, the grass seemed impossibly green, the sky behind the lights impossibly inky black. In …
Via Nature podcast, Alex Witze on the grand pulse flow experiment
If I’d done the geek stuff right, hit the play button below to hear a really nice piece by Alex Witze of Nature magazine from the Colorado River delta pulse flow. (I know, it’s a magazine, this is audio. Brave new world and all.) If I haven’t done the geek stuff right, you can probably …
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It now looks like 2017 is the earliest we could see a shortage declaration on the Colorado River
The latest Bureau of Reclamation monthly basin operating report, out today (the “24-month study”, pdf), makes it increasingly clear that we’re not going to see Lake Mead drop to levels that would require a shortage declaration in 2016. The shortage is based on Lake Mead’s surface elevation, and the trigger level is 1,075 feet above sea …
pulse flow progress
Courtesy of the folks at CILA, the Mexican boundary and water commission, the latest Colorado River pulse flow map shows water making it past the Laguna restoration sites in the Colorado River delta, continue its slow push toward the Sea of Cortez:
In Las Vegas, an acknowledgment that growth is gone
You can’t understand water in the west without understanding urban growth patterns. They’re joined at the hip. Here, in a single graph, is the explanation for the Vegas announcement yesterday that its two main water agencies are laying off 7.5 percent of their staff: Henry Brean explained it thus: The Southern Nevada Water Authority and …
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The Colorado River is no one thing
Photographer John Trotter on the Colorado River: When they opened those gates on (Morelos) dam and let water back into the main channel on the river, it kind of engaged those people. It brought them back into the mainstream of all the other people who are living along it in Moab or Grand Junction or …
fighting off the desert with fake water
We come to a desert but it is not to our liking. One wonders why, then, we came to a desert, but no matter. We can engineer our way out of this: Meadow Lake was never much of a meadow. It was too wild, too wide, its sage-studded plains golden with buffalo grass and endless …
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Welcome, pulse flow readers. Buy my (old) book!
It occurs to me that the brief and delightful pulse flow of clicks to this blog reading my recent coverage of what’s going on in the Colorado River delta might be potential book buyers. (Duh. Marketing is not my strength.) It’s called The Tree Rings’ Tale, a science book for kids (middle school aged, 13 …
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