Best line about water management I ever wrote: Wet years have a way of covering up a multitude of water management sins. Drought exposes them for all to see. It also helps to expose those sins, apparently, if you have satellites. Here’s Jay Famiglietti, talking about what the GRACE satellites show about groundwater depletion in …
Continue reading ‘When there’s a drought, you pump groundwater, until you can’t’ »
[View the story “Thirsty Gecko’s Megadroughts” on Storify]
One more from yesterday’s road trip to the Bosque del Apache, the National Wildlife Refuge 90 minutes’ drive south of Albuquerque. As I’ve written before, snow goose overpopulation is an ecological disaster. But when they take flight? Yowza.
I do not understand this. Not being rhetorical or coy. I really do not understand this. I’ve observed before that Yuma and Imperial counties, the two farm regions that have benefitted from enormous allocations of Colorado River water and the support of the federal government that goes with it, have some of the highest unemployment …
Continue reading ‘Puzzling over water and agricultural economics’ »
There’s so much rich material in Henry Brean’s exit interview of Pat Mulroy, the outgoing head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, that I barely know where to begin, but let’s start with water pricing. Mulroy makes clear (as she always has) that she viewed it as her responsibility to deliver the water the community …
Continue reading ‘Mulroy on growth, supply and water pricing’ »
Lunch today sitting in the car at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, with a pond of snow geese, pintails and assorted other water fowl wintering here in one of the few broad wet spots in the Middle Rio Grande Valley of central New Mexico. A birder friend explained once that the car makes …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert, Bosque del Apache plumbing edition’ »
California, listen to me. (Grabs home state firmly by the shoulders, stares into California’s face intensely.) You can do this. It’s going to be OK. I know, I know. “Zero” sounds bad. But you go into a drought with the water supply and water system you have, not the one you might want or wish …
Continue reading ‘Breathe, California. Keep it together. You can do this.’ »
The question of how tumbleweeds got to America keeps coming up in conversation, but I can never quite remember the details, so I’m typing this up here so I can Google it later as needed. Here’s the version from Tim Egan’s terrific book The Worst Hard Time, a gripping narrative history of the Dust Bowl. …
Nevada journalist George Knapp has a wacky suggestion for Pat Mulroy on her way out the door at the Southern Nevada Water Authority: [I]t is still possible for Mulroy to make a grand, parting gesture by starting the ball rolling on a plan to drain Lake Powell…. This’d make an excellent final chapter for my …
Continue reading ‘Pat Mulroy, the Hayduke of the 21st century’ »