I’m on the hunt for the origins of the phrase “practicably irrigable”. If anyone has any insights, please jump in on the comments. Here’s what I know: The concept is central to water law in the western United States. The first reference I’m able to find in the U.S. legal canon is in the 1960 …
California’s remarkable, looming drought conditions are a test, and via OtPR we’re seeing some clues as to who will pass: Southern California prepared for this and has a sufficient buffer that it doesn’t need to ration this year. And how did Southern California prepare? In part by being audacious enough and rich enough, but also …
Back in the 1980s, a researcher named Lawrence Hamilton (gated JSTOR paper here) studied water use and conservation behavior among the residents of 431 homes in Concord, New Hampshire. Concord’s a classic case – a slow, steady population increase putting pressure on supply that’s manageable during wet times but that became a problem in 1980, …
Continue reading ‘Vegas: It’s easier to conserve water if you’ve been wasting a lot to begin with’ »
My friend Judy Liddell posted a lovely picture of a Rio Grande bosque great blue heron on her Facebook page yesterday, to which I had this comment: I have a lot of birds for which I say “That’s my favorite bird!” But I think the great blue heron may really be my favorite, the first bird …
One of the significant areas of climate research right for us in the southwestern United States involves work on modeling the large (spatially and temporally) droughts that are so significant in long term human and ecosystem dynamics. These are the ones that are not just one-year whammies, but linger for decades, like the drought of …
I think this was taken right before all that bad stuff started happening to Dorothy, the witches etc.
The status of the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow raises some fascinating transboundary questions. As water moves across state boundaries, who bears responsibility when upstream actions affect an endangered species in a downstream state? The fish, once found from the mountains of northern New Mexico to the Gulf of Mexico, is gone from all but …
In his book Border Oasis, Evan Ward tells the story of the transborder conflict between the United States and Mexico over salinity in the Colorado River. “Unfortunately,” Ward writes, “sometimes when one region solves its salinity problems, it creates new salinity problems for people downriver.” The conflict Ward describes began in 1961 when farmers on …
There’s no denying the spectacle of thousands of snow geese. The Jan. 17 Bosque del Apache bird count put the number at the central New Mexico refuge at 55,000. Lissa and I watched entranced this afternoon as some subset of that, many thousands strong, flew and landed and flew again in the north farm fields …