From this morning’s newspaper: The community’s total water use for the year, 32 billion gallons, was the lowest for the metro area since 1983, despite the fact that the population in the utility’s service area has grown 70 percent in the two decades since, according to Katherine Yuhas.
If it’s too intense and too early in the spring, it can blow all the snow and moisture away in the mountains as if winter had never happened. Then there’s no snow to become water to drain into the rivers, to come into the fields. That’s from Stacia Spragg-Braude’s new book If There’s Squash Bugs …
I suppose it’s a sign of the times on the Colorado River that a January forecast of 95 percent of average flow into Lake Powell counts as good news. Since green on the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center map runs from 90 to 110 percent, we get green. It’s only a little bit below average! …
Continue reading ‘For now, some breathing room on the Colorado River’ »
Some months ago, I found myself at a speaking engagement at a posh resort in the hills outside San Diego, the sort with beautiful eucalyptus trees, and golf carts. I’d brought some business attire for my panel discussion (in our family we refer to them as “grownup clothes”), but realized I’d forgotten to pack socks. …
Continue reading ‘The rich are different from you and me. They have nicer socks.’ »
For Christmas, my friend Alison gave me the 1928 Popular Science Monthly “Pocket Guide to Science.” It’s a treasure, including things like this: What produced the Grand Canyon of Arizona? It was cut down, during millions of years, by the Colorado River which still flows in the bottom of it. The sand and clay cut …
Three years ago John Leeper, then head of the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources, told me about the importance of the deal that assigns long-neglected water rights along with the money to bring the water to arid eastern side of the reservation: “Real water to real people in real time.” Last week Roberto Rosales …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: real water, real people’ »
It is said that Chinle, a Navajo community in northeastern Arizona, has one of the largest high school basketball gyms in the country. Basketball is very popular in Indian Country.