Arrayed on the left-hand hillside of the Alabama Hills were the large letters LP spelled out in white-washed rocks that stood for Lone Pine. Driving through the town, you can still see the letters, which are refurbished by locals in a ritual familiar to many communities in the Western states. Ansel Adams was so disturbed …
Trying some stuff that I don’t want to do on my employer’s production server. Nothing to see here. Move along. Img 924111903 0001 (PDF) Img 924111903 0001 (Text)
Henry Brean on Pat Mulroy, arguably the most significant water manager in the Colorado River Basin: She got her bachelor’s degree from UNLV, then stayed on to earn her master’s in German literature. Laugh if you will, she said, but “it’s a great study in human nature, and it’s a great study in political theory.”
There’s a newsroom joke that “we don’t write about planes that don’t crash,” but I think it’s important to think carefully about societal systems that succeed, because lessons learned matter: The flood pulse was impressive. But it is instructive to look at how much larger it would have been if not for a pair of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the flood that wasn’t’ »
Here’s Henry Brean: Long-time Southern Nevada Water Authority chief Pat Mulroy is preparing to retire but won’t make a formal announcement until “she’s ready,” Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak said Monday. And Conor Shine: Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager Pat Mulroy is planning to retire after 22 years on the job. Reached Monday evening, …
Writing in Science four years ago, the late Elinor Ostrom outlined a number of characteristics of necessary for sustainable development and use of what’s called in the literature “social-ecological systems”. These are complexes of humans and resources where the success of each depends on the interplay with the other, like forests and fisheries and, for …
Continue reading ‘California groundwater: bring on the social scientists’ »
A snowy egret showed up this afternoon amid the turtles sunning themselves on the Rio Grande Nature Center’s pond. We took some pictures. [slideshow_deploy id=’8238′]
From the work blog: Corky Herkenhoff, who’s been farming at San Acacia for half a century, told me he can tell where the runoff is coming from by the smell. San Acacia sits just below the Rio Puerco and Rio Salado, two generally dry tributaries that have been pumping water into the Rio Grande over …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the Rio’s smell’ »
Swirls as the muddy Rio Grande passed through Albuquerque this morning: (Much electronic manipulation of the image to bring out those colors. It was pretty, but not quite that pretty.)
In the midst of a very unusual storm (see my newspaper explanation of its unusualness here), I’ve spent much of the last 24 hours watching a big slug of water make its way down the Rio Grande Valley in which Albuquerque sits. A source yesterday afternoon pointed me to the readings on the USGS San …
Continue reading ‘Chasing water in the desert: the great Rio Grande “flood” of 2013’ »