There are no silver bullets for dealing with the west’s water problems. There is instead, as several speakers said last week at a workshop I attended, “bronze buckshot”. The Metropolitan Water District board yesterday handed out 16 grants to local Southern California water agencies that looked very much like what this metaphor implies – lots …
From yesterday’s newspaper: The (San Juan) basin, in northwestern New Mexico, has every competing water interest you’d want in the mix if you were creating a recipe for conflict: Native American water rights (the Navajo and Jicarilla Apache nations), endangered species (the Colorado pikeminnow and razorback sucker), farming large and small, city water use and …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: water management tools we learned in kindergarten’ »
The Times-Standard in Humboldt County (northern California) reports that someone swiped 20,000 gallons of water. From a school: Bridgeville Elementary School was reopened Wednesday after being forced to close for a day when staff discovered up to 20,000 gallons of water had been stolen from an onsite water tank during the Labor Day weekend. ”There …
Albuquerque’s Rio Grande is currently not much of a river. Lissa and I made the rounds this afternoon of a few Rio Grande viewpoints. This is from Albuquerque’s West Bluff neighborhood, on the west side of the river north of downtown. The bridge in the distance is Montaño. With an abysmal snowpack, the river was …
This is such an old story, but the new garb makes an interesting side-by-side comparison: a community faces tension as a new water user comes to town. In Barnhart, in West Texas, it’s fracking for oil: The Barnhart area has been hard-hit by drought, he said, just as surging oil and gas drilling activities have …
Continue reading ‘Q: What do fracking and viticulture have in common?’ »
Southern California, if I may quote myself, didn’t have enough water to support a city, “so they built three great rivers.” Not one or two. Three aqueducts to carry water to “the southland”, as we called it in my youth. The audacity of that act is captured in this map I stumbled across today, from …
Continue reading ‘The audacity of building rivers: Parker Dam and the Colorado River Aqueduct’ »
If one wanted the Kansas portion of the Ogallala Aquifer to last forever, to be farmable sustainably in perpetuity, one would need to cut back current groundwater mining by 80 percent to bring withdrawals into line with natural recharge, according to a new study published last week in PNAS. That ain’t gonna happen. But even …
I’m thinking I may need to update my tree rings book, or write a new one. Much of my focus was on measurements of tree ring width, which makes sense. If you pick the right tree, the ring width can tell you whether a year was dry or wet. Thin rings mean the tree didn’t …
Continue reading ‘Tree rings: it’s not just the width any more, it’s the isotopes’ »