storifying the Rio Grande
Trying an experiment here (because there are some things you can’t get to work on your employer’s production server) [View the story “A dwindling Rio Grande” on Storify]
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Kodas on wildfire
From Prescott, Michael Kodas helped the Newshour audience this evening understand the complex interplay of climate change, a century of fire suppression and rapid growth at the wildland-urban interface: Watch Hotter Temps, Drought, Development Drive Fire Problems on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: irrigating the Rio Grande
From the morning paper, Day 1 (Day N?) of my Rio Grande death watch: JARALES – There’s a great line about New Mexico’s central river, often attributed to Will Rogers: “The Rio Grande is the only river I ever saw that needed irrigation.” Whether Rogers said it or not (and there is some question), it …
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Lund on a call for a new environmentalism
Smart Jay Lund piece on the shortcomings of old-school environmentalism in the new world: Classical environmentalism is mostly about stopping new harmful human influences, not reversing the harmful effects of past changes or shaping a more environmentally friendly future. Environmentalism has not substantially reversed the widespread urban and agricultural destruction of wetlands or freed rivers …
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Cutting the Gordian knot of the Upper Colorado River Basin’s delivery obligations
The folks at the University of Colorado’s Colorado River Governance Initiative have a clever idea to keep the Upper Basin states from getting screwed by climate change. Their new Upper Basin Voluntary Demand Cap white paper (pdf) offers a solution path for one of the stickiest problems in future Colorado Basin water management under climate change. In …
Another dry month at my house
I take my rainfall measurements at 7 a.m., so June’s over for me. I’m happy to report that our 0.14 inch (36 cm) of rain puts us over an inch for the Oct-now “water year”! We’re planning a fireworks celebration for later this evening, out by the dry brush in the far back corner of …
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: in small-town drought, why the wells go dry
We’ve seen a lot of news media attention in New Mexico’s drought of 2013 to the little village of Magdalena, where the wells earlier this month went dry. Small towns are especially vulnerable in drought. But as I dug into the data the last few weeks, I realized that journalistically swooping down on the town …
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Raising Shasta Dam
One of my gazillion water book ideas was “The Last Concrete”. It was going to be about the end of big water infrastructure in the West. Except there’s no way to know when the last one happens, because there are a bunch of lingering projects that probably won’t ever get built, but that don’t ever …
Marble Canyon: burrowing into the Earth
From the 1923 US Geological Survey’s Birdseye Expedition of the Grand Canyon. The full caption: Sheer walls in Marble Canyon. The rate at which this canyon burrows its way into the earth never fails to astonish the traveler entering it for the first time. Twenty miles below its head, the walls are 2,000 feet above …
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The Great Mistake, 1928 edition
With “Chasing Water” and “Moving Water” taken, the current working title for my Colorado River book-in-progress is “The Great Mistake.” It doesn’t have enough action verbiness for the final cut, but it seems to nicely frame one of my central themes – that the folks who built the elaborate plumbing system in the Colorado River …