Archive of entries posted by jfleck

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: The “futile call” – a water rights priority dilemma

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Drought exposes the fissures in water policy. In the abstract, you can talk about where the problems look like they might lie, and the measures that look like they’re in place to ensure adaptability and sustainability. Drought tests. This week’s test is happening down on the Pecos, a relatively small river that flows out of …

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Folks, we’ve got a drought going on

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Bill Hasencamp at the Metropolitan Water District (I think it was Bill) asked a question today on the Colorada Basin River Forecast Center monthly briefing call that led to an email exchange that led to this, from the work blog: the forecast for spring inflow into Lake Powell, on the Colorado River, is the lowest …

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Ebert

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The reaction at the office today to the death of newspaperman Roger Ebert was striking. I cannot think of another writer of American English with the same broad, beloved appeal. One friend, a younger-generation journalist who’s from Chicago, sent around a collection of particularly delicious fragments from Ebert movie reviews, and I was struck by …

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Water’s for not fighting over?

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If men will fight over water, they will also cooperate to conserve it and the history of water controversies is that, in the long run, the rule of cooperation prevails. Yet another nugget from my current favorite book, Carey McWilliams’ California: The Great Exception. Do you think he’s right? (The quote’s the opening of a 1949 …

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Fixing Northern California’s Delta: some process issues

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Matt Weiser at the Sacramento Bee offered up a fascinating framework in a piece last Sunday for thinking about California’s $23 billion (and counting) proposal to reshape the way water moves in and through the largest estuary on the western coast of North America: [A]s the process now stands California voters will have no formal …

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Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Powell warned us

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In 1889, John Wesley Powell tagged along as a group of US Senators toured the western United States in an effort to understand “the irrigation problem”. What Powell reported looks kinda familiar: “The winds are drifting sands here and there,” John Wesley Powell said of his 1889 visit to the Lower Rio Grande Valley, where …

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California and the invention of “sportswear”

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In the enclosed shopping mall near our home is a Hollister store, which bills itself as “the coolest destination for genuine SoCal style clothes for guys and girls.” They sell surf-themed garments to residents of a landlocked state. There is history here: Novel conditions of living, reflecting climatic differences, created a compulsion to invent something …

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