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 …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Powell warned us’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘California and the invention of “sportswear”’ »
Despite growing up a little kid’s walk from an avocado grove, I didn’t discover their blessings until my late teens, when a college classmate from San Diego brought a car trunk load on a drive from Southern California to eastern Washington. We would lay them out on newspaper on our laps in the front seat …
From the morning paper, a look at the effect of drought on farmers in southern New Mexico. It’s a more complex story than simply lack of water, and the impact depends a great deal on where you are: The Franzoys’ problem is not so much the dropping aquifer as the quality of the groundwater. It …
Continue reading ‘stuff I wrote elsewhere: drought hits New Mexico’s famed Hatch Valley’ »
Working with some colleagues, (including, no shit, the Emmy-award winning co-founder of Inkstain), an experiment in alternative story-telling forms to accompany a newspaper piece on the impact of drought on farmers in the southern Rio Grande valley of New Mexico:
Visiting a farm recently, I was reminded that business people for whom water is an input think about water conservation differently than city folk like me. For a given amount of water available, the farmer wants to grow and sell as much food as possible. So it should not be surprising to see water conservation …
Continue reading ‘water conservation diaries: it’s about making more food’ »
Busy with New Mexico’s drought, I’ve been paying scant attention to the rollout of California’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan, AKA the Peripheral Thingie. This is the scheme to build tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to move water south to California farms and cities. It’s the biggest and most interesting US water policy gambit out …
Continue reading ‘BDCP rollout: did anyone say anything that surprised you?’ »
I recently (happily) stumbled across a web version of the full 1995 publication of the Colorado River “Severe Sustained Drought” study, a comprehensive “what if” exercise done in the 1980s and early 1990s. From the forward:: The Severe Sustained Drought Study contemplates a much more dire water supply scenario than that which has occurred in the …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: The “Severe Sustained Drought” study’ »
Hannah Holm of the Water Center at Colorado Mesa University argues that agricultural water conservation doesn’t really save water: When water is diverted from a stream and put onto the land, part of that water is taken up by plants, part of it evaporates, and part of it makes its way back to the stream. With …
Given my profession, I’m incentivized to freak out about drought. If I thought it wasn’t a big deal, I’d have to find something else to write about. But in darker moments, I wonder if I’m overdoing the freakout. Chris Austin’s writeup of Ellen Hanak’s comments at this week’s California water bond hearing raise the question …