It almost felt like a setup when Steve Harris asked me to talk at a conference about how “water is for cooperating over.” I make a meager but steady living these days writing about water conflict. And yet…. [B]efore I got to Ghost Ranch on Friday afternoon, I took the turnoff to Abiquiu Reservoir. In …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: in the midst of drought, signs of water cooperation’ »
When I left Pasadena nearly 25 years ago, my water mentor Tim Brick was hard at work on the problem of restoring a semblance of riverness to the Arroyo Seco, the channel that defines that Southern California city’s western edge. Via a visit by our old mutual friend Larry Wilson to the confluence of the …
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 …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: The “futile call” – a water rights priority dilemma’ »
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 …
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 …
The US Bureau of Reclamation was known as the US Reclamation Service (USRS) from its formation via the Reclamation Act of 1902 until it was renamed in 1923. This “USRS” was cast in concrete on Mesilla Dam, an irrigation diversion structure on the Rio Grande outside Las Cruces, NM, in 1915. The dam is part …
It is a strange reality of our modern world that, in the face of a truly remarkable drought here in the Middle Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, I was able to pour imported Colorado River water on purely ornamental plants in my garden yesterday morning. I’m thrifty with the water – a modest drip …
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 …
The absence of a state policy governing the use of underground waters is, in fact, the outstanding weakness in California’s water conservation program. Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception, 1949 To what extent does this still hold today?