On a road trip to southern New Mexico to report on drought: “That’s a forlorn-looking river, isn’t it,” Phil King told me as we walked out on Mesilla Dam this afternoon, looking down at the bed of sand where the Rio Grande is supposed to be.
From the California state water contractors, a new framing. It’s not that stupid little fish, or those pesky environmentalists: Limits on pumping operations are an ongoing issue due to the Delta’s outdated water delivery system. “Earlier this year, storms came through that could have provided a substantial boost to our water reservoirs, but we simply …
Continue reading ‘A new framing of the Sacramento Delta problem’ »
Andrew Freedman had an interesting piece last month about tree ring research that’s different than the stuff I usually write about: The past several decades have been the wettest in nearly five centuries for the watershed serving the nation’s largest city, New York, according to a new study. But that wet period is deceiving because …
Continue reading ‘A New York story: not all the tree rings’ tales are about drought’ »
Reed Benson, water law professor at the University of New Mexico, has an op-ed in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal arguing for the re-authorization of the US Bureau of Reclamation’s Drought Relief Act powers, which expired last year (adwalled): Major droughts, including more intense ones than this, have always been a fact of life in the West. …
At the xeriscape show last week, I picked up a nifty new rain gauge, courtesy of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, with this helpful advice: Skip one watering when you receive at least a quarter of an inch of rain. The last time that happened at my house? September.
The Jevons Paradox would suggest that our new solar panels would give me an easy comfort about using more electricity. And yet, ever since we gathered two weeks ago with the installers and the electric company guy in the ritual of turning them on and watching the meter run backward, I have been obsessed with …
Continue reading ‘my education in economics: an anti-Jevons anecdote’ »
Apart from the specific contributions which mining made to agriculture in California, farming has always resembled mining in this state. The soil is really mined, not farmed. Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception
I can think of few better uses for water that growing avocados. Can you? Escondido is planning to build a $6 million pipeline, set to debut in 2015, that would redirect water bound for an ocean outflow and convert it into recycled water for avocado farms in the eastern portion of the city. Yum.