From this morning’s newspaper, a deep dive into the issues surrounding the Navajo Nation’s struggle to secure water rights in northwestern New Mexico: It was 1948. Fred Wilson, New Mexico’s representative to the interstate group working to divide up the waters of the Upper Colorado River Basin, was pleading. “The state of New Mexico wants …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Navajo water rights’ »
Here’s a great reminder that technology properly understood is not just the gizmo, it’s the human-gizmo interaction. The old people apartments where Mom lives some time ago added big-screen TV’s on the wall between the elevators on every floor. The idea was to use them as a messaging system, giving residents up-to-date information on stuff. …
Via Nora Reed, via Sociological Images, a particularly odd way of viewing water sustainability in Las Vegas, Nev.: As commenter Rishi noted, “Pretty much all of the water in Las Vegas is imported.” And Vegas is in the midst of an effort to import a whole lot more. Image courtesy Sociological Images, cc, some rights …
The February forecast is for not very much water to flow down the Colorado River and its tributaries into Lake Powell: The dotted line is the median forecast. The solid line above it is the mean. The median forecast is for 54 percent of normal into Lake Powell. The dark blue bands mean that, even …
Continue reading ‘River beat: 54 percent of average runoff into Lake Powell’ »
Juliet McKenna is on a roll. You should really just skip me and add her to your RSS feed. Her latest entry is a look at the various ways of completing the sentence, “The Colorado River Basin Study is a call to action to….”? Check out her great list. Here’s the reason the diversity of …
Continue reading ‘What exactly does the Basin Study mean we need to do?’ »
Juliet McKenna has done a fantastic back-of-the-envelope calculation about potential effect of dust created by Las Vegas, Nevada’s proposed groundwater pumping system. Vegas, you’ll recall, wants to build a pipeline across the state, using groundwater from distant rural areas to fuel growth in that state’s largest metropolis. McKenna notes that various analyses of the project …
An interesting note from the Montgomery and Associates water blog on the financial problems facing the Central Arizona Project, which delivers Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson. If the Board leaves rates alone this year, some customers may be temporarily satisfied. However, financial problems will persist and grow, adding to uncertainty for the future. …
2013 Earth Science Achievement Awards The 2013 New Mexico Earth Science Achievement Awards will be presented on February 4 to John Fleck, for outstanding contributions advancing the role of earth science in areas of public service and public policy in New Mexico, and to Tien Grauch, for outstanding contributions advancing the role of earth science …
I’m going to make up a story. I’d like to think it might be true. There’s an impromptu path I like to walk along the Rio Grande in Albuquerque that follows a narrow high spot of riverbank for something between a quarter and a half a mile. As you head north, the river’s on your …
Keith Kloor had a nice riff the other day on the question of how we should decide what “nature” is supposed to look like, now that we’re kinda in charge: It’s not my job to say what nature should mean in a world shaped primarily by humans–I’m still working it out, myself–but I know others …