There’s a rich, historical elegance to the tradition of state-v-state lawsuits over interstate compacts. Because each of the US states is constitutionally sovereign, when they sue one another over water flowing down a river from one state to the next, the legal action begins and ends before the US Supreme Court – the court of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: original jurisdiction’ »
The bonus water of 2010-11 on the Colorado River, when Lake Mead jumped nearly 50 feet in surface elevation, is looking more and more like an anomaly. The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center issued its January forecast this week, with early snowpack pointing to a mid-point forecast of 61 percent of average flow into Lake …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Another Bad Year on the Colorado’ »
In the summer of 1869, while John Wesley Powell was making his first journey down the Colorado River, Ferdinand V. Hayden, he of the famous Hayden surveys, was making a less notable journey down the eastern flank of the Rockies, from Colorado into New Mexico. Hayden’s primary purpose was geology, with an eye toward the region’s …
I went for a walk this morning at the old Two-Mile Dam site on the Santa Fe River east of Santa Fe, NM. It’s two miles from downtown (hence the name), in the Sangre de Cristo foothills near the end of a road lined with wealth. Santa Fe is unusual in New Mexico as a …
Back in the 1980s, when I was a reporter covering Pasadena City Hall, Tim Brick sold me on the fact that water was a great story. Pasadena had a municipal water agency, so it made sense that the city hall beat reporter should pay attention. But Tim, Pasadena’s representative on the Metropolitan Water District board …
The science accumulates: The more greenhouse gases push up temperatures over the next few decades, the more New Mexico’s water supplies are at risk, according to new research by a team of Columbia University scientists. Using the latest high-resolution global climate simulations, the scientists show evaporation caused by warming temperatures is likely to leave less …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: climate change on the Colorado River’ »
I blogged a similar picture a couple of years ago, but this new NASA image of the Nile Valley, at night, from space, bears a reblog: Our rivers define us.
I’ve been keeping rainfall records as a volunteer National Weather Service observer since 1999. 2012 is the 13th calendar year for which I have complete records for my house, in Albuquerque’s near northeast heights, about a mile northeast of the University of New Mexico. It was my driest on record, at 5.08 inches (12.9 cm). …
From this morning’s newspaper, an attempt to frame (in my own mind) the coming “gnarly struggle over the federal Endangered Species Act’s requirement that we try to keep the Rio Grande silvery minnow alive“: The reason for the river’s November-December surge was a small stockpile of water the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had stashed during …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: more on plumbing and nature’ »
I first met Christy George a couple of years back on the edge of a lovely lake outside Stockholm, where we spent two glorious days kicking around the joys and struggles of environmental storytelling. Christy is the former president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, a public broadcasting news veteran and a clever teller of …
Continue reading ‘“My Vanishing Hometowns,” a climate change storytelling project’ »