Archive of entries posted by jfleck

Beetle kill, watersheds and water quality

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When beetles kill trees, it changes water chemistry for the folks downstream of the hammered watersheds. And not in a good way (DBP is “disinfection by-products”, study area is in Colorado): Results demonstrate higher total organic carbon concentrations along with significantly more DBPs at water-treatment facilities using mountain-pine-beetle-infested source waters when contrasted with those using water …

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Denver water use dropping

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Bruce Finley in the Denver Post tallies up another western city cutting municipal water use, demonstrating that, for city water users, this is a tractable problem: Water-saving efforts already have dropped metro Denver residents’ overall average daily usage to 85 gallons, down from 104 gallons in 2001. Only one city better than Denver in Finley’s …

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CSFC Index: an NM economic data puzzle

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The folks on the Inkstain Economics Desk point to an intriguing puzzle, in the form of 22 shipping containers out behind the neighborhood MegaWalMart this morning. We’ve long used the Cheap Shit From China index (CSFC) here at Inkstain as a crude but useful economic barometer. The premise is this: WalMart has better data than …

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Clarity on withdrawal versus consumption, San Diego style

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Regarding my discussion yesterday of the fact that not all water conservation measures are created equal, here’s a nice treatment of the subject by Deborah Brennan at U-T San Diego: “It’s one of the simplest, most common sense things you can do to save money and restore the ecosystem, especially in San Diego where we …

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Water: the withdrawal/consumption confusion

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I’d like to sketch out a personal project – something I think needs doing. And, given that this blog’s modest audience includes some other folks who are, like me, involved in public communication on water issues, maybe it’ll serve as a prod for others. There is an important confusion in public discussions over two very …

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Are Phoenix and Las Vegas in “the west”?

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At the 2010 census, about 70 percent of the population of Nevada lived in the greater Las Vegas metro area. The comparable Phoenix/Arizona percentage is something on the order of 68 percent. “The west” as a conceptual framework for thinking about those lands beyond the hundredth meridian has some utility. But rather than probing John …

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“the life force is strong, John”

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Many years ago, when I lived in California, I was walking down the street with a friend, an old Italian-Catholic grandmotherly woman who I knew through her work fighting against the construction of a freeway through our town. I was sharing my fascination with these tenacious little juvenile palm trees that had found a niche …

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Antelope Island and the notion of climate variability

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On a quick weekend dash to Ogden earlier this month, I squeezed an hour out of my return trip to the Salt Lake City airport to make the drive out the causeway across the Great Salt Lake to Antelope Island. When G.K. Gilbert, under the direction of John Wesley Powell, was trying to sort out …

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