Headed out on my bike ride this morning, I spotted our neighbor, Farmer John, in the front yard working on his food patch, and rolled up on the sidewalk to chat. It’s a lovely little garden – big robust tomatoes, some melons and a couple of rows of big, healthy-looking corn. Lissa and I have …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert, urban agriculture edition’ »
When I was a young reporter covering Pasadena City Hall, I wrote a lot about the municipal budget, reasoning that budgets are where governments most explicitly establish and act on their priorities. But it was frustrating, because I just had one budget – no real points of comparison. So I set out one year to …
Continue reading ‘Why I’m optimistic about Colorado River water (California? not so much)’ »
Writing this week in the Los Angeles Times, the NRDC’s Doug Obegi makes the central point about the linkage between water problems across the west. Responding to Victor Davis Hanson’s argument in favor of giving farmers more water from the Sacramento Delta, Obegi makes the salient point that there isn’t the water to give: The …
Continue reading ‘The Colorado River and Sacramento Delta limits’ »
Update: I was just waving my arms here, but a commenter who actually knows what s/he is talking about has stepped in with some valuable assistance. So skip my post below and just read this: The data you’re looking for can be found here, at the county level: http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/ruraldevelopment/developments.htm Like any data set, it’s open …
Paul Miller and Tom Piechota have assembled a new set of data suggesting a decline in precipitation in the West, and more particularly in the basin that feeds the Colorado River. For this work, they looked at SNOTEL stations, the network of snow measurement sites run by NRCS that feed data into streamflow forecasts. For …
Richard White’s history of the extension of railroads across the western United States (Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America – great read) has fascinating excerpts from the 1870 diary of H.K. Thomas, the Union Pacific stationmaster in Laramie, Wyoming. The normal fires of summer in the mountains are mentioned twice – “covering …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Why my state is burning down’ »
Shaun McKinnon has some numbers on this year’s Arizona runoff, and they aren’t pretty: La Niña did a number on runoff down the Salt and Verde rivers this year — a low number, according to Salt River Project, which has released the final report on winter’s water yield. For the 2011 runoff season, the two …
New Mexico’s forests are seriously messed up. Here’s a video teaser for my Sunday newspaper story: Update: Sorry, didn’t realize the embedded video made noise without asking. If you want to see it, go here.
update: A previous version of this post had what I though was a picture of Carl Rasch. Upon inquiry, I think it was a black-and-white picture of some other old dude with a great mustache. In answer to a question that came up in conversation on Twitter today, herewith an abbreviated version of the story …
Continue reading ‘Who Was Carl Rasch? The lawyer behind the Winters Doctrine’ »
Yesterday’s post about recurring suggestion that we build giant water infrastructure was premised in part on this year’s extremely wet year on the Missouri-Mississippi system, the “Why not build a big pipe from there to the desert” argument. As I mention, I hear this idea a lot, but especially this year, when it seems like …
Continue reading ‘You can’t size your infrastructure for the outliers’ »