Up early this morning to watch the team time trial at Le Tour, I flipped on the computer to check what was going on with the Los Alamos fire. (I was hoping to take a few minutes during a commercial break to post an updated fire map.) It was a little before 8 a.m., and …
Continue reading ‘What I did with my week, social media edition’ »
It rained this afternoon at my house. The physics of raindrops, I once learned, means that the largest raindrops falling out the bottom of a thunderhead hit first, and I was sitting in my office at the back of the house writing when I heard them banging onto the metal roof. I went out to …
Hey smart water tweeps, here’s a lazyweb question the Google has been unable to assist me with. Somewhere, sometime, I heart a great truism from some smart water person whose name is lost to the mists: Ditches (canals, etc.) move water in space. Dams move water in time. Have you heard this before? Source?
Been a busy week (what with New Mexico burning down) with little to show for it other than an overactive Twitter feed, but I caught my breath this morning and threw together some thoughts on weather, climate, forest management, drought, and the unnerving fact that I had to cut my morning bike ride short because …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Weather, Climate, Forest Management, Fire, Drought’ »
From the morning paper, some thoughts (sub/ad req) from my recent trip on the west-wide linkages, and the institutional problems those linkages have created: “We’ve got a system that is not sustainable,” said Curt Schmutte, Met’s top official working on the Delta problem. Given the political rancor that surrounds California’s Delta discussions, it is unclear …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: the California-NM connection’ »
Excited to get my copy of The End of Abundance in the mail today!
I’m excited to join an “I’m not worthy” sort of group at Stanford’s Lane Center who share a common interest in our changing West. My piece of the problem is water management. My initial contribution touches on my cautious optimism about long term institutional management issues on the Colorado River – some success in recent …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Bending the Law of the River’ »
Any of my California water friends know Philip Garone’s The Fall and Rise of the Wetlands of California’s Great Central Valley? Worth a read?
How vulnerable is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to earthquakes? Apparently the answer to that sciency-sounding question depends on your interests in various Delta solution paths. The Delta is a giant, richly entangled example of what Dan Sarewitz talks about: The necessity of looking at nature through a variety of disciplinary lenses brings with it a …
Water’s never really wasted. It always goes somewhere and does something. See, for example, the lining of the Coachella Canal, on the northeast side of the Salton Sea: [L]eakage from the unlined Coachella Canal recharged local aquifers. Wetlands have expanded due to spring discharge below the canal. Wetlands were natural features prior to canal construction, …