Coal burning and water supplies are integrally linked in the southwestern United States. When the Central Arizona Project was built in the 1960s, planners hoped to build hydroelectric power plants on the main stem of the Colorado River to generate the power to lift the artificial river they were building up a total of nearly …
Lake Pleasant, Arizona Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. It was 95 F (35 C) when I went up to Lake Pleasant Friday afternoon. Remember this is mid-October. You couldn’t see the water evaporating off the lake, but I’m pretty sure it was happening. Located in the hills north of Phoenix, Arizona, Lake Pleasant is the storage …
Petrified Wood Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Like the old tease, “Don’t think about a pink elephant,” it’s hard to not think about water in Holbrook, Ariz., a place that doesn’t have much. It sits along the Little Colorado River, which mostly isn’t what you’d normally think of as a “river” – that is, a thing …
In this morning’s newspaper, on the hard-nosed national security types looking at ecosystem services as a core issue (sub/ad req): Environmental problems, from water shortages, pollution and climate change to disease and food scarcity, are at the core of national security, Passell argues. “They’re all related to the same set of problems,” Passell said in …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Ecology of National Security’ »
There are places in the arid West where the use of greywater is a force multiplier – taking the water you already used to wash your clothes and piping it into the garden rather than “wasting” it by dumping it down the sewer. But it does not always make as much sense as our intuition …
This project is too small to be anything more than intriguing, but intriguing it is. Crop insurance for some of the world’s poorest farmers: A quarter-century after famine killed one million Ethiopians and seared the world’s conscience, peasant farmers there are enduring an ever-faster barrage of droughts. Nearly 14 million people in Ethiopia are going …
Continue reading ‘An Experiment in Crop Insurance for the Poor’ »
Via the Christian Science Monitor – I’m guessing a strict adherence to California’s water laws is probably low on these folks’ priority list: Large marijuana plots hidden deep in California’s public lands have illegally diverted hundreds of millions of gallons of water, compounding shortages caused by the state’s ongoing drought. At least the water’s being …
I’ve been skeptical of reports that the recession is bottoming out, because until recently my data did not support it. For some time, the Inkstain Cheap Shit From China Index (CSFCI) has been stuck at zero. But on Tuesday, I noted on my morning bike ride the first shipping container out behind the Uber Walmart …
The failure of the Colorado River to reach the sea, Jonathan Foley argues, is evidence of dramatic challenges facing humanity that go beyond climate change. From an essay at Environment 360: Across the globe, we already use a staggering 4,000 cubic kilometers of water per year, withdrawn from our streams, rivers, lakes and aquifers. Of …
A look at the science and financing behind the “CO2 is Green” ads running in New Mexico (ad/sub req): It is hard to square Leighton Steward’s cheery message with the vast swaths of dead trees across the mountains of northern New Mexico. “Fall of ’02 is when they started to die,” biologist Craig Allen told …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: A Look at CO2 is Green’ »