When U.S. Army Lt. J.C. Ives explored the lower reaches of the Colorado River in 1857-58, he made careful efforts to record as much of what he saw and learned as possible, “it being doubtful whether any party will ever again pursue the same line of travel.” Ives wrote: The region explored after leaving the …
Continue reading ‘sublimity perhaps unparalleled in any part of the world’ »
I was interviewing a local flood control engineer recently about the lovely little wetland that’s grown up in a retention pond up near my work. It’s located just off one of the channels that carries flood flows down through the city, and its primary purpose is to catch and hold water for a while to …
I don’t know if anyone else reads this stuff, or if we’re just talking to one another, but a quartet of the waterbloggers piled on a today on the Vegas (Nev.) water situation. The back story involves Southern Nevada water impresario Pat Mulroy, who wants to bring water across the state to feed her growing …
For you down-in-the-weeds water wonks, the Central Arizona Project is now posting its monthly delivery reports.
A couple of new papers out this week use a clever technique to quantify what looks like extraordinary groundwater mining going on in India. Groundwater pumping is a classic “tragedy of the commons.” In the long run, it’s best not to mine groundwater, to pump it in a modest and therefore sustainable fashion. But any …
From this morning’s newspaper, UNM ecologist Jim Brown sketches out dire scenarios: On one hand, Brown wrote in his 1995 book “Macroecology,” humans are just one of the millions of species that inhabit Earth, “formed by the same processes that produced all other species, and our abundance and distribution are governed by the same natural …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Ecologists and Peak Oil’ »
I’ve been out of the loop for much of the last week, and at this point it’s likely that everyone who follows western water issues has already seen Emily Green’s post on the Cadiz groundwater project. If you haven’t, I recommend it. Cadiz is the proposal to do something that is a bit murky with …
It’s hard to resist the gunslinger metaphor when reading Henry Brean’s story about Pat Mulroy’s Las Vegas water pipe ultimatum: To shore up support for a controversial project, Southern Nevada Water Authority chief Pat Mulroy will ask her board for an “up-or-down vote” on plans to pipe groundwater to Las Vegas from across rural eastern …
I rode up South 14 in the Manzano Mountains this morning with a couple of friends. It’s been hot in town, and the ride seemed like it would offer some mountain cool. Albuquerque spreads across an alluvial plain at the base of the Sandia and Manzano Mountains, and once you get out of town and …