Not gonna lie – watching Colorado River reservoirs decline so precipitously has been painful. But it is important to cultivate optimism, and there is, in fact, reason to be hopeful about our ability to deal with the challenges. That’s the message the University of Arizona’s Bonnie Colby and I shared in a recent conversation with …

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Brad Udall on twitter yesterday ran through a striking series of graphs of the current state of the Colorado River. With his permission, I’m posting them here along with a slightly polished version of his accompanying commentary. Some key points that grabbed my attention: Second-lowest Powell inflow in a period of record we use dating …

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Thanks to Megan Kamerick and KUNM, our New Mexico public radio juggernaut, for offering the platform and leverage to help boost our message about climate change response on the Colorado River: [N]obody’s going to sort of voluntarily raise their hand and say, ‘Yeah, we’re happy to have less.’ And so negotiating those agreements where everybody …

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By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck Unlike the Lower Colorado River Basin States, which have traditionally taken pragmatic and self-serving views of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, the Upper Basin States have largely shown the century-old document unwavering reverence. The reverence comes from the way the agreement protected Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico against …

Continue reading ‘Reverence or Pragmatism? The Upper Colorado River Basin’s Compact Dilemma’ »