Archive of entries posted by jfleck

New constraints on Imperial’s ability to throttle back Colorado River water use

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I’ve been puzzling over the impact of Imperial Irrigation District’s legal struggle over its “Equitable Distribution Plan”, a regulatory framework for governing how much water individual farmers can use. This story from Daniel Rothberg is a big help: As a practical matter, the repeal of the Equitable Distribution Plan lessened IID’s control over its plans to …

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“breakdown” in Kirtland fuel spill cleanup

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Albuquerque’s municipal water utility, in a strikingly worded memo yesterday, said the latest plans for managing a huge groundwater spill on and adjacent to Kirtland Air Force Base represent “a breakdown” in what was once a partnership among the water utility, the Air Force, and the New Mexico Environment Department. The new plans back away …

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Palo Verde Irrigation District withdraws lawsuit against Metropolitan Water District of Southern California

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In a bit of Colorado River detente, the Palo Verde Irrigation District has filed a motion in Riverside County Superior Court to withdraw a lawsuit it had filed against the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California over the use of water on Met-owned land in the Palo Verde District:   View note The move does …

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“For three days they traveled in the desert without finding water.”

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On a bike ride this morning, I turned onto a little dirt trail through the woods, heading out toward the Rio Grande. Twenty yards from the river, I found a book lying in the trail, battered by the weather: It was a Bible, lying open to Exodus 15:22: “Then Moses led Israel from the Red …

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Water policy implications of elk, raiding wheat fields, in Polvadera, New Mexico

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I had one of those “I wish I was still a reporter” moments when Glen Duggins, at yesterday’s meeting of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District board meeting, raised the issue of elk in Polvadera. Polvadera is an unincorporated community along the Rio Grande, between the also unincorporated communities of San Acacia and Lemitar, strung …

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We should probably stop calling it “drought”

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Colorado River Basin Managers are working on what they call a “Drought Contingency Plan” to reduce water use, but that’s probably a bad name to describe what’s going on, as the members of the Colorado River Research Group explain in a new white paper (pdf): In current Colorado River water management, perhaps no word is used …

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Putting the water back

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Laura Paskus on an encounter with Jennifer Pitt in the Colorado River Delta: Walking through the cottonwood forest, Pitt says this landscape was destroyed before anyone figured out what to do about it. When the Colorado River started running dry in the mid-20th century, there weren’t yet environmental laws to temper or stop destructive operations …

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Florence Hawley Ellis

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This afternoon I tweeted a picture of this treasure, found in the stacks of the University of New Mexico’s Centennial Science and Engineering Library: Tom Swetnam, a friend who is the former director of the UofA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, recognized the name in the top-right corner: “Looks like that may be Florence Hawley Ellis’ …

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Do kids in greener neighborhoods grow up with bigger brains?

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This is so far out of my area of expertise that I have no way of evaluating methodology or results, except to point out that it’s worth thinking about the water policy implications: The Association between Lifelong Greenspace Exposure and 3-Dimensional Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Barcelona Schoolchildren Lifelong exposure to greenness was positively associated …

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The Navajo Nation and New Mexico’s Colorado River allocation

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Very little of the Colorado River’s water originates in New Mexico. The San Juan, one of the Colorado’s main tributaries, starts in the mountains of Colorado, cutting through a corner of the state’s northwest desert, before snaking into the canyon country of Arizona and Utah. Yet when the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact was signed …

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