Lawyers have the coolest language. Consider the doctrine of prior appropriation. “Beneficial use,” the drafters of the New Mexico constitution explained, “shall be the basis, the measure and the limit of the right to the use of water.” It felt like poetry the first time I heard the New Mexico state engineer roll it out …
Just 5 percent of New Mexico ranked this week as “abnormally dry” in the federal Drought Monitor. That is the least dry the state has been since the monitor began publishing its weekly drought condition reports in January 2000.
Annemarie Lewis did a great job of helping Amy McCoy and I talk about the governance of the Colorado River in this American Rivers podcast. My favorite part starts around the 19:00 when Annemarie asks both of us what “success” might look like. Next week, in Part II, we talk about solutions.
River basins governed by agreements that include a combination of institutional mechanisms (such as enforcement, monitoring, conflict resolution, side-payment/issue-linkage, adaptability, and a joint basin commission) tend to exhibit more cooperation than river basins governed by agreements that don’t embody this combination of mechanisms. River basins governed by agreements that include an enforcement and adaptability mechanism …
With a Senate Hearing tomorrow and a meeting of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District Thursday, we’re starting to see the public rollout of a Colorado River management agreement between the United States and Mexico that now looks like it’s on track to be signed within the next few months. The biggest clue that this could really …
Continue reading ‘U.S.-Mexico Colorado River deal is close’ »
Whether Aspen needs to build a reservoir to meet water demands in 2065 may depend in part on whether it wants to keep irrigating its municipal golf course during an apocalyptic drought. Nice bit of framing by Brent Gardner-Smith. Experience tells us the answer – that when people have less water, they use less water. …
Some evenings I curl up with a laptop and cruise Calisphere’s orange create label collection. Absent some years away for college, I spent the first three decades of my life in Southern California’s “citrus belt”, that source of the region’s wealth and culture reaching east from Pasadena across the foothills of the San Gabriels to …
When we think today about Arizona’s water problems, we imagine large lawns in sprawling suburbs in and around Phoenix, golf courses, and “misters”—those devices that fritter away water into the hot desert air to cool the customers eating at outdoor restaurants in the Valley of the Sun. Me, in Water is For Fighting Over Lissa …
Much of the “cultural cognition” problem around our climate politics and discourse derives from the politics of “mitigation” – the fact that the tools needed to reduce greenhouse gases are politically (culturally?) abhorrent to some, who in response dismiss the underlying science of climate change. This has the effect of foreclosing the second crucial climate …
Continue reading ‘governance, adaptation, and climate change’ »
The Albuquerque Journal’s Mark Oswald notes a remarkable milestone that passed today: SANTA FE — A water-rights lawsuit that is said to be the nation’s longest-running piece of litigation reached a crucial milestone here Friday, with a judge’s final decree that added only five pages to the thousands upon thousands generated since the proceedings known …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s dysfunctional water rights administration’ »