There’s something that really jumps out in the Bureau of Reclamation’s final accounting of 2016 Lower Colorado River Basin water use. In May, the Bureau releases the official accounting, which is a meticulous, tedious, closely watched and monitored and argued over report on who used how much water on the Lower Colorado. Much to digest in the …
Continue reading ‘Imperial Irrigation District is saving a lot of water’ »
Did you know that there are 16 separate federal “activities and programs” with some sort of jurisdiction over and responsibility for rural water? 18 for drought mitigation and response? I did not. I mean, I had a general idea, but not in the sort of excruciating and incredibly useful detail as you can find in …
Continue reading ‘Why you should be reading Brett Walton’s “Federal Water Tap”’ »
Here in New Mexico, in the relatively populous Middle Rio Grande Valley, we have no expectation that water rights – the legal question of who is entitled to the use of how much water – will ever be clearly determined, at least not in the lifetimes of anyone involved in water management today. The institutional …
“A lively debate, provocatively labeled ‘conservation in the Anthropocene,’,” my University of New Mexico colleague Ben Jones and collaborators wrote last year, “has been taking place over what conservation, and related notions of naturalness and preservation, means where large natural systems are increasingly inter-connected or coupled to human systems.” In particular, Jones et al. were …
Driving back this week the long way from Las Vegas, Lissa and I were stunned by Zion National Park. The river was high, the rocks were red, and the people were everywhere. I’m guessing it’s been 50 years since my first Zion camping trip, with Mom and Dad and Lisa and one of those big …
Continue reading ‘Lots and lots of people seem to be going to our National Parks’ »
ROGERS SPRING – Rogers Spring is a strange apparition in the desert, 400 gallons per minute burbling out of the side of a mountain and down through an oasis of palm trees before the water peters out into the creosote of the Mojave Desert. Driving up out of Kingman last Sunday, on our way to …
Matt Weiser (Water Deeply) has a nice interview with Mike Cohen (Pacific Institute) about one of the most interesting policy conundrums in Colorado River Basin water governance – the question of the Salton Sea. Here’s the sequence. California needs to figure out how to use less Colorado River water. Since the biggest chunk of the …
Continue reading ‘When a water supply problem becomes an air quality problem’ »
We also note that migrants are very strongly attracted to areas experiencing drought. Drought are associated with low precipitation and higher-than-average temperatures, two amenities that attract residents (even if they may be detrimental for local agriculture). That is from The Effect of Natural Disasters on Economic Activity in US Counties: A Century of Data, an NBER paper …
Continue reading ‘US drought migration patterns are not what I expected’ »
According to the latest Bureau of Reclamation runoff and reservoir storage forecast (the “24-month study”, pdf here), combined storage in the two largest Colorado River reservoirs, Mead and Powell, will end this water year up 3.4 million acre feet from last year. Mead is forecast to end the year up more than five feet in …
The “nilometer” was the device used in ancient Egypt to measure water levels in the Nile: Only priests and rulers, whether pharaohs or later, Roman or Arab leaders, were allowed to monitor the nilometers, and their ability to predict the behavior of the Nile was used to impress the common people. (And to determine how …
Continue reading ‘information control and the priesthood of water’ »