Brad Udall gave a talk in 2013 that became foundational to my thinking about solving the challenge of life with a shrinking Colorado River. Here’s how I described it in my book Water is For Fighting Over: Udall distinguished between the “reality of the public” and the “reality of the water community,” describing a world …
Heather Tanana and Anne Castle will be talking about the Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribal Communities project at today (Feb. 22, 2023 – noon Arizona time) at the University of Arizona’s Water Resources Research Center seminar series – over the Zoom! Signup info here. Access to clean drinking water is a fundamental human …
Helpful piece by Luke Runyon on steps toward accounting for Lower Colorado River evaporation and riparian system losses. During a September Colorado River symposium held in Santa Fe, both Interior Department Secretary Deb Haaland and Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton told attendees that the issue of evaporation and transit loss in the Lower …
Continue reading ‘Accounting for Colorado River evaporation’ »
Tony Davis had a great story in the Daily Star over the weekend on the allure of desalination of ocean water as Arizona struggles with shrinking Colorado River supplies. Tony’s excellent work on this question susses out the problems: ocean desal is costly, like really costly ocean desal is energy intensive, like really energy intensive …
Continue reading ‘Desalination, Arizona, and magical thinking’ »
At last week’s Getches-Wilkinson Center conference on Colorado River stuff, I had the privilege of moderating a panel with the provocative title “Time to Get Real”. The opening remarks from Kathryn Sorensen of Arizona State University seemed worth repeating, and she kindly gave me permission to post on the blog (the pictures were her slide …
Continue reading ‘Kathryn Sorensen on getting real in the Colorado River Basin’ »
I ran across this Arizona Republic cartoon some years ago while working on my book Water is For Fighting Over etc. I found it in a 1985 book by Frank Welsh called How to Create a Water Crisis. It reared its head this week as I’m working with some colleagues on some stuff about Arizona …
From the comments, but worth elevating to a post so folks it doesn’t get lost – Tom McCann on Arizona Sen. Martha McSally’s bill to restart the Yuma Desalting Plant: McSally’s bill is nothing more than a PR stunt–a way to appear to be doing something on the Colorado River without any risk of it …
Brett Walton had a great bit of business in yesterday’s Circle of Blue story on 2019’s remarkable drop in Colorado River Lower Basin water use: The last time water consumption from the river was that low was in 1986, the year after an enormous canal in Arizona opened that allowed the state to lay claim …
Continue reading ‘March 1985: when everything on the Colorado River changed’ »
My thanks to a friend who recently pointed me, as we discussed the appropriate ways to account for Arizona’s use of tributary Colorado River water, to the above bit of history. In the official transcript of a 1946 congressional hearing, which was then gleefully repeated down through the years (you can see it on p. …
Continue reading ‘“in tribute to a million acre feet” – Herbert Hoover and Arizona’s Gila water’ »
Old John Fleck would have happily explained to you why this from Bruce Babbitt is a terrible idea: Damming the Gila River is a vampire proposal that would suck the life out of Southern New Mexico’s most treasured wild and scenic river. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham wants to kill the project. Both of New Mexico’s …
Continue reading ‘Taking New Mexico’s Gila water from the San Juan?’ »