I love history as a journalistic storytelling technique for two reasons. First, it often can provide built-in context. Second, it can provide a natural narrative arc. So when I sat down Friday with Mike Connor, the new head of the Bureau of Reclamation, I tried to frame his job today in terms of the western …
The AP’s Ben Neary has a significant story this weekend about a Bureau of Reclamation analysis of how much water really is available from the Green River for an interbasin transfer being proposed by entrepreneur Aaron Million. Million thinks there is a quarter of a million acre feet a year available. While studies are ongoing, …
Continue reading ‘BuRec: Not Enough In Green River For Transfer Scheme’ »
Occasionally for lunch I slip away from the office, grab a sandwich from one of the places across the street, and head over to a little flood control pond about a mile from my office to check out the birds. The sandwiches are messy, and inevitably little bits of lettuce spill out on the ground …
When I started making noises about some sort of Colorado River project, one of the water wonks I know pointed me toward the delta, arguing it was a) central to understanding the Colorado, and b) widely ignored. The problem, in short, is that essentially no fresh water flows there any more. An ecosystem once sustained …
I spend a lot of time these days reading water news. When I read something good, I often blurt it out on my twitter feed, which is good for that sort of link sharing. But one of the problems with the disjointed nature of social media right now is the way different communities use different …
I’m puzzling over the real story of Oliver Meredith Wozencraft, the chap who was arguably the first person to imagine the large-scale irrigation of the deserts of the southwest with water from the Colorado River. Wozencraft was a physician who came west in 1849 in search of gold and stumbled instead (apparently quite literally) onto …
For the water geeks in the audience, I highly recommend this movie, which my sister, Lisa, Netflixed for us this weekend: (h/t Karl Flessa for suggesting it)
There’s some water geek hilarity over on the New Mexico Independent today correcting V.B. Price on a point of history and water law. First Price: New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — the “upper basin” states in the Colorado Compact of 1922 — have “junior” water rights to California, Arizona, and Nevada, the states that …
Continue reading ‘Stephen B. Davis Jr., Back From the Dead?’ »
Here’s a nice way of thinking about aridity: If all the water that flows in each river during an average year were spread evenly over the area drained by the river, the depths would be: Delaware 20.9 in.; Columbia 13.1 in.; Mississippi 6.7 in.; Colorado 1.15 in. Source: Water and Choice in the Colorado Basin, …
I’m reading Frank Waters’ The Colorado, which offers an odd vantage point on the history of the river basin. It was written in 1946 when, as Waters points out in an introduction written when it was republished in the mid-1980s, Phoenix was the only city in the basin of any heft whatsoever. It is clear …