KAWUNEECHE VALLEY – The Colorado River was flowing this morning at around 700 cubic feet per second at the USGS gauge near Baker Gulch. It felt like a lot of water – spilling the channel banks and out into the meadows, as is its way in a good spring runoff. If you look downstream at …
“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 …
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’ »
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 …
At the end of April, Lake Mead sat at 1,085 feet above sea level, more than eight feet higher than it was a year ago. That is in part thanks to a big winter upstream, which has ensured continued above-average releases from Lake Powell upstream. But equally important is the fact that folks in the …
Continue reading ‘Using less water on the Lower Colorado River’ »
There is much to like in Where the Water Goes, David Owen’s new book about “life and death along the Colorado River”, but the thing I liked most was the bemused charm with which Owen himself confronts western water’s absurdities, which must be embraced, but which are easily taken for granted. Here he is in Denver conference …
This is only the fourth year since the turn of the century with above-average flow on the Colorado River.
From the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association on the question of who speaks for Arizona on Colorado River issues: View note
The feud within Arizona over who’s in charge of the state’s Colorado River water – the state Department of Water Resources or the Central Arizona Water Conservation District – escalated this week. This is from an April 25 “cease and desist” letter (obtained by me through a state public records act request) from the Arizona …
Continue reading ‘who’s in charge of Arizona’s Colorado River water?’ »
I’m moving out of my policy wonk comfort zone this morning, talking about The River in some new ways, about some new work I’ve been doing. It will be livestreamed, 9 a.m. MT: