There’s an important point I try to make when I’m out in public talking about the 2014 Colorado River Delta environmental pulse flow: the amount of water used and the size of the landscape that got wet, compared to the once-vast delta, is tiny. I get excited about the pulse flow, when water managers on …
Discussions about climate change and water supply in the western United States risk getting bogged down in pursuit of uncertainties. Those uncertainties are real, but there’s a bunch that we already know, and it’s sufficient to help us form policy responses, according to a new summary paper from the Colorado River Research Group: Assuming the …
Continue reading ‘Climate change in the Colorado River Basin’ »
Scientists have dubbed decades-long periods of aridity in southwestern North America “megadroughts“. We’ve had them in the past, and research has long pointed toward an increasing risk of them as the climate warms. New research published last week by Cornell’s Toby Ault and colleagues has generated a wave of scary headlines – A Mega-Drought Is Coming to …
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An excerpt from my book, published by Earth Island Journal: a case study in how “cheap talk” – the relative informality of a “working group” without obligations – helped calm conflict between environmentalists and water managers on the Lower Colorado: In the short run, the relative informality meant that there was no concrete, institutionalized way …
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There is something manifestly silly about the assertion, in table 5a of the Bureau of Reclamation’s 2015 Colorado River Accounting and Water Use Report, that the Imperial Irrigation District diverted 2,455,649 acre feet of water from river at Imperial Dam that year. Park of the core curriculum for our University of New Mexico Water Resources Program …
As the new “water year” begins, we’ve got some challenges in the Colorado River Basin. It is worth noting some good news – despite a mediocre runoff year at 88 percent of average, storage in the basin’s two huge reservoirs, Mead and Powell, is almost exactly the same as it was last year at this …
Continue reading ‘Happy New Water Year, Colorado River Basin! Now get to work….’ »
The last month of my life has been remarkable. My book, Water is for Fighting Over: and Other Myths about Water in the West, emerged into the world, and people noticed it and they’ve been talking about it and I could not be more happy. Nick Stockton interviewed me for Wired, Brad Plumer did a Q & …
When the folks at Island Press asked a bunch of their authors to offer up advice to the incoming president, whoever that might be (“If you were advisor to the president, what would your top priority be and why?“), I tried to keep in mind a fundamental principle that guides my work – the art …
While I was writing my book about the future of Colorado River water management, I joked about my efforts to leave the Salton Sea out of the story. It was only sort of a joke. The problems of the Salton Sea, an inland water body fed by agricultural drainage from the Imperial Valley, are an …
I miss y’all! So busy being person-selling-a-book while simultaneously being person-teaching-grad-students-about-water. I have much to say, frustrated that I don’t have enough time to write about it all here, but Steve Goldstein at KJZZ helped me share some of my ideas with Phoenix radio listeners. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can listen in …