Audubon is looking to hire someone to help save the Salton Sea. It’s a great twofer – you get to help the birds, and if you succeed you also get to help save Colorado River manage as a whole, as the two are integrally related. If we fail to get the Salton Sea right, everything …
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Amy Thomson in 5280: Denver residents have managed to reduce water consumption by more than 20 percent in the last 15 years, even with a 15 percent increase in population.
This is your semi-regular, repetitive reminder that El Niño and La Niña don’t matter a hill of beans, in statistical terms, for the Colorado River Basin as a whole. The Climate Prediction Center has issued a La Niña watch. That means cooler temperatures across the equatorial Pacific, which tends on average to influence the North …
I love this: Thursday is the lowest release for the week, so starting late Thursday the water begins to drop in the river, with the lowest flows on Saturday. If you are a recreational water user — skiing, fishing, pleasure boating, or jet skiing — less water means more sandbars or exposed debris to avoid. …
Continue reading ‘on the Lower Colorado, the weekly human hydrograph’ »
It is impossible, I have found, to write seriously about water in the western United States without being in conversation with the late Marc Reisner and his classic Cadillac Desert, published thirty years ago. It’s assessment of our problems is foundational, and even if I disagree with some of what he had to say (as …
Continue reading ‘the long shadow of Marc Reisner and Cadillac Desert’ »
update: A correction to this post here, thanks to some excellent journalistic sleuthing by Tony Davis. **** The Bureau of Reclamation’s Aug. 1 Colorado River Lower Basin Water Use Forecast (pdf here) passed a symbolically important milestone: at a forecast consumptive use of 6.998 million acre feet, if the forecast holds, this will be the …
Continue reading ‘Lower Colorado water consumption lowest since 1992’ »
I wanna tell you the story of the time I met Sandra Postel in a dry riverbed in the deserts of Mexico. When I first started writing about water more than two decades ago, the work of the water scholar Postel was both informative and inspirational. As much as anything I came across, her work …
Continue reading ‘In which Sandra Postel has some nice things to say about my book’ »
Laura Paskus writes: Almost 50 years ago, on June 14, 1967, four couples fired off a telegram from Las Cruces to Sen. Henry Jackson, a Democrat from Washington. Called “Scoop” by his pals, Jackson chaired the Senate committee looking at a bill to authorize the Central Arizona Project, a system of dams, canals and aqueducts …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s long history of not building dams on the Gila’ »
I’m happy (nay enthusiastic!) to point out the way Lake Mead keeps dropping, but it’s worth nothing this as well: Colorado River water use in Arizona, Nevada, and California this year is currently forecast at 7.006 million acre feet (source: pdf), well below the three states’ nominal legal entitlement of 7.5 million acre feet. The …
On what is apparently Colorado River Day (who decides such things?) I made a little pilgrimage this afternoon to see the Shoshone hydro plant, just up river from the little town of Glenwood Springs on Colorado’s west slope. Shoshone has a unique place in the water management of the Colorado River Basin because of western …
Continue reading ‘Shoshone hydro plant, the most fascinating water right in the West’ »