Regular readers will know of my obsession with pushing beyond the “OMG we’re running out of water!” story line to look in detail at who, specifically, gets shorted when supplies run low and what adaptive responses they have available. In New Mexico, water managers are using the occasion of our current drought to helpfully prepare …
Continue reading ‘Possible San Juan-Chama water shortages’ »
Hannah Holm of Colorado Mesa University had a good piece earlier this month in the Grand Junction Free Press outlining the future risks facing Colorado River water users and managers: A heavy train is moving at 5 miles per hour toward… a cliff? A collision? And how far away might this unknown calamity be? These …
Continue reading ‘The shortcomings of the Colorado train wreck metaphor’ »
My sister, Lisa, found a box of Dad’s old postcards over the weekend, including a number he had sent during a trip out west in 1946. He’d just gotten out of the Army, a Pennsylvania kid wandering the landscape that would later animate his art and become our home. There was this, to his parents …
Continue reading ‘Boulder Dam, circa 1946: “a lot of propoganda for Daddy to read”’ »
From the morning paper, an exploration of what we mean by “drought”, with some stuff on the Sheffield Nature paper so talked recently in drought circles, along with the latest grim outlook: “Drought,” University of Arizona research Gregg Garfin said, “is defined by its impacts.” I realize this is a long-winded way of being very …
Continue reading ‘stuff I wrote elsewhere: “Depends on what you mean by ‘drought.’”’ »
When the federal government and the seven US states that share the Colorado River signed their 2007 “Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and the Coordinated Operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead,” the final Record of Decision (pdf) included several chunks of legalese to the effect that the deal, while binding on the US …
Continue reading ‘How the US-Mexico Colorado shortage/surplus sharing deal works’ »
Water is at the core of a compelling human drama. Or perhaps dramas (plural). Yet the core issues, where the drama lies, are maddeningly difficult to, if I may share a personal journalist neologism, “storyize”. Cynthia Barnett, my favorite water writer, explains in the Los Angeles Times: But we can’t see dried-out aquifers the way …
Kudos to Chris Austin, who was out ahead of everyone else earlier this week in laying out the details of the pending US-Mexico Colorado River water deal. I encourage you to head over to Chris’s blog for more on the deal, which was first presented last Monday to the board of the Metropolitan Water District …
Bruce Finley in the Denver Post tallies up another western city cutting municipal water use, demonstrating that, for city water users, this is a tractable problem: Water-saving efforts already have dropped metro Denver residents’ overall average daily usage to 85 gallons, down from 104 gallons in 2001. Only one city better than Denver in Finley’s …
First, my apologies to Michael Campana, for whom my recent disquisition on hookers and blow on the Lower Colorado seems to have caused some inadvertent difficulties. I expect my Texas neighbors are the forgiving sort and will welcome you back. It would be unfortunate, given their recent difficulties with the whole running-out-of-water thing, if they …
Continue reading ‘Hookers and blow on the Lower Colorado – boring wonky back story’ »
Hey Lower Colorado River Basin. Can we talk? I know, I know. It’s New Water Year’s Eve and it’s like a hundred something degrees and sunny and you wanna go water skiing on Lake Mead, all fat and happy with its 1,115.18 feet of surface elevation, glistening in that warm Nevada sunshine. Or you wanna …
Continue reading ‘Time for a Lower Basin New Year’s resolution?’ »