As I’ve written previously, the Colorado Basin Study suggests that augmenting water supply in the region is the most expensive and least quick approach to closing the supply-demand gap. But if folks do want to pursue augmentation, Juliet McKenna is asking the right questions: The consequences of implementing any water supply augmentation plan need to …
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, my distillation of the Colorado River Basin Study’s key message: Towing icebergs from Alaska or building a giant pipeline from the Missouri River won’t bail out the western United States from its growing water supply crisis, federal officials said Wednesday. Instead, conservation by the region’s farms and cities offers the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Basin Study – it’s conservation for now’ »
The Bureau of Reclamation’s study of supply and demand in the Colorado River Basin is due out tomorrow, and already it’s been getting a lot of attention. Bruce Finley at the Denver Post and Felicity Barringer at the New York Times have both highlighted the study’s consideration of the “pipeline to the Missouri” option, one of …
Continue reading ‘Why the Basin Study is not about a pipeline to the Missouri’ »
The All-American Canal, which grabs water from Imperial Dam and runs it along the north side of the California-Baja border before delivering it to Imperial Valley farmers, was built at some great expense to replace the original wandering route that took the water south into Mexico before curving back north to US farms. The folks …
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 …