I spent an unhappy evening yesterday staring at data, trying to make sense of the inevitability of change. I slept poorly. The Rio Grande through Albuquerque is dry, the Colorado River’s reservoirs are rapidly emptying and, unable to come to grips with this reality we have thrown up our hands and tossed the future of …
A guest post from longtime friend of Inkstain (and friend of the Colorado River) Karl Flessa. By Karl Flessa In the classic Monty Python sketch, a customer returns to the pet shop where, just 30 minutes ago, he purchased a parrot. He complains that the parrot is dead. The shopkeeper tries to convince the customer …
Continue reading ‘The Colorado River Compact is a dead parrot’ »
My Rio Grande thinking is almost entirely about the bits in New Mexico, but this, happening now at Big Bend, on the US-Mexico border, is worthy of note: Bulldozers have begun plowing up ground at the mouth of Big Bend national park’s famed Santa Elena Canyon as part of the Trump administration’s multibillion-dollar “smart wall” …
Albuquerque’s bosque has been suffering a rapid dieback, as shallow aquifers drop away from the roots of the community’s beloved cottonwood gallery forest. This is uncharted territory for our modern bosque, which grew into its present state after Bureau of Reclamation channeling in the 1950s created the modern river corridor, and flood control and water …
Continue reading ‘Rapid dieback in Albuquerque’s Rio Grande bosque’ »
By Jack Schmidt and John Fleck John C. Page, Commissioner of Reclamation, reported to Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, in announcing the growth of Lake Mead, that the indications are enough water will be caught and stored by Boulder Dam this spring to put the operations of the Boulder Dam plant on a …
The latest European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts got some ink/bits for their strong forecast for a wet winter in California (h/t Daniel Swain), but what do they say for us? Sorry for the blocky look, but when you drill down, the map gets pretty coarse – these are big pixels. But the headline is …
Continue reading ‘“Super” El Niño meh in the Rio Grande and Colorado River headwaters?’ »
Near-extinct oryx are returning. Farms are prospering as irrigation water reaches fields for the first time in decades. Farmers are even nurturing new trees on their land. Once a byword for drought and famine, the African Sahel region on the southern flank of the Sahara Desert now has more water than it has for decades. …
Communities continue to face different groundwater realities, different economies and different views about water management. But as groundwater challenges become harder to ignore, many are reaching the same conclusion: Waiting for someone else to solve the problem isn’t a strategy. Faith Kearns on new Arizona research on rural community response to groundwater challenges
On the implications of total Mead-Powell storage reaching record lows: The big questions that are implied by where we’re at are ones that absolutely need to be addressed, but they’re not going to be addressed now. I mean, we can’t even have functional conversations about how to reduce consumptive use. – Jack Schmidt, quoted by …