I’ve been pretty successfully checked out of Colorado River work while I put the finishing touches on the new book (pre-order now!) but my colleagues are on it with a new post looking at the over-winter storage at the big reservoirs behind Hoover and Glen Canyon dams: This feels like good news, or least not …
2002 snowpack and runoff were terrible on the Rio Grande and San Juan. Think the San Juan Chama Project diverted about 6,000 acre-feet into the Rio Grande that year (normal would be between 80,0000 and 120,000 acre-feet. Heck, for Colorado on the mainstem Rio Grande, we had to negotiate a new delivery by Colorado to …
Continue reading ‘Quoting Rolf Schmidt-Petersen on water management in New Mexico in 2002’ »
For more than a century of development, Colorado River governance has lived under atension between individual communities’ desires to use more water and the collectiveneed to balance basin-scale supply and use for the benefit of the region as a whole.Incentives favoring individual communities at the expense of the collective good havebrought us to the edge …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River Assigned Water: Quoting Sorensen et al’ »
I was crammed into the back seat of a Subaru wagon Friday, bouncing down the tail end of the last dirt road along New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande when the big marsh buggies emerged in the distance, blocking up the road’s end. In the lexicon of the river’s “maintainers,” we were somewhere around “River Mile …
I added the year to the title of this blog post for the search engines. Because what’s going on right now applies to a lot of years since I’ve been writing about this stuff at Inkstain. I’m gathering string today for the first Water Matters podcast of 2026 (available on Buzzsprout and wherever fine podcasts …
Continue reading ‘Expect another dry year (2026) on New Mexico’s Rio Grande’ »
We need a tl;dr here, because I’ve got three or four different versions of this post on my hard drive half written, or in my head, half written. Actual publication as a physical object you can hold in your hands is still five-plus months away, but our new book is now available for pre-order (click …
Continue reading ‘Ribbons of Green, now available for pre-order’ »
If you distill down what my six partners just said, I believe there’s three common things: Here’s all the great things my state has done. Here’s how hard/impossible it is to do any more. And here are all the reasons why other people should have to do more. As long as we keep polishing those …
A guest post by Friend of Inkstain Michael Cohen…. By Michael Cohen, Senior Fellow, Pacific Institute December 15, 2025 Key Takeaways Missing Deadlines Way back at the end of the last century, at the annual Colorado River conference in Vegas, Marc Reisner repeated the Margaret Thatcher quote that consensus is the absence of leadership. On …
I don’t envy Secretary Burgum the position that he’s in, but we do need federal leadership. Secretary Burgum already reached out to convene a meeting. He invited the governors and the chief negotiators to DC earlier [last] week. That meeting didn’t happen because three of the four Upper Basin governors weren’t willing to go. [Nevada …
Continue reading ‘Quoting Katie Hobbs on Colorado River Negotiations’ »
Ten years after I handed in the manuscript for my book Water is For Fighting Over, about the governance past, present, and future of the Colorado River, my Utton Center colleague Rin Tara and I took a look back at the book on our Water Matters podcast. Writing it changed my life, reading it changed …
Continue reading ‘Water is For Fighting Over, ten years on’ »