We’ve got a ton of hero/villain narratives underway around the water contamination problems of Flint, Michigan. But there’s always a risk of post hoc storytelling here. As storytelling beings, we gravitate to narratives like that. But inevitably the heroes and villains are embedded in deeper institutional structures that are a necessary precursor to the problem, …
Lynda Mapes and her colleagues at the Seattle Times built a beautiful multimedia piece on the return of nature to the Elwha River on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula now that the dams are gone. It has an amazing picture from 2010, pre-dam removal, of Chinook salmon at the bottom of the dam with this caption: In …
Tara Lohan at Water Deeply had a great interview last week with Tom Ash of Southern California’s Inland Empire Water Agencies about the problem of water revenue in a time of conservation and drought: Tom Ash: What I learned is that it doesn’t matter where in the world – China, Chile, Spain, France, Italy, Israel …
Continue reading ‘Flawed rate structures cost California water utilities half a billion dollars’ »
Interesting point from the Young Farmers Coalition about our West: The majority of young farmers and ranchers in this region have never farmed in non-drought conditions.
Chicago Tribune, June 3, 1934:
I joke that I kept trying to leave the Salton Sea out of my book, because it’s such a hairy problem that in threatened to derail me in so many ways. Of course I failed, because the Sea is a critical piece of solving the distributional problems of scarce Colorado River water. Agricultural reductions in …
I don’t want to get out ahead of things, because we’re still trying to understand what the current gonzo El Niño means for global weather, but the monthly outlook from the U.S. Climate Prediction Center now has the odds at 50-50 that we’ll be in La Niña by fall: Most models indicate that El Niño …
The Pacific Institute and others have published a useful new study on “Incentive-based Instruments for Freshwater Management” which raises some interesting issues about the language we use to describe water policy instruments. Deep in Abrahm Lustgarten’s excellent new piece about water markets in the West is this description of the arrangement by which the Metropolitan …
Continue reading ‘On Bard and the language of water “markets” and “incentives”’ »
Via Brett Walton at Circle of Blue: Per capita water use declined 30 percent from 2000 to 2015, and total water consumption within the metro Atlanta area declined over 10 percent despite a 20 percent increase in population. That’s from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (pdf). As Brett notes, “Georgia now says it does …
Continue reading ‘In Atlanta, another water use decoupling’ »
In his keynote at last week’s Law of the Colorado River conference in Las Vegas, Metropolitan Water District General Manager Jeff Kightlinger pointed out something that’s not gotten a lot of attention in discussions of California’s drought – the extraordinary decline in that state’s acreage of cotton. Cotton’s gotten a bad rap in irrigation circles, because …
Continue reading ‘The decline in California’s cotton acreage’ »