Tom Curwen has a great story in today’s Los Angeles Times of the sort that I’d like to see more of – beyond “OMG California is toast” drought coverage to look at what works in the state’s water management, what sort of adaptive capacity exists in the places where water is not running out. Which, …
Thursday morning I found myself standing knee deep in the Rio Grande. Grinning. University of New Mexico water resources faculty members Mark Stone (that’s Mark in the green shirt helping the knee-deep students learn to measure river flow) and Becky Bixby were out at the river with the summer field course students. It was a trial run …
Continue reading ‘University of New Mexico Water Resources Program: my newly remodeled career’ »
A fascinating analysis by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program concludes that 57 percent of the nation’s population growth between 2000 and 2014 happened in places currently experiencing drought. Weird. But there also is this: In the midst of these challenges, though, some of the fastest-growing places like Las Vegas, San Diego, San Antonio, and Austin …
Smart words from Annie Snider on tomorrow’s Senate hearing on western water problems and drought: There are no silver bullets, and few, if any, of the opportunities that do exist are cheap. Details on the hearing here.
Many Navajo homes lack running water. Many more draw from shallow wells with poor quality water and resulting health problems. Now, my friends Olivier Uyttebrouck and Roberto Rosales report, this community could also lose its hauler, the grandma who trucks in the only clean water available: As she pulls up outside a house, residents quickly …
A month that Eric Kuhn of the Colorado River Water Conservation District in western Colorado called a “miracle May” has left the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs in much better shape than we might have expected given the glum projections of doomsayers like me. Precipitation across the Colorado River Basin has been well above average, …
My friend Phil King, a professor at New Mexico State University and water advisor to the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, has been following the water down through the Rio Grande southern New Mexico valleys as irrigation season starts: For those unfamiliar with water management practices in Southern New Mexico, this is an odd place. …
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Abrahm Lustgarten and Naveena Sadasivam at ProPublica have launched their eagerly awaited western water series with a great piece today on the impact of agricultural subsidies on water use in the Colorado River Basin. They focus on cotton, which uses a lot of water and, they argue, only gets grown because of the structure of …
Continue reading ‘ProPublica on the Colorado River Basin solution space’ »
Kathleen Ferris of the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association on the difficulty of comparative water use analysis: [C]omprehensive information on conservation and reuse implemented to date is not available. Each of the water providers within the ten metropolitan areas track information about their conservation programs differently. For example, water use in central Arizona is tracked by …
Continue reading ‘The difficulty in U.S. municipal water use comparisons’ »
In 1952, Robert Gottlieb and Margaret FitzSimmons explain in their 1991 book Thirst for Growth, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California essentially extended a promise to the communities it served: build away, we’ll get you the water as needed. It came in the form of the “Laguna Declaration” (so named because of the lovely …