I tend to hear the term “water buffalo” as pejorative – the old, lumbering water managers of a bygone era of dam-building and overconsumption. Not so, say the folks at the Central Arizona Project: Just what is a water buffalo? In Arizona, they are those iconic figures who had the foresight to plan ahead to …
Continue reading ‘Water buffalos – embracing the pejorative?’ »
In High Country News, Cally Carswell has a story about the criollo (“a name that is endlessly fun to recite. These are criollo cows. (Try it: cree-oh-yo.)”: There’s anecdotal evidence that criollo will eat more of the shrubs and tougher grasses on degraded grasslands, but no hard data yet on whether that amounts to a …
Continue reading ‘Annals of adaptation: Cally Carswell on desert cattle’ »
From this morning’s newspaper, a look at the latest proposal to pump rural groundwater to New Mexico’s populous middle (behind Google surveywall): Depending on your view of the issue, this is either: a) an innovative approach to bring new water to the Middle Rio Grande Valley, or b) an inappropriate attempt to privatize a public resource …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: NM water policy tools poorly suited for the job’ »
We’re about 20 percent of the way into the fall-winter-spring snow accumulation season in the Colorado River Basin, and the current snowpack upstream of Lake Powell as estimated by the CBRFC is 61 percent of average: It is worth remembering, as the Bureau of Reclamation notes in its weekly water supply report (pdf), that “values …
Continue reading ‘In the Colorado River Basin, a slow start to the 2014-15 water year’ »
Al Jazeera Counties, mostly in the more rural northern parts of California, are reporting a surge in thefts and illegal diversions of water from wells and streams. The prime suspects are illegal marijuana farmers desperate for water before the fall harvest, which would explain the surge in water thievery over the summer.
Despite California’s epic drought, there were Central Valley persimmons this afternoon in Talin Market, Albuquerque’s international district grocer, when my sister, Lisa, and I stopped by to pick up a few things. They were priced at $1.29 a pound, with the box label suggesting they had come all the way from Gridley, Calif., a little …
It’s a little thing, this new breed of drought-tolerant alfalfa bred on New Mexico State University research plots in the southern part of my arid state. But it provides another clue (behind a Google surveywall) about what the path forward in western water management might look like: Adoption of a new crop takes time, so don’t …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Drought-tolerant alfalfa’ »
People in arid lands have always been very ingenious when it comes to conserving water. The late New Mexico writer and irrigator Juan Estevan Arrellano, from his new book Enduring Acequias: Wisdom of the Land, Knowledge of the Water, which came out in August, shortly before his recent sad and untimely death.
The latest USGS “Estimated Use of Water in the US” is out. It says we’re using less water. From 2005-10, a 13 percent drop. “Peak water” happened back in 1980: There are lots of caveats. This analysis uses “withdrawals” rather than “consumptive use”. So if a power plant sucks up river water for cooling, …
Water is photogenic, even at a sewage treatment plant. This is from a tour this afternoon of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s Southside Wastewater Reclamation Plant with a couple of University of New Mexico faculty colleagues and a bunch of students, including the graduate students in the Water Resources Program, where I’m an …