Assistant Secretary of the Interior Anne Castle, speaking late last month in Las Vegas: With the crucial Lake Mead reservoir at 38 percent capacity and the Southwest in the grip of the driest 15-year period in more than a century, Castle said it will take multiple, incremental agreements to balance the water rights of cities, …
Interesting comments from water people Scott Slater and Brian Jordan about the pitfalls ahead for California groundwater regulation: California groundwater
Tim Quinn of the Association of California Water Agencies (“big water” in Calif.) frames the state’s groundwater regulation legislation thus: We recognize there are many serious concerns about the groundwater legislation in the Central Valley, where many drought-weary water managers feel hammered by surface water cutbacks and worry that the door is now open to …
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California’s newly passed groundwater management legislation has rightly been called “the most significant set of water reforms to pass the Legislature since at least the Burns-Porter Act in 1960 that authorized the State Water Project”. In a state where overpumping is epidemic, regulation is incredibly important, as Jay Lund and Thomas Harter recently explained: Sustaining …
Continue reading ‘For regulating California groundwater, this is only the beginning’ »
The resource institutions that research has documented as working well in the field differ substantially in their detailed design but can usually be characterised as adaptive, multilevel governance systems related to complex, evolving resource systems. We need to overcome the tendency to recommend panaceas and encourage, instead, considerable experimentation at multiple levels to reduce the …
Continue reading ‘Elinor Ostrom on mistrusting easy answers’ »
I’m excited to be giving a talk on the Colorado River Delta environmental pulse flow Sept. 8 at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. If you’re in the neighborhood, please come by, say “hi”, and, if possible, ask questions when I explain things poorly. The talk is a snapshot of a work in progress, so no …
The San Diego Air And Space Museum posted some wonderful old aerial pictures of Hoover Dam on Flickr, and I’m hoping someone in the Inkstain posse can help me sort out the history. This image was taken by Colonel Orie W. Coyle, and appears to be a test of Hoover Dam’s outlet jets that I’m thinking …
The pecan trees of Pecan Lane have seen better days.
Indiana, where nine out of the past ten years have been wetter than the long term average, is talking about water shortages: Water shortages are coming to Indiana unless the state implements policy changes, according to a recent prediction by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce Foundation. Data courtesy NCDC.
From the USDA (pdf): Contracted production of California processing tomatoes is forecast at a record high 14.0 million tons, averaging 48.61 tons per acre, according to a survey conducted by the National Agricultural Statistics Service. The current forecasted production is 17.6 percent above the 2013 crop. Drought has been an issue for some crops, but apparently …
Continue reading ‘Resilience to drought, California tomato crop edition’ »