Another reason for optimism about our ability to solve our water messes: [I]n most regions, the water needed to feed one person decreased even if diets became richer, because of the increase in water use efficiency in food production during the past half-century. Global Changes and Drivers of the Water Footprint of Food Consumption: A …
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The Four Corners is a very big, very arid, and very complicated place.
When I first ran across the rantings of George Maxwell as the Colorado River Compact was being developed in the 1920s, their racism seemed almost comical. Here he is in a written submission to the 14th Meeting of the Colorado River Commission, Nov. 13, 1922 (pdf from University of Colorado): The flood menace must not …
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The aptly named “Little Water,” on the Navajo Nation in northwest New Mexico. The weather station at Canyon de Chelly, which looks like it’s about 30 miles away across the border in Arizona, has recorded 1.52 inches (3.86 cm) of rain so far in 2014, which is less than half of mean precip through May …
In no part of the wide world is there a place where Nature had provided so perfectly for a stupendous achievement by means of irrigation as in that place where the Colorado River flows uselessly past the international desert. – William Smythe, Sunset Mangazine, 1900, quoted in Eric Boime, “Beating Plowshares into Swords”: The Colorado …
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NPR’s Dan Charles had a nice piece on California’s drought this week digging down a layer into how farmers are actually responding to California’s drought. They are: Fallowing fields of annual crops like corn to ensure they have enough water for their permanent crops, like almonds. Sarah Woolf takes me on a tour of her …
Continue reading ‘Water is different than other industrial raw materials, but how, and why?’ »
Simply put, no environmental law has had as much impact on western rivers–or created as much controversy–as section 7 of the ESA. – Reed Benson I’m on record as arguing that the Endangered Species Act is a terrible water management tool, while simultaneously being not terribly effective as an environmental tool. But you manage water …
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When last we met, I showed you the San Juan River looking like the only water for miles (and not much water at that) as it flows across the Ute Mountain Ute Nation near Four Corners. Today, after miles of driving around the high country of the Four Corners region (vacation road trip) I have …
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My search for water in the desert took Lissa and I this afternoon up US 160 from Teec Nos Pos in Arizona’s far northeastern corner, past the Four Corners Monument and into Colorado, where the highway crosses the San Juan River. Teec Nos Pos has a weather station that averages 8.09 inches (20.55 cm) of …
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Lissa and I stopped this morning at Mesa Verde’s “Mummy Lake”, more recently renamed “Far View Reservoir,” on account of apparently there was never any mummy. Now we learn, thanks to science, that there was probably never a reservoir or lake, either: The structure at Mesa Verde National Park known historically as Mummy Lake and …
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