The National Environmental Policy Act – NEPA – is a weird bird. It’s one of the earliest of a suite of U.S. environmental laws that took shape in the 1960s and ’70s as environmental values grew into a substantive element of our nation’s politics. It doesn’t actually protect anything, but it does require the U.S. …
Continue reading ‘The National Environmental Policy Act in western water’ »
If I’d done the geek stuff right, hit the play button below to hear a really nice piece by Alex Witze of Nature magazine from the Colorado River delta pulse flow. (I know, it’s a magazine, this is audio. Brave new world and all.) If I haven’t done the geek stuff right, you can probably …
Continue reading ‘Via Nature podcast, Alex Witze on the grand pulse flow experiment’ »
The latest Bureau of Reclamation monthly basin operating report, out today (the “24-month study”, pdf), makes it increasingly clear that we’re not going to see Lake Mead drop to levels that would require a shortage declaration in 2016. The shortage is based on Lake Mead’s surface elevation, and the trigger level is 1,075 feet above sea …
Courtesy of the folks at CILA, the Mexican boundary and water commission, the latest Colorado River pulse flow map shows water making it past the Laguna restoration sites in the Colorado River delta, continue its slow push toward the Sea of Cortez:
You can’t understand water in the west without understanding urban growth patterns. They’re joined at the hip. Here, in a single graph, is the explanation for the Vegas announcement yesterday that its two main water agencies are laying off 7.5 percent of their staff: Henry Brean explained it thus: The Southern Nevada Water Authority and …
Continue reading ‘In Las Vegas, an acknowledgment that growth is gone’ »
Photographer John Trotter on the Colorado River: When they opened those gates on (Morelos) dam and let water back into the main channel on the river, it kind of engaged those people. It brought them back into the mainstream of all the other people who are living along it in Moab or Grand Junction or …
We come to a desert but it is not to our liking. One wonders why, then, we came to a desert, but no matter. We can engineer our way out of this: Meadow Lake was never much of a meadow. It was too wild, too wide, its sage-studded plains golden with buffalo grass and endless …
Continue reading ‘fighting off the desert with fake water’ »
It occurs to me that the brief and delightful pulse flow of clicks to this blog reading my recent coverage of what’s going on in the Colorado River delta might be potential book buyers. (Duh. Marketing is not my strength.) It’s called The Tree Rings’ Tale, a science book for kids (middle school aged, 13 …
Continue reading ‘Welcome, pulse flow readers. Buy my (old) book!’ »
Folks on the Colorado River delta “pulse flow” science monitoring team sent around a few pictures yesterday taken by the Sonoran Institute’s Tomás Rivas of the water arriving at the Laguna CILA environmental restoration site. The beauty of this picture for me, beyond the obvious sight of water in a formerly dry delta river channel, is …
Continue reading ‘land and water: Colorado River pulse flow arrives at Laguna’ »
Ultimately, what’s going on down in the Colorado River right now turns on a complicated mix of politics and science. The politics involves how much support advocates can gain for environmental restoration of the troubled system, on both sides of the border. The science supports those decisions After the rush of excitement about the historic …
Continue reading ‘after the rush, getting down to the science’ »