Here’s Henry Brean: Long-time Southern Nevada Water Authority chief Pat Mulroy is preparing to retire but won’t make a formal announcement until “she’s ready,” Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak said Monday. And Conor Shine: Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager Pat Mulroy is planning to retire after 22 years on the job. Reached Monday evening, …
Writing in Science four years ago, the late Elinor Ostrom outlined a number of characteristics of necessary for sustainable development and use of what’s called in the literature “social-ecological systems”. These are complexes of humans and resources where the success of each depends on the interplay with the other, like forests and fisheries and, for …
Continue reading ‘California groundwater: bring on the social scientists’ »
From the work blog: Corky Herkenhoff, who’s been farming at San Acacia for half a century, told me he can tell where the runoff is coming from by the smell. San Acacia sits just below the Rio Puerco and Rio Salado, two generally dry tributaries that have been pumping water into the Rio Grande over …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the Rio’s smell’ »
Swirls as the muddy Rio Grande passed through Albuquerque this morning: (Much electronic manipulation of the image to bring out those colors. It was pretty, but not quite that pretty.)
In the midst of a very unusual storm (see my newspaper explanation of its unusualness here), I’ve spent much of the last 24 hours watching a big slug of water make its way down the Rio Grande Valley in which Albuquerque sits. A source yesterday afternoon pointed me to the readings on the USGS San …
Continue reading ‘Chasing water in the desert: the great Rio Grande “flood” of 2013’ »
There are no silver bullets for dealing with the west’s water problems. There is instead, as several speakers said last week at a workshop I attended, “bronze buckshot”. The Metropolitan Water District board yesterday handed out 16 grants to local Southern California water agencies that looked very much like what this metaphor implies – lots …
From yesterday’s newspaper: The (San Juan) basin, in northwestern New Mexico, has every competing water interest you’d want in the mix if you were creating a recipe for conflict: Native American water rights (the Navajo and Jicarilla Apache nations), endangered species (the Colorado pikeminnow and razorback sucker), farming large and small, city water use and …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: water management tools we learned in kindergarten’ »
The Times-Standard in Humboldt County (northern California) reports that someone swiped 20,000 gallons of water. From a school: Bridgeville Elementary School was reopened Wednesday after being forced to close for a day when staff discovered up to 20,000 gallons of water had been stolen from an onsite water tank during the Labor Day weekend. ”There …
Albuquerque’s Rio Grande is currently not much of a river. Lissa and I made the rounds this afternoon of a few Rio Grande viewpoints. This is from Albuquerque’s West Bluff neighborhood, on the west side of the river north of downtown. The bridge in the distance is Montaño. With an abysmal snowpack, the river was …
This is such an old story, but the new garb makes an interesting side-by-side comparison: a community faces tension as a new water user comes to town. In Barnhart, in West Texas, it’s fracking for oil: The Barnhart area has been hard-hit by drought, he said, just as surging oil and gas drilling activities have …
Continue reading ‘Q: What do fracking and viticulture have in common?’ »