storifying the Rio Grande
Trying an experiment here (because there are some things you can’t get to work on your employer’s production server) [View the story “A dwindling Rio Grande” on Storify]
Archive of posts filed under the water category.
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: irrigating the Rio Grande
From the morning paper, Day 1 (Day N?) of my Rio Grande death watch: JARALES – There’s a great line about New Mexico’s central river, often attributed to Will Rogers: “The Rio Grande is the only river I ever saw that needed irrigation.” Whether Rogers said it or not (and there is some question), it …
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Lund on a call for a new environmentalism
Smart Jay Lund piece on the shortcomings of old-school environmentalism in the new world: Classical environmentalism is mostly about stopping new harmful human influences, not reversing the harmful effects of past changes or shaping a more environmentally friendly future. Environmentalism has not substantially reversed the widespread urban and agricultural destruction of wetlands or freed rivers …
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Cutting the Gordian knot of the Upper Colorado River Basin’s delivery obligations
The folks at the University of Colorado’s Colorado River Governance Initiative have a clever idea to keep the Upper Basin states from getting screwed by climate change. Their new Upper Basin Voluntary Demand Cap white paper (pdf) offers a solution path for one of the stickiest problems in future Colorado Basin water management under climate change. In …
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: in small-town drought, why the wells go dry
We’ve seen a lot of news media attention in New Mexico’s drought of 2013 to the little village of Magdalena, where the wells earlier this month went dry. Small towns are especially vulnerable in drought. But as I dug into the data the last few weeks, I realized that journalistically swooping down on the town …
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Raising Shasta Dam
One of my gazillion water book ideas was “The Last Concrete”. It was going to be about the end of big water infrastructure in the West. Except there’s no way to know when the last one happens, because there are a bunch of lingering projects that probably won’t ever get built, but that don’t ever …
The Great Mistake, 1928 edition
With “Chasing Water” and “Moving Water” taken, the current working title for my Colorado River book-in-progress is “The Great Mistake.” It doesn’t have enough action verbiness for the final cut, but it seems to nicely frame one of my central themes – that the folks who built the elaborate plumbing system in the Colorado River …
An aqueduct to replenish the Ogallala?
Wayne Bossert, who manages the Northwest Kansas Groundwater Management District No. 4, has a post up this morning about an idea being kicked around by his colleagues to the south to build an aqueduct to move Missouri River water westward to replenish supplies in depleted Ogallala-dependent communities: The proposal is to transfer high flows west …
Stuff I helped create elsewhere: “Is fire good? Is fire bad”?
Big package in the Sunday newspaper and on line triggered by a visit to the Jemez Mountains by Journal multimedia guy Pat Vasquez-Cunningham and myself to spend time with Tom Swetnam: The son of the National Forest Service’s Jemez district ranger, Swetnam grew up with a hand-cranked phone in the front bedroom, hardwired to the …
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In Colorado River water, sharing the shortages versus suing the bastards
From a June 13 appearance on KNPR in Las Vegas, NV, with Pat Mulroy and Robert Glennon: States have resorted to lawsuits, and even military action to protect water sources in the past. Lawsuits have a huge downside, and can cost municipalities access to water if they lose. “What we’ve seen going back to the …
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