One of the undertold stories, amid the gloomy forecasters for water in the southwestern United States, is the water conservation successes of the region’s major metro areas. Emily Green has a nice example from Los Angeles, where total water usage is down nearly 20 percent from 2006-07. Michael Cohen, at the Pacific Institute, documented this …
One of my favorite water books, Steven Solomon’s Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, persuasively demonstrates that one can trace the geography of human history through our relationship with water – our great port cities and rivers as highways, our first great industrial power supply, the source of fertile soil and the …
Continue reading ‘“City Water, City Life” – a positive review’ »
Jay Famiglietti, from UC Irvine in California, and his colleagues have made something of a scientific cottage industry out of the use of data from the German-NASA GRACE satellites (short for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) to measure changes in groundwater around the world. Not surprisingly, it’s going down as humans pump it out to use faster …
Continue reading ‘Famiglietti on GRACE and the need for good groundwater data’ »
Lake Powell, the large Upper Colorado River Basin Reservoir sitting behind Glen Canyon Dam, ended May with a surface elevation of 3,599.44 feet above sea level, 3 feet higher than projected a month ago, thanks to greater-than-anticipated runoff during the month. Some of that’s just time-shifting – an early melt bringing water down sooner than …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: June numbers show slight improvement in Lake Powell’ »
In an op-ed in today’s Sacramento Bee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, has a lot of ideas for fixing California’s water problems: bigger dams tweaks (unspecified) to the Endangered Species Act a Peripheral Tunnel (do we still call it “Peripheral”?) to ease conveyance of water from north to south of the water Californians will be storing …
Continue reading ‘Dianne Feinstein has a bunch of #cawater ideas’ »
update: Michael Cohen at the Pacific Institute emailed with a subtle clarification. If Lake Mead, as the USBR analysis reported below suggests, drops below elevation 1,075 feet above sea level during 2015, the actual shortage declaration on the lower Colorado would then apply to the following year’s water allocation. More specifically, during August the Bureau …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River shortage declaration possible by 2015/16’ »
So I’ll be the representing the journalist rabble in a discussion of the fate of the Colorado River tomorrow (Thurs. 6/12/2013) at 9 a.m. PDT on KNPR, public radio in Las Vegas, NV.
I live in a suburban neighborhood that dates to the early 1950s, when this swath of mesa east of the Rio Grande was cleared for homes. It’s almost certainly at that point that the city of Albuquerque, which then managed the water utility, laid a grid of pipes to bring water to the area. Carl …
I write about minnows in the Rio Grande, and smelt and salmon in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Richard White writes about salmon in the Columbia. In all three cases, we’re discussing species-focused environmental efforts – to “save” the silvery minnow in the Rio Grande, or salmon and the delta smelt in California, or salmon in …
In a democracy boredom works for bureaucracies and corporations as smell works for a skunk. Richard White, The Organic Machine