irritable?
Typo found in my notes: “irritable” where I meant to type “irrigable“. Looking at century-old estimates of possible agricultural land in the desert southwest. Notable mistake.
Archive of posts filed under the water category.
Note to self: invest in water
From Rakteem Katakey and Manish Modi at Bloomberg: Shares of water companies are beating those of gold and oil producers as governments from China to India boost spending on basic infrastructure to avert shortages threatening economic growth and political stability.
Groundwater: cooperating in Kansas
Brett Walton’s got another good story about what happens when communities creatively confront coming water shortages and take control over their own adaptation. This one’s out of Kansas, where folks in the Northwest Kansas Groundwater Management District are on the cusp of agreeing amongst themselves to a 20 percent groundwater pumping curtailment, shared, to stretch out …
the drought’s Obama’s fault
From the Texas Tribune: “Without immediate and direct action from the White House and U.S. Department of State, Texans along the Rio Grande will continue to suffer from a lack of available water,” Perry wrote.
Why “when the Ogallala runs out” isn’t the right way to think about this
At dinner the other night, one of the people at the table commented about the risk we face when the Ogallala Aquifer, beneath the great plains, runs out, which he’d heard would happen in 20 years. Without taking action now to begin regrowing the native grasses needed to hold the plains in place, he’d heard, …
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Stuff I wrote elsewhere: in the midst of drought, signs of water cooperation
It almost felt like a setup when Steve Harris asked me to talk at a conference about how “water is for cooperating over.” I make a meager but steady living these days writing about water conflict. And yet…. [B]efore I got to Ghost Ranch on Friday afternoon, I took the turnoff to Abiquiu Reservoir. In …
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Thinking like a watershed*
When I left Pasadena nearly 25 years ago, my water mentor Tim Brick was hard at work on the problem of restoring a semblance of riverness to the Arroyo Seco, the channel that defines that Southern California city’s western edge. Via a visit by our old mutual friend Larry Wilson to the confluence of the …
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: The “futile call” – a water rights priority dilemma
Drought exposes the fissures in water policy. In the abstract, you can talk about where the problems look like they might lie, and the measures that look like they’re in place to ensure adaptability and sustainability. Drought tests. This week’s test is happening down on the Pecos, a relatively small river that flows out of …
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Folks, we’ve got a drought going on
Bill Hasencamp at the Metropolitan Water District (I think it was Bill) asked a question today on the Colorada Basin River Forecast Center monthly briefing call that led to an email exchange that led to this, from the work blog: the forecast for spring inflow into Lake Powell, on the Colorado River, is the lowest …
US Reclamation Service, 1915
The US Bureau of Reclamation was known as the US Reclamation Service (USRS) from its formation via the Reclamation Act of 1902 until it was renamed in 1923. This “USRS” was cast in concrete on Mesilla Dam, an irrigation diversion structure on the Rio Grande outside Las Cruces, NM, in 1915. The dam is part …