It is a strange reality of our modern world that, in the face of a truly remarkable drought here in the Middle Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, I was able to pour imported Colorado River water on purely ornamental plants in my garden yesterday morning. I’m thrifty with the water – a modest drip …
If men will fight over water, they will also cooperate to conserve it and the history of water controversies is that, in the long run, the rule of cooperation prevails. Yet another nugget from my current favorite book, Carey McWilliams’ California: The Great Exception. Do you think he’s right? (The quote’s the opening of a 1949 …
The absence of a state policy governing the use of underground waters is, in fact, the outstanding weakness in California’s water conservation program. Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception, 1949 To what extent does this still hold today?
Matt Weiser at the Sacramento Bee offered up a fascinating framework in a piece last Sunday for thinking about California’s $23 billion (and counting) proposal to reshape the way water moves in and through the largest estuary on the western coast of North America: [A]s the process now stands California voters will have no formal …
Continue reading ‘Fixing Northern California’s Delta: some process issues’ »
In 1889, John Wesley Powell tagged along as a group of US Senators toured the western United States in an effort to understand “the irrigation problem”. What Powell reported looks kinda familiar: “The winds are drifting sands here and there,” John Wesley Powell said of his 1889 visit to the Lower Rio Grande Valley, where …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Powell warned us’ »
From the morning paper, a look at the effect of drought on farmers in southern New Mexico. It’s a more complex story than simply lack of water, and the impact depends a great deal on where you are: The Franzoys’ problem is not so much the dropping aquifer as the quality of the groundwater. It …
Continue reading ‘stuff I wrote elsewhere: drought hits New Mexico’s famed Hatch Valley’ »
Working with some colleagues, (including, no shit, the Emmy-award winning co-founder of Inkstain), an experiment in alternative story-telling forms to accompany a newspaper piece on the impact of drought on farmers in the southern Rio Grande valley of New Mexico:
Visiting a farm recently, I was reminded that business people for whom water is an input think about water conservation differently than city folk like me. For a given amount of water available, the farmer wants to grow and sell as much food as possible. So it should not be surprising to see water conservation …
Continue reading ‘water conservation diaries: it’s about making more food’ »
Busy with New Mexico’s drought, I’ve been paying scant attention to the rollout of California’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan, AKA the Peripheral Thingie. This is the scheme to build tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to move water south to California farms and cities. It’s the biggest and most interesting US water policy gambit out …
Continue reading ‘BDCP rollout: did anyone say anything that surprised you?’ »
I recently (happily) stumbled across a web version of the full 1995 publication of the Colorado River “Severe Sustained Drought” study, a comprehensive “what if” exercise done in the 1980s and early 1990s. From the forward:: The Severe Sustained Drought Study contemplates a much more dire water supply scenario than that which has occurred in the …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: The “Severe Sustained Drought” study’ »