My post last week on the Bellagio fountain and the fact that it got its water from wells originally drilled to water an old golf course drew questions. Today, we have answers. Jeffrey Prest asks: “What was the name of the old golf course?” Doug Bennett at the Southern Nevada Water Authority shared this old postcard of …
Continue reading ‘More on where the Bellagio fountain gets its water’ »
From the morning paper, the latest in the struggle to figure out how much water the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow needs: According to an analysis by the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, the river has only once since the 1990s, in 2005, had enough water to meet the Fish and Wildlife Service’s “conservation objective” …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere – Anthropocene diaries: how much water for the minnow?’ »
The agreement between the Southern Nevada Water Authority (Las Vegas) and the Arizona Water Banking Authority, under which Arizona banked water for Nevada, has always seemed to me like a harbinger of the future in the Colorado River Basin – mutually beneficial sharing across state borders. Via Juliet McKenna and Michele Robertson, it now appears …
Continue reading ‘landmark Arizona-Nevada water deal coming to an end’ »
oops, update, forgot link Journal photographer Robert Rosales and I recently visited Maxwell, NM, which I describe (I think safely, though how does one know for sure?) as having “arguably the most serious drought-driven municipal water supply problem in the state of New Mexico.” From the story: Asked about the burden she bears in trying …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Real water, real people, Maxwell NM edition’ »
I’ve been getting this wrong. The water in the Bellagio Fountain in Las Vegas does not come from recycled sewage: The Bellagio fountains are mostly using well water that exists beneath the Bellagio landscape. That well water was used previously to maintain a golf course that previously existed there. The beauty of that is the …
Continue reading ‘Where the Bellagio Fountain’s water comes from’ »
A forest burns down. Humans rescue fish, keep ’em alive in an Albuquerque warehouse. Maybe 80 years before the drainage that feeds their forest creek recovers. Maybe 200. This is life in the anthropocene: Angela James’ fish tanks don’t look much like Whiskey Creek. But for 68 imperiled Gila trout, the tanks in a northeast …
Continue reading ‘Anthropocene diaries: a fish story I wrote elsewhere’ »
Evapotranspiration is the combination of water evaporated from soil, surface water, etc., and water transpired from the leaves of plants. It’s an incredibly important measure of what’s going on in the hydrologic system. Which is why I love this new map: From Estimation of Evapotranspiration Across the Conterminous United States Using a Regression With Climate and …
Continue reading ‘Insanely cool new evapotranspiration maps from USGS team’ »
My friends at Carpe Diem West, who’ve been doing some interesting work on the science/politics/policy interface of watershed restoration, are holding one of those ghastly named but increasingly useful “webinar” things next week: Join the Academy’s first extended webinar taking a closer look at how to value watersheds and the services they provide to downstream …
Nearly every time I give a talk on water (which seems to happen frequently lately – wonder if I’ll be less popular as a speaker once the drought ends) I get asked about desalination. It is, as Bettina Boxall noted in a recent LA Times story, the stuff of dreamers: “an inexhaustible, drought-proof reservoir in …
The “broken windows fallacy” is the economic argument that spending money on X is of intrinsic value because of the jobs created, regardless of the value of the thing being done. The reference to broken windows is the argument’s reductio ad absurdum – hire one person to break a bunch of windows, and a second …