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 …
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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 …
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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 …
From this morning’s newspaper, a deep dive into the issues surrounding the Navajo Nation’s struggle to secure water rights in northwestern New Mexico: It was 1948. Fred Wilson, New Mexico’s representative to the interstate group working to divide up the waters of the Upper Colorado River Basin, was pleading. “The state of New Mexico wants …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Navajo water rights’ »
Via Nora Reed, via Sociological Images, a particularly odd way of viewing water sustainability in Las Vegas, Nev.: As commenter Rishi noted, “Pretty much all of the water in Las Vegas is imported.” And Vegas is in the midst of an effort to import a whole lot more. Image courtesy Sociological Images, cc, some rights …
The February forecast is for not very much water to flow down the Colorado River and its tributaries into Lake Powell: The dotted line is the median forecast. The solid line above it is the mean. The median forecast is for 54 percent of normal into Lake Powell. The dark blue bands mean that, even …
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Juliet McKenna is on a roll. You should really just skip me and add her to your RSS feed. Her latest entry is a look at the various ways of completing the sentence, “The Colorado River Basin Study is a call to action to….”? Check out her great list. Here’s the reason the diversity of …
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