Riding my bike this morning, I came across a man with a hawk. I stopped to ask. (How many times do you see a man out taking his hawk for a walk?) It was a Harris’s hawk, bred in captivity, a native of the southern deserts a little far north of its normal range. He …
American cities became much healthier in the early twentieth century because they were spending as much on water as the federal government spent on everything except the military and the postal service. Edward Glaeser, writing in Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
Given the findings of the recent federal-state Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study, it’s useful to look back at what other efforts at sussing out the region’s water problems and solutions have found. It’s especially interesting given the (to me) striking assertion in the Basin Study that building a pipeline from the Missouri, or …
From this morning’s newspaper, a look at the coming trouble among farming, fish, cities and water in the Rio Grande: [W]ith farms and cities diverting water from the river to meet their needs, leaving enough for the fish and the ecosystem on which it depends while at the same time meeting human needs has become …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: trouble on the Rio Grande’ »
From the Joe Mozingo at the LA Times: The marijuana boom that came with the sudden rise of medical cannabis in California has wreaked havoc on the fragile habitats of the North Coast and other parts of California. With little or no oversight, farmers have illegally mowed down timber, graded mountaintops flat for sprawling greenhouses, …
If one allows mining of a nonrenewable source, it is disingenuous to argue that the source should never be polluted if the economic activity causing the pollution is necessary to sustain employment. Suppose that two individuals proposed to extract water from a nonrenewable aquifer. The first agreed he would farm and by doing so dry up the aquifer. …
California had one of its memorable (and important for water supply) “atmospheric river” storms earlier this month. The folks at NASA have posted a particularly beautiful image of one of the results: That’s a huge blast of sediment flowing out the mouth of the Eel River in northern California following the storm.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about University of Colorado law school professor Doug Kenney’s argument that the states of the Colorado River’s Upper Basin (UB) faced a very real risk under climate change – that to the extent the river shrinks across the 21st century, the Upper Basin states will have the eat …
Continue reading ‘Is the Upper Basin more vulnerable than I thought?’ »
One of the points Steven Solomon’s book Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization hammered home for me is water’s importance in providing transportation routes. Here in the western United States, it’s not something I’ve had to think of too much (see rivers without water to understand the cognitive dissonance). So I’ve been …
Last week’s release of the Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study was a headline-grabbing event – “Colorado River water supply to fall short of demand, study says“, to cite but one of a zillion examples of the core message getting big play. Barry Nelson argued the study “has the potential to mark a new era in the …
Continue reading ‘With the Basin Study done, we can get back to draining Lake Mead’ »