Nota bene: A guest post from friends of Inkstain John Berggren and Kevin Wheeler John Berggren (Regional Policy Manager, Western Resource Advocates) Kevin Wheeler (Principle, Water Balance Consulting) 5/5/2026 As everyone is well aware, the snowpack and associated runoff this year are truly awful. It will be one of the worst, if not worst, on record. …
Tucker Davidson of Audubon wrote a lovely piece about slowing down and listening to, and looking for, the birds: Birding requires us to be present in the moment. It also allows us to shift our focus from our own worries and ruminations to another subject, breaking anxious thought patterns. Birds hold our attention without overwhelming it. For …
Think of law as software. State agency budgets and staff are hardware. We have been stripping the copper for the past forty years, making software updates questionably useful, without durable fixes to the hardware. For constitutional environmental rights to make a difference, state natural resource departments need to be adequately funded and staffed. – Sonya …
Words fall short as we watch the West’s snowpack disappear under the glare of a heat wave so off-the-charts, so freakish, that I had to resort to some pretty extreme math to try to understand how freakishly off-the-charts this is. We’ve got more than a century of weather records in Albuquerque, with really good ones …
Continue reading ‘A Freakish Heat Wave – A Statistical Wonder’ »
Update: Apologies to Norm Gaume and the Water Advocates for screwing up the link to the original quoted piece, which is shared here via Creative Commons copyright [CC BY SA]. Original post: Terrific visualizations from the Water Advocates of the state of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande: Water Demands and the Effective Water Supply Stress …
As the former CEOs of two of the largest water utilities using water from the Colorado River, we have been deeply engaged in interstate and federal negotiations on the river for over 30 years. Those negotiations were tough, but the basin states ultimately reached agreement, including reducing California’s use of water by 800,000 acre-feet and …
Continue reading ‘Quoting Jeff Kightlinger and Jim Lochhead’ »
It is hard to know where to begin. The Department of the Interior’s Post-2026 Colorado River draft environmental impact statement, and the deep questions it raises, is an “everything including the kitchen sink” sort of process. But at its root, the question it raises is simple: Tell us what you’re going to do. It is …