There’s a huge steel pipe running above the trains in the Sloane Square station on the London Underground. Depending on the historical time period you’re talking about, you could call it the River Westbourne or the Ranelagh Sewer. As Paul Talling explains: As this area developed into the desirable location it is today, the final …
Water draws me: There are no “rivers” proper in the part of Southern California where I grew up. Perhaps that’s why I’m so drawn to water. Or maybe it’s just part of the human condition? I can imagine an evolutionary benefit to being drawn to water. Whatever. Wherever I am, I end up walking to …
From the morning paper: With drought draped across all of New Mexico and much of the United States to our east and west, it’s an interesting time to think about the prehistoric Mayan city of Chichén Itzá. Its fate is a reminder that drought isn’t simply something climate does to us. Drought’s effects are defined …
Cynthia Koehler, writing in the Sacramento Bee last week, offers another example California water’s wicked problem. While all the attention is focused on the Sacramento Delta, are the critical headwaters of the state’s great river systems being given short shrift? California’s farms, commerce, industry and 38 million residents rely in large part on water that …
I’ve long thought “drought” is a troublesome word, implying abnormal when we’re really talking about dry part of the normal range of variability. My colleague Rene Romo has a marvelous quote that sidles up to that point in an excellent story today about the problems of southeastern New Mexico farmers and ranchers: Woods Houghton, the …
The folks at Montgomery and Associates recently took a look at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California as an example of why water management problems, once a region actually confronts shortage, are manageable: MWD’s response demonstrates that supply-demand imbalances can be resolved through active management. In practice, active water management generally means acquiring more …
Continue reading ‘MWD and the case for optimism in western water’ »
In the Dallas suburb of Highland Park (media household income $172k), efforts to conserve water by not planting lawns have run into a hiccup, as Melissa Repko reports: A new ordinance, passed on Monday, outlaws artificial turf on front yards. With a town permit, the turf is allowed on side yards and back yards, so …
Continue reading ‘making water conservation tougher than we need to’ »
There’s a pitched battle underway in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin over how much water humans can take from the system for their own use, and how much should be left for the river-fed ecosystem. One of the corollary arguments here in the states involves the human economic value of instream flows for recreation – river …
Continue reading ‘A clever argument for reduced flows in the Murray Darling’ »
Center-pivot irrigation in Garden City, Kansas – 1972 on the left, 2011 on the right Courtesy NASA: h/t Andy Revkin