Hey smart water tweeps, here’s a lazyweb question the Google has been unable to assist me with. Somewhere, sometime, I heart a great truism from some smart water person whose name is lost to the mists: Ditches (canals, etc.) move water in space. Dams move water in time. Have you heard this before? Source?
From the morning paper, some thoughts (sub/ad req) from my recent trip on the west-wide linkages, and the institutional problems those linkages have created: “We’ve got a system that is not sustainable,” said Curt Schmutte, Met’s top official working on the Delta problem. Given the political rancor that surrounds California’s Delta discussions, it is unclear …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: the California-NM connection’ »
Excited to get my copy of The End of Abundance in the mail today!
I’m excited to join an “I’m not worthy” sort of group at Stanford’s Lane Center who share a common interest in our changing West. My piece of the problem is water management. My initial contribution touches on my cautious optimism about long term institutional management issues on the Colorado River – some success in recent …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Bending the Law of the River’ »
Any of my California water friends know Philip Garone’s The Fall and Rise of the Wetlands of California’s Great Central Valley? Worth a read?
How vulnerable is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to earthquakes? Apparently the answer to that sciency-sounding question depends on your interests in various Delta solution paths. The Delta is a giant, richly entangled example of what Dan Sarewitz talks about: The necessity of looking at nature through a variety of disciplinary lenses brings with it a …
Water’s never really wasted. It always goes somewhere and does something. See, for example, the lining of the Coachella Canal, on the northeast side of the Salton Sea: [L]eakage from the unlined Coachella Canal recharged local aquifers. Wetlands have expanded due to spring discharge below the canal. Wetlands were natural features prior to canal construction, …
A new study out today from the Pacific Institute of municipalities’ water use in the Colorado Basin has some good news and some bad news from a basin-wide perspective. Per capita water consumption in the basin’s cities is down: Almost every one of the water agencies included in the study experienced declines in per capita …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Cities’ water use in the Colorado Basin’ »
This ran last week in the Albuquerque Journal, while I was on the road, sorry for the late bloggage (sub/ad req). From the Natural Resources Law Center’s Navigating the Future of the Colorado River conference, it’s a riff on how this year’s big snowpack buys a bit of time for the hard discussions to come …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere – Buying Time on the Colorado’ »
In a comically disingenuous TV diatribe earlier this month, Congressman Devin Nunes, defender of San Joaquin Valley farmers’ federal water, suggested that perhaps if the effete liberals in San Francisco care so much about the Delta smelt, they should reduce their own consumption of Sierra Nevada water: If the Delta ecosystem is collapsing, I would …