My current water policy hammer is the “not fer fightin’ over” meme – the idea that the apocryphal Mark Twain quote is wrong, not because he didn’t say it, but because much of what is most interesting about western water policy involves the places where people find solve water problems with negotiated compromise rather than …
Over at the work blog today, I shared some comments from Julio Betancourt, a USGS ecologist who knows his way around arid climate, about our recent fires and their connection to climate change. It’s something he wrote a month ago, before Las Conchas, but seems relevant, and I share here with his permission: I think …
In watching New Mexico’s fires the past few weeks and talking to my forest ecosystem brain trust, I’ve been repeatedly struck by the set of questions Emma Marris raises in her new book Rambunctious Garden (great, recommended) about what baseline we’re thinking about when we talk about restoring natural systems that are currently badly out of …
A piece in the Las Vegas Review-Journal makes this odd point about its namesake city: Water is the reason most cities are where they are, and Las Vegas is no exception. I’ve been to Las Vegas. And while it might once have been true that the nucleus of that desert town once formed around a …
From the Sunday paper (sub/ad req.*), my attempt to make sense of the issues I was fumbling around about yesterday: The factors that set up trouble in the Southwest’s forests are complex – a warming climate and forest management practices over the 20th century that allowed a terrifying buildup of fuel. There was simply too …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: the big dry, newspaper edition’ »
It rained this afternoon at my house. The physics of raindrops, I once learned, means that the largest raindrops falling out the bottom of a thunderhead hit first, and I was sitting in my office at the back of the house writing when I heard them banging onto the metal roof. I went out to …
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’ »