Should I read this book?
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?
Archive of posts filed under the water category.
Scientization in the Delta
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 …
No Water Wasted
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, …
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Cities’ water use in the Colorado Basin
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 …
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Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere – Buying Time on the Colorado
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 …
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Hetch Hetchy – Best Pork Bun in Town!
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 …
Playing Chicken with the Delta
One of the most interesting analyses of California’s water problems I read before last week’s trip was “California’s Sacramento San Joaquin Delta Conflict: from Cooperation to Chicken“, by Kaveh Madani and Jay Lund at UC Davis. It looks at the struggle over the Delta’s future as a game theory problem, one in which an optimal …
The Delta – A Sense of Urgency
SACRAMENTO – One of the things I’ve been struck by in my week talking to water people in Sacramento is a sense of urgency around the problems of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta – a feeling that now is the time to do something. I’m also struck by the lack of consistent clarity of what that …
1,100/3,660
If you’re into nice round numbers (or live in Las Vegas and like drinking water coming out of your tap), keep hitting reload over here – Lake Mead’s elevation is about to cross 1,100 feet above sea level for the first time since – oh, was it only April 2010? Meanwhile, upstream at Lake Powell: …
Water’s Sometimes for Fightin’ Over
In answer to my question over the weekend about whether the big California snowpack might have “bought Californians nothing other than a new set of facts on the ground to fight over”, there is this possible answer from Mike Taugher: Delta water users have sued to block a temporary decrease in pumping meant to save …