Without pack animals and before fueled machinery, the ability of a human to carry food placed a fundamental constraint on economic integration across large distances. Over any significant distances, a human would have to eat all the food they could carry, leaving none left for trade. Trade of small, high value items could go on …
In an interview over at Grist, Brad Udall reminds us that, as we think about the effect of climate change on the West, it’s not just the thorny question of whether precipitation rises or falls that matters. Despite the uncertainties surrounding that question, as temperatures rise (a projection about which there is considerably less uncertainty), …
Lissa and I were walking in the Rio Grande bosque, the riparian cottonwood forest, last night when the sun dropped below the clouds just before sunset and lit the trees across the pond with the most exquisite light. All we had was a cell phone camera, so I went back this evening at the same …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert: not exactly nature, but close’ »
Great essay in High Country News by Jackie Wheeler about the strange and wonderful (and currently empty) Tempe Town Lake and our quirky relationship with water here in the affluent desert southwest: In so many ways, Town Lake was frivolous, artificial, and naïve. It didn’t produce hydroelectric power. It wasn’t built by beavers or glaciers. …
A bloggy bit from an ongoing project with Journal photographer Roberto Rosales on the trash in Albuquerque’s flood control system, and the people who try to catch it before it reaches the Rio Grande: “The vast majority of the floatables were plastic water bottles,” Daggett told me. “You buy your plastic water bottle and it …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: It’s the Water Bottles’ »
When Albuquerque’s new AAA baseball park opened in 2003, the drinking fountain by the restrooms on the third base side was somehow connected to a hot water line. I’m sure it was an accident, right? We’re dealing with the flaws of arguing from anecdote here, but Peter Gleick’s piece this week offers a number of …
Eleven years ago next week, I stuck up a rain gauge in the backyard and starting dutifully writing down daily data on NOAA WS FORM B-91, “Record of River and Climatological Observations.” Today, my employer kindly indulged my little hobby, affording me space on the front page of the newspaper for a riff on the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Measuring the Weather’ »
One of the central struggles in moving water out of the Colorado River a century ago was the silt. Moving water moves a lot of it, and when you slow the water down, the silt drops out. It was siltation that kept clogging Charles Rockwood’s Imperial Valley diversions, where he was taking water from the …
Scrawled on the whiteboard in my home office is the phrase “moving water”. The phrase is Lissa’s. It seemed to capture the set of problems I’m trying to write about. As the hydrologists among my readership can attest, water is an enormously powerful force that tends to want to do what it wants to do, …
Water law in the western U.S. doesn’t generally allow a user to save water from one year to the next. You use it, or you lose it. That, for example, is the situation faced by the Imperial Irrigation District this year, which faces the prospect of (horrors!) having Los Angeles get the extra water if …