From this morning’s newspaper, a piece about the Bosque Environmental Monitoring Program (sub/ad req). I’ve been hearing great things about BEMP for ages, and finally did what I should have done years ago, which is call up Dan Shaw, one of the program’s directors, and ask if I could come hang out and do a …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Teaching About Nature Around Us’ »
How seriously do Westerners take their water conflicts? Arizona Sen. John McCain brought it up yesterday during the White House health care debate. From the Washington Post’s transcript: There’s two examples right now of medical malpractice reform that is working. One’s called California, the other called — called Texas. I won’t talk about California, because …
Continue reading ‘Western Water in the Health Care Debate?’ »
Because some things should be printed on paper and thrown on people’s driveways, in this morning’s paper I revisit Dianne Feisntein’s comments on the Rio Grande silvery minnow: Rio Grande silvery minnow, meet California’s delta smelt. Y’all have a lot in common. But perhaps not as much as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would have Californians …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: More on Feinstein and the Minnow’ »
The energy-water nexus is an issue all over the western United States. Many new sources of energy, from concentrating solar plants to oil shales, need water. New sources of water, whether pumping it long distances or desalinating brackish groundwater or ocean water, take energy. Few examples on the energy side are as interesting as the …
From the work blog: Is Dianne Feinstein misrepresenting New Mexico history in her search for a precedent for reducing water for the delta smelt?
From this morning’s Journal, the struggle to help a river get to its destination when it doesn’t really want to go there on its own (sub/ad req): RATTLESNAKE POINT — Without Jason Thibodaux’s help, the Rio Grande would have a hard time making it past this sediment-choked desert flood plain. Around a bend in the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The View from Rattlesnake Point’ »
Corporations are doing a poor job of incorporating water variability risk into the disclosures they make to stockholders, according to an analysis released this week by Ceres, an organization of environmental groups and investor advocates: Global water scarcity is one emerging risk that all companies should be focused on – and one about which investors …
Perhaps this explains Pat Mulroy’s recent travails: A court in drought-plagued Malawi has jailed a man accused of casting a spell that blocked rain from falling on his neighbour’s field, police say. The court sentenced Chikumbeni Mwanatheu, 35, to two months in prison with hard labour after he admitted a charge of witchcraft, police spokesman …
Continue reading ‘Here All Along I Thought It Was Climate Change….’ »
The Bureau of Reclamation has tuned up its estimates of the chances of release of extra water to help Lake Mead, now putting them at one in four this year, according to an update published today (Wed. 2/10). The jargon here is “equalization,” which happens when there is enough extra water upstream in Lake Powell …
Continue reading ‘Chances of Extra Water for Mead Remain Low’ »
Following a trail of bread crumbs from James Lawrence Powell’s Dead Pool led me to the tale of Tom Udall’s trip down Glen Canyon with his dad as a boy (sub/ad req). Udall, now a U.S. Senator from New Mexico, is the son of former Arizona congressman and Kennedy-Johnson Interior Secretary Stewart Udall: Glen Canyon …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Udalls and Glen Canyon Dam’ »