While much of the discussion of “new water” in the western United States involves desalination of seawater, there’s an experiment getting underway outside Albuquerque that is part of a new approach to the problem: desalination of brackish groundwater. My colleague Rosalie Rayburn has a story in the Albuquerque Journal on the latest testing going on …
Tom Beal has a story in the Arizona Daily Star that captures a couple of related realities one finds these days in the western water community. One is that climate change is the real deal. It’s easy to go on quibbling about the attribution problem, but the Colorado River is mostly drier these days than …
Continue reading ‘Stationarity Really, Most Sincerely Dead’ »
The experimental restart of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Yuma Desalting Plant, which should get underway after the first of the year, is more than a technical experiment in operating the big desalination equipment. It is, I think more importantly, a fascinating experiment in cross-border collaboration, as I describe in this morning’s paper (sub/ad req): Beginning …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Colorado River Delta’ »
I love history as a journalistic storytelling technique for two reasons. First, it often can provide built-in context. Second, it can provide a natural narrative arc. So when I sat down Friday with Mike Connor, the new head of the Bureau of Reclamation, I tried to frame his job today in terms of the western …
The AP’s Ben Neary has a significant story this weekend about a Bureau of Reclamation analysis of how much water really is available from the Green River for an interbasin transfer being proposed by entrepreneur Aaron Million. Million thinks there is a quarter of a million acre feet a year available. While studies are ongoing, …
Continue reading ‘BuRec: Not Enough In Green River For Transfer Scheme’ »
From today’s newspaper, the story of a private property owner and a loose-knit coalition of folks around her working to preserve and restore one of the most remarkable stretches of Rio Grande riparian wildlands in the middle Rio Grande (sub. or ad req): A gate that used to keep cattle in now keeps them out …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Pecos Sunflower Edition’ »
Water folk: I’ve got a chance to interview Mike Connor, head of the Bureau of Reclamation, on Friday. Suggested questions?
Occasionally for lunch I slip away from the office, grab a sandwich from one of the places across the street, and head over to a little flood control pond about a mile from my office to check out the birds. The sandwiches are messy, and inevitably little bits of lettuce spill out on the ground …
I confess that my literary life list does not include Dune, Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic. But perhaps it should. For a show at the University of Toronto, architect Andrew Kudless has drawn on Herbert to design a dystopian future urban world in which we southwesterners dig down, building underground to preserve our water: Sietch Nevada …
When I started making noises about some sort of Colorado River project, one of the water wonks I know pointed me toward the delta, arguing it was a) central to understanding the Colorado, and b) widely ignored. The problem, in short, is that essentially no fresh water flows there any more. An ecosystem once sustained …