Water Quote of the Week
It’s only Monday, but I think Tim Brick nails it: If we look to the future, the Colorado River will not be a reliable source of water.
Archive of posts filed under the water category.
Coal and Water in the Southwest
Coal burning and water supplies are integrally linked in the southwestern United States. When the Central Arizona Project was built in the 1960s, planners hoped to build hydroelectric power plants on the main stem of the Colorado River to generate the power to lift the artificial river they were building up a total of nearly …
Water in the Desert, Phoenix Edition
Lake Pleasant, Arizona Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. It was 95 F (35 C) when I went up to Lake Pleasant Friday afternoon. Remember this is mid-October. You couldn’t see the water evaporating off the lake, but I’m pretty sure it was happening. Located in the hills north of Phoenix, Arizona, Lake Pleasant is the storage …
Don’t Think About Water
Petrified Wood Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Like the old tease, “Don’t think about a pink elephant,” it’s hard to not think about water in Holbrook, Ariz., a place that doesn’t have much. It sits along the Little Colorado River, which mostly isn’t what you’d normally think of as a “river” – that is, a thing …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Ecology of National Security
In this morning’s newspaper, on the hard-nosed national security types looking at ecosystem services as a core issue (sub/ad req): Environmental problems, from water shortages, pollution and climate change to disease and food scarcity, are at the core of national security, Passell argues. “They’re all related to the same set of problems,” Passell said in …
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Greywater
There are places in the arid West where the use of greywater is a force multiplier – taking the water you already used to wash your clothes and piping it into the garden rather than “wasting” it by dumping it down the sewer. But it does not always make as much sense as our intuition …
An Experiment in Crop Insurance for the Poor
This project is too small to be anything more than intriguing, but intriguing it is. Crop insurance for some of the world’s poorest farmers: A quarter-century after famine killed one million Ethiopians and seared the world’s conscience, peasant farmers there are enduring an ever-faster barrage of droughts. Nearly 14 million people in Ethiopia are going …
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Highest and Best Use?
Via the Christian Science Monitor – I’m guessing a strict adherence to California’s water laws is probably low on these folks’ priority list: Large marijuana plots hidden deep in California’s public lands have illegally diverted hundreds of millions of gallons of water, compounding shortages caused by the state’s ongoing drought. At least the water’s being …
Ag, Land Use and the Whole Crisis
The failure of the Colorado River to reach the sea, Jonathan Foley argues, is evidence of dramatic challenges facing humanity that go beyond climate change. From an essay at Environment 360: Across the globe, we already use a staggering 4,000 cubic kilometers of water per year, withdrawn from our streams, rivers, lakes and aquifers. Of …
Georgia Drought In Perspective
Richard Seager’s new paper on Georgia drought has been well-covered by Cornelia Dean in the New York Times, and I’ll let her make its central point: that Atlanta’s problems “resulted from population growth more than rainfall patterns.” Seager and his colleagues point out something that I banged away on a bit a couple of years …