I forgot my usual Inkstain link last week to a piece I wrote for the newspaper about the strange world of rainwater harvesting law in New Mexico. David Zetland was on about this last September, asking about the legality of rainwater harvesting in various U.S. states. My short answer, in the comments, was, essentially “kinda …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere a While Ago: Rainwater Harvesting in NM’ »
My head’s been spinning trying to follow discussions over California’s pending water legislation. Emily Green has helpfully rounded it all up in one spot: “Potential cost? $12bn. Who will it affect? Every Californian who needs water.” George Johnson on Santa Fe’s water budget: “For all its aspirations to be different, Santa Fe is still guided …
I spend a lot of time these days reading water news. When I read something good, I often blurt it out on my twitter feed, which is good for that sort of link sharing. But one of the problems with the disjointed nature of social media right now is the way different communities use different …
Somewhat surprisingly to me, Albuquerque’s water future has become an issue in our upcoming mayoral election. My Journal colleague Sean Olson, who used to cover the Water Utility Authority and now covers politics, interviewed the candidates for a piece in this morning’s paper: You can’t talk about Albuquerque’s future without talking about water, and the …
I’m puzzling over the real story of Oliver Meredith Wozencraft, the chap who was arguably the first person to imagine the large-scale irrigation of the deserts of the southwest with water from the Colorado River. Wozencraft was a physician who came west in 1849 in search of gold and stumbled instead (apparently quite literally) onto …
For the water geeks in the audience, I highly recommend this movie, which my sister, Lisa, Netflixed for us this weekend: (h/t Karl Flessa for suggesting it)
There’s some water geek hilarity over on the New Mexico Independent today correcting V.B. Price on a point of history and water law. First Price: New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — the “upper basin” states in the Colorado Compact of 1922 — have “junior” water rights to California, Arizona, and Nevada, the states that …
Continue reading ‘Stephen B. Davis Jr., Back From the Dead?’ »
When Milly et al. pronounced the death of stationarity in Science magazine last year, lots of folks in the water world took notice. Stationarity is the idea that the envelope of variability we’ve seen is the envelope of variability we’ll get in the future. Not so in a climatically changing world? Now come Gabriele Villarini …
Continue reading ‘If Stationarity Dies, How Will We Know?’ »
Here’s a nice way of thinking about aridity: If all the water that flows in each river during an average year were spread evenly over the area drained by the river, the depths would be: Delaware 20.9 in.; Columbia 13.1 in.; Mississippi 6.7 in.; Colorado 1.15 in. Source: Water and Choice in the Colorado Basin, …
I’m reading Frank Waters’ The Colorado, which offers an odd vantage point on the history of the river basin. It was written in 1946 when, as Waters points out in an introduction written when it was republished in the mid-1980s, Phoenix was the only city in the basin of any heft whatsoever. It is clear …