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 …
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 …
Continue reading ‘An Experiment in Crop Insurance for the Poor’ »
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 …
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an essay at Environment 360: Across the globe, we already use a staggering 4,000 cubic kilometers of water per year, withdrawn from our streams, rivers, lakes and aquifers.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 …
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 …
Borrowing a page from Emily Green’s book, I’m trying (again) a sporadic roundup of some of the interesting water things I’ve been reading: Henry Brean on the potential effect of the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s pumping plans on Great Basin National Park: “I’d like them to know that we’re extremely concerned — very concerned — …
I love Jon Stewart’s television program, but it’s rare that he does a subject of direct relevance to my little blogoworld. But last week, he did water. Specifically, a look at a Fox News discussion of the complex public policy questions surrounding California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs …
Unbeknownst to me, Thursday was the centennial of the first electricity flowing from the generators at Roosevelt Dam, arguably the first great dam of the modern era in the West. Located 60 miles up the Salt River from Phoenix, it was the highest dam in the world when it was built, according to Donald Worster’s …
Water wonks: I’m spending a few days in and around Phoenix later this month. Any suggestions for water infrastructure tourism?
Back in the 1970s, Congress asked the Bureau of Reclamation to study the feasibility of extending a water line across western New Mexico to carry water from the San Juan River to Gallup, New Mexico. Gallup’s a desert city, dependent on a limited aquifer. Gallup sits on the edge of the Navajo Reservation. The Navajos …
Continue reading ‘Navajo-Gallup Water Project Moves Several Inches Forward’ »