Michael Campana has the remarkable story of Ron Rivera, who died earlier this month: Rivera, a former Peace Corps volunteer (Panama) born in the Bronx of Puerto Rican parents, spent the last 25 years traveling to Asia, Latin America, and Africa, teaching locals how to throw ceramic pots that would transform dirty water into its potable …
Continue reading ‘Saving One Life at a Time with Clean Water’ »
Staci Matlock’s tale in yesterday’s Santa Fe New Mexican of trying to figure out who it really is that wants to pump water from the Plains of San Agustin makes fascinating reading: Who owns Augustine Plains Ranch remains a mystery, even to the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, hired to represent several of the protestants. …
on the unsurprising fact that we use less water when it rains (unsurprising but nevertheless a demonstration that we’re paying attention, and not just blindly watering our bermuda grass) T. Boone is bringing his wind-powered carnival to Albuquerque next week
On the Colorado Compact Kerfuffle
From today’s Albuquerque Journal*, a thoughtful discussion of the risks posed by the current lack of regulation of desalination of deep brackish groundwater in New Mexico. The backstory is significant interest in drilling into deep aquifers around Albuquerque, bringing up brackish fossil groundwater, cleaning it up and using it to support continued growth that might …
Joel Gay gives Albuquerque water rates a good, hard look: “You hit ’em where it hurts — in the wallet,” said Armando Ortega, customer service manager in Alamogordo, which has among the highest water rates in the state. Since adopting a conservation-oriented rate structure in 2003, Alamogordo’s water use has dropped by 40 percent, he …
Bloomberg has an interesting story about the business of squeezing the most out of that last drop of water. Talk about having skin in the arid land survival game! Today, some 300 Israeli companies make equipment to deliver water or purify it with lasers or diffusion, putting them in a position to profit as climate …
Continue reading ‘If You Want to Know How to Maximize Your Water, Ask the Israelis’ »
One of the quirks of western water law is the variety of ways the different states treat groundwater. In New Mexico, for example, the law recognizes that groundwater and surface water are inextricably linked. This is merely a recognition of hydrological reality. Pump groundwater, and eventually surface water soaks down to replace it, depleting a …
Some stuff I wrote elsewhere about a potentially huge New Mexico water law court decision: A state court this week threw out New Mexicans’ longstanding legal right to drill a domestic water well without having to worry about whether it would leave less water for their neighbors. The ruling is a victory for activists who …
My ABQJournal colleague Sean Olson has a story on the front page of this morning’s paper about the rise this year in water conservation in Albuquerque: Albuquerque has used about 16.4 billion gallons thus far in 2008, up from about 15.6 billion gallons through the same period in 2007, according to water authority statistics. The …