My co-instructor Bob Berrens and I added a slide this morning to our welcome lecture for first-year students in the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program, hoping to foreshadow two questions we’ll be asking the students over and over and over and over this semester: Bob: That sounds great, how are you going to …
Continue reading ‘Why don’t they redo the Colorado River Compact?’ »
When I was a little kid, the Fleck family had a big box with a radio and a record player and speakers in the family room. Radio was always magical to me, and when I was at my littlest I imagined a man inside the box, scrunched up and holding a guitar, talking and singing …
As we lumber toward a renegotiation of the operating rules on the Colorado River, one of the challenges folks in basin management face is the differing understandings of the Law of the River. There’s stuff we all know, or think we know, or stuff Lower Basin folks think they know that Upper Basin people may …
Continue reading ‘Sources of Controversy in the Law of the River – Larry MacDonnell’ »
Via Laura Gersony at Circle of Blue, a look at the work of Julia Bernal, leader of the Pueblo Action Alliance and a really interesting thinker on land and water here in the Southwest: She is an advocate of the Land Back movement, which calls on the U.S. government to allow Indigenous people to continue …
Continue reading ‘“We can’t have land back without water back.” – Julia Bernal’ »
I ran across this Arizona Republic cartoon some years ago while working on my book Water is For Fighting Over etc. I found it in a 1985 book by Frank Welsh called How to Create a Water Crisis. It reared its head this week as I’m working with some colleagues on some stuff about Arizona …
Mary Harner and I tagged along yesterday morning out in the Rio Grande Oxbow with Wes Noe, a UNM Water Resources Program/Community and Regional Planning student who is doing his masters project at field sites there. Loyal readers will remember remember my travels with Mary, a University of Nebraska colleague studying the Rio Grande. Wes …
A robust July monsoon has allayed our worst fears about central New Mexico’s Rio Grande. Is it really a “monsoon”? Back in the days when my paid gig was writing newspaper stories, I loved writing about the monsoon, and every time I did I would get helpful feedback from readers anxious to explain that I …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s Rio Grande, bailed out by an impressive monsoon’ »
By Brad Udall and John Fleck Earlier this year, we argued in a Science magazine editorial that Colorado River forecasting must take the growing risk of climate change seriously. The latest five-year projections from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation offer a practical example of the challenge. Published July 8 (see here and here) with an …
Continue reading ‘Is the Colorado River “Stress Test” stressful enough?’ »
Not gonna lie – watching Colorado River reservoirs decline so precipitously has been painful. But it is important to cultivate optimism, and there is, in fact, reason to be hopeful about our ability to deal with the challenges. That’s the message the University of Arizona’s Bonnie Colby and I shared in a recent conversation with …
Continue reading ‘Walking and chewing gum: mixing crisis narratives and messages of optimism’ »
Between the wildfire smoke and two important meetings for which I am unprepared, I intended to stick to a quick indoor Zwift bike ride this morning before getting on with my day. Until I checked the gauges. 57 cubic feet per second. It’s a morning ritual, the little iPhone app while I’m curled up in …