I had one of those “I wish I was still a reporter” moments when Glen Duggins, at yesterday’s meeting of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District board meeting, raised the issue of elk in Polvadera. Polvadera is an unincorporated community along the Rio Grande, between the also unincorporated communities of San Acacia and Lemitar, strung …
Colorado River Basin Managers are working on what they call a “Drought Contingency Plan” to reduce water use, but that’s probably a bad name to describe what’s going on, as the members of the Colorado River Research Group explain in a new white paper (pdf): In current Colorado River water management, perhaps no word is used …
Continue reading ‘We should probably stop calling it “drought”’ »
Laura Paskus on an encounter with Jennifer Pitt in the Colorado River Delta: Walking through the cottonwood forest, Pitt says this landscape was destroyed before anyone figured out what to do about it. When the Colorado River started running dry in the mid-20th century, there weren’t yet environmental laws to temper or stop destructive operations …
This afternoon I tweeted a picture of this treasure, found in the stacks of the University of New Mexico’s Centennial Science and Engineering Library: Tom Swetnam, a friend who is the former director of the UofA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, recognized the name in the top-right corner: “Looks like that may be Florence Hawley Ellis’ …
This is so far out of my area of expertise that I have no way of evaluating methodology or results, except to point out that it’s worth thinking about the water policy implications: The Association between Lifelong Greenspace Exposure and 3-Dimensional Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Barcelona Schoolchildren Lifelong exposure to greenness was positively associated …
Continue reading ‘Do kids in greener neighborhoods grow up with bigger brains?’ »
Very little of the Colorado River’s water originates in New Mexico. The San Juan, one of the Colorado’s main tributaries, starts in the mountains of Colorado, cutting through a corner of the state’s northwest desert, before snaking into the canyon country of Arizona and Utah. Yet when the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact was signed …
Continue reading ‘The Navajo Nation and New Mexico’s Colorado River allocation’ »
In general, if you ask people if they would prefer to pay less, or more, for a given product, the answer is likely to be “less”. Democracy is, at root, the process of asking such a question. This, Manny Teodoro argues, is at the heart of the U.S. infrastructure problem: The trouble is that, in …
Continue reading ‘Is democracy to blame for our infrastructure problems?’ »
We lost the daily direct flights between Albuquerque and Tucson a decade ago when the economy tanked, which left me in a shuttle yesterday morning at sunup driving north on I-10 from Tucson to Phoenix to catch a flight home after a couple of very intense, very productive days discussing water.* It’s a beautiful stretch …
Continue reading ‘Some thoughts on “the West’s Disappearing Water”’ »
While historically, water has been depicted as something that has driven a wedge between communities, “I think it should be something that ties our communities together,” Mueller said. “We all need it, we all depend on it, we all want it in one way or the other. If we can work together (on water) we’re …
Thursday at 4: With another dry year setting in across the West, the challenges of meeting the water supply needs of a growing population while maintaining our rural communities and a healthy environment are again being thrown in sharp relief. The continuing decline of Lake Mead has become a symbol of deepening problems, but there are also …
Continue reading ‘Hey Tucson, I’ll be yammering at the University of Arizona Thursday’ »