Archive of posts filed under the water category.

Do kids in greener neighborhoods grow up with bigger brains?

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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 …

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The Navajo Nation and New Mexico’s Colorado River allocation

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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 …

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Is democracy to blame for our infrastructure problems?

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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 …

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Some thoughts on “the West’s Disappearing Water”

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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 …

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Hey Tucson, I’ll be yammering at the University of Arizona Thursday

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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 …

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“drought” – Philp on weather, water, and yesteryear’s language

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Tom Philp had a great piece in Water Deeply last week about the language we use: Water policy becoming a prisoner of its own limited vocabulary, particularly when it comes to the weather. Here is a case that “drought” and “normal” belong in the dustbin of history, for their overuse can lead to the wrong conversation. …

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The Rio Grande forecast keeps getting worse

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The preliminary Feb. 1 forecast for runoff on New Mexico’s rivers, out  this evening, is now projecting record or near-record low flows for the 2018 runoff season. It would take an epic wave of wet storms from here on out to bring the river to anything approaching a “normal” year, and no such epic wave …

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Keeping Colorado’s Crystal River wet

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Sarah Tory had an interesting piece Friday about an effort to keep water in Colorado’s Crystal River, a tributary of the Roaring Fork (Carbondale area, or Aspen for those of a certain geographical bent). Tory’s piece does a good job of explaining the institutional complexities of an agreement that spans potentially both opportunities for exploiting …

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