Water use numbers released by the City of Charlottetown this week contained good news for people worried the city has been using too much. New numbers show the city used 6.13 billion litres of water in 2015, the lowest amount since 1998. Via CBCNews. Charlottetown is on Prince Edward Island.
The language here is so delicate, which is in itself an interesting issue: It is now possible to imagine a future in which highly treated wastewater will be plumbed directly into California homes as a new drinking water supply. That’s Matt Weiser on California’s next big step in institutionally normalizing “direct potable reuse” – the treatment of …
Fascinating new paper by Lewis Davis at Union College (gated) arguing that the need for collaboration in early agricultural societies with highly variable rainfall led to the development of cultural norms of not fighting over water: The link between rainfall variation and individual responsibility draws on an extensive theoretical and empirical literature on risk sharing among …
Continue reading ‘rainfall variability is for not fighting over’ »
Putting together a lecture for University of New Mexico Water Resources Program students tomorrow, I’ve been thinking about this quote from MWD’s Bill Hasencamp, in last week’s LA Times: “Basically, what the models say is that, in the future, most years will be shortage years,” said Bill Hasencamp, the manager of Colorado River resources for …
Continue reading ‘When do we stop calling what’s happening on the Colorado River “shortage”?’ »
The University of Colorado’s Doug Kenney is sounding genuinely optimistic in this recent take on the Colorado River’s problems over at Carpe Diem West: Throughout the basin, a lot of really good innovations are occurring. Conservation has, rightly, emerged as a credible management tool, and not merely something for the hippies to talk about. Cooperation …
Continue reading ‘Some optimistic words on the Colorado Basin from Doug Kenney’ »
One of the journalist’s techniques is to try to start where you think your reader already is, with some piece of knowledge they’re already got, and then lead them to a new place. For me, that often means retracing my own path. I started years ago thinking it was crazy to grow alfalfa in the …
A new environmental water sharing governance experiment is underway this late summer on the Rio Grande in central New Mexico in an effort to keep stretches of the river wet for ecosystem benefits. Ollie Reed sketched out the details in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal: Sandia, Isleta, Santa Ana and Cochiti pueblos each donated 100 acre-feet …
Continue reading ‘Collaboration on New Mexico’s Rio Grande’ »
So I need to correct something that I wrote a month ago. Tony Davis took a deep dive into the Bureau of Reclamation’s data and concluded in a story published this morning (I think accurately) that water conservation savings in the Lower Colorado River Basin will not be as large as I and others have been …
Continue reading ‘Lower Colorado Basin water savings not as big as I thought’ »
I’m generally an optimist about our ability to solve our water problems of the western United States, but the drought of 2000-05 provides a boundary condition to my thinking. In my post-journalism life, one of the most interesting projects I’ve been working on is a study for/by/with Colorado’s West Slope basin roundtables of the risks …
One of the centerpieces of the argument I make in my book, Water is for Fighting Over: and Other Myths about Water in the West, is that changing patterns in water demand (specifically, that we’re using a lot less of it than we used to, across all sectors of the economy) create significant new flexibility in …
Continue reading ‘New Pacific Institute report on water demand forecasting’ »