With a wave of stories in the last few days about the provision of running water to the community of East Porterville, in California’s Central Valley, I wanna re-up this important Citylab story by Laura Bliss. East Porterville has been the poster child for drought in California as national and international media descended to tell …
If I go out and ride for an hour, my brain function after is definitely better. I like to think up creative water solutions when I’m riding. That’s John Currier, chief engineer of the Colorado River District in Glenwood Springs, in a fun story on the crazy bicycling habits of Currier and his colleagues Eric …
Continue reading ‘The solution to the West’s water problems’ »
My embarrassing affliction – obsessively clicking on my book’s Amazon page to try to infer how well it is selling – is apparently common among new authors. But I noticed something the last couple of days that made me clutch. There are no two books more important as predecessors to Water is For Fighting Over than …
Continue reading ‘Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought’ »
We have faculty affiliated with the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program working on public acceptance of wastewater recycling and reuse. We have faculty who make beer. This is a story for us: Pima County water officials want to organize a statewide brewery competition where beer-makers compete using purified wastewater…. The goal of the …
Audubon is looking to hire someone to help save the Salton Sea. It’s a great twofer – you get to help the birds, and if you succeed you also get to help save Colorado River manage as a whole, as the two are integrally related. If we fail to get the Salton Sea right, everything …
Continue reading ‘Audubon hiring someone to help save the Salton Sea’ »
News is a misleading way to understand the world. It’s always about events that happened and not about things that didn’t happen. So when there’s a police officer that has not been shot up or city that has not had a violent demonstration, they don’t make the news. As long as violent events don’t fall …
Amy Thomson in 5280: Denver residents have managed to reduce water consumption by more than 20 percent in the last 15 years, even with a 15 percent increase in population.
This is your semi-regular, repetitive reminder that El Niño and La Niña don’t matter a hill of beans, in statistical terms, for the Colorado River Basin as a whole. The Climate Prediction Center has issued a La Niña watch. That means cooler temperatures across the equatorial Pacific, which tends on average to influence the North …
I love this: Thursday is the lowest release for the week, so starting late Thursday the water begins to drop in the river, with the lowest flows on Saturday. If you are a recreational water user — skiing, fishing, pleasure boating, or jet skiing — less water means more sandbars or exposed debris to avoid. …
Continue reading ‘on the Lower Colorado, the weekly human hydrograph’ »
It is impossible, I have found, to write seriously about water in the western United States without being in conversation with the late Marc Reisner and his classic Cadillac Desert, published thirty years ago. It’s assessment of our problems is foundational, and even if I disagree with some of what he had to say (as …
Continue reading ‘the long shadow of Marc Reisner and Cadillac Desert’ »