This 2010 paper by Peter Gleick and Meena Palaniappan planted the seed, and as I worked on my book I found examples everywhere – geographies and economic communities that are using less water even as they were growing. I blogged about it, as one does, one thing led to another, and when I finished the book …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: The Great Decoupling of the West’s Water’ »
One of my University of New Mexico Water Resources Program colleagues frequently points out what they call “green versus green issues” – environmental tradeoffs that are often under-examined because our environmental discourse focuses on one set of values without sufficiently incorporating other values. Today’s inbox missive: removing dams from the Snake River in the U.S. …
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Jay Lund (UC Davis) wrote an interesting piece this week offering some water management geographic comparisons – how does California stack to other geographically similar regions? This is an interesting approach, because a lot of water governance rhetoric is inward facing – we see our own problems, but don’t do a good enough job of …
Continue reading ‘Some points of comparison for California water’ »
Smart Faith Kearns on the headlines this week about the “discovery” of a bunch of groundwater beneath parched California: [O]n a symbolic level it’s really just fascinating how often we get caught up in stories being saved — by a good winter, a new dam, new water. I wish I didn’t find it so depressing. …
Continue reading ‘On California’s “new” groundwater and the hope for a savior’ »
Seems we’ve been at this for a while: update @jfleck it's tipping points all the way down — Brett Walton (@waltonwater) June 29, 2016
The trick now is for the three U.S. states sharing the Colorado River’s water downstream of of Lake Mead – Nevada, Arizona, and California – to negotiate some sort of a deal that reduces their collective take on the river. That’s trick one. Trick two is for state negotiators to then sell the deal back …
Continue reading ‘The argument for California to make a Colorado River deal’ »
Lake Mead this evening is passing through a historic milestone – below elevation 1,072 feet above sea level for the first time since it was filled in the 1930s.
Despite a below-average year in the Upper Colorado River Basin, Lake Powell will reach its summer peak this year at its highest level in four years. That comes despite the fact that, once again, the Upper Basin is releasing “bonus” water from Glen Canyon Dam to prop up water users in Arizona, Nevada, California, and …
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We now have an answer to the question of where the money will come from for a billion dollar diversion to take water from the Gila River, a Colorado River tributary in southwestern New Mexico. Nowhere. Laura Paskus has the scoop on this week’s decision by the project’s governing body to abandon the Cadillac versions …
Continue reading ‘Gila River diversion being significantly downscaled’ »