My life’s kind of a blur right now, but the official Island Press announcement of my book, along with the unveiling of its cover, is a thing that has just happened, so let me pause and catch my breath. People familiar with my frequent ranting about how Mark Twain never said the thing about whiskey …
Continue reading ‘“Water is for Fighting Over” – on the shelves in September’ »
When I read this Phillip Reese story Monday evening about a California community willfully defying the state’s water conservation orders, the name of the place rang a bell. I shot off an email to my friend Cynthia Barnett, author of the wonderful Blue Revolution, a call for a new water ethic in the United States. “Wasn’t …
Continue reading ‘Granite Bay and the California water ethic’ »
When we think of federal water policy, we think Bureau of Reclamation or EPA. But just as agriculture is where the water is, federal agriculture agencies are where the money is. Ellen Hanak of the Public Policy Institute of California had a post yesterday with some useful suggestions for spending it well: Practical reforms in …
Continue reading ‘Hanak on federal agriculture policies and water’ »
No matter how big the reservoir, “if you’re taking more out than you put in, you’ve got a problem,” former U.S. Interior Department water and science chief Anne Castle said. Via Brandon Loomis
Arthur Rothstein arrived in the Dust Bowl in April of 1936. He was 21 years old, the son of Jewish immigrants, born and raised in New York City. Fresh from Columbia University, Rothstein had been the first photographer hired by Roy Stryker, his former professor, at the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency that, from …
Continue reading ‘Throwback Thursday: Making adobe brick. Bosque Farms, New Mexico’ »
Tony Davis raises an important issue this morning about Colorado River Basin collaborative problem solving: But while most of the summit was filled with talk of new technologies and research tools, massive corporate investments in new supplies and hope for ramped-up conservation measures, an Arizonan who spoke at the four-hour summit offered a more discordant …
It’s tempting during a drought to call for pumping restrictions, but this can worsen economic impacts, especially on the farm sector. Now is a good time to take actions that ensure groundwater is available for future droughts. Ellen Hanak, Public Policy Institute of California
A student in one of our University of New Mexico Water Resources Program classes asked last week what the magic trick was to finding water data. We’d asked the students to do some really challenging modeling of the flow of water through New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande watersheds, and one of the biggest difficulties was finding usable …
It’s increasingly clear that the lessons we’re learning from California’s drought are not those we expected. Far from the doom of so much of the rhetoric, Californians are adapting to scarcity with remarkable aplomb. The latest data point, from Phillip Reese and Dale Kasler of the Sacramento Bee, may be the most interesting yet: California’s …
Continue reading ‘Despite drought, California agriculture adds 30,000 jobs’ »