Smart words from Phil Isenberg, California’s water sage: [O]ur historic population and economic growth—and the social and individual choices we have made—explain the water and environmental problems we face today. Unless we acknowledge that water supplies are limited, and act to temper our water use, we will limp toward the next drought, and act surprised when …
Continue reading ‘Isenberg: Drought amplifies, not causes, water problems’ »
Saturday’s post about Phoenix and the need for proper institutional structures to sort out the West’s water problems was really a bit of shadowboxing with a piece I was working on for today’s paper about New Mexico (sub. ad req.) It’s about an ongoing argument here about a proposed water rights agreement between our Interstate …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: On Water and Institutional Structures’ »
One of the less appreciated effects of warming temperatures on water supply is the shift in the timing of runoff. Warming springs mean earlier melt. This is as much an infrastructure problem as it is an overall water volume problem, because the dams and ditches built to manage water during the 20th century were based …
At April’s “Implications of Lower Lake Levels” symposium, Brad Udall talked about the importance of the Australian example for the western United States. From 2000 to 2010, Udall said, parts of Australia experienced 40 to 50 percent reductions in river flow, which said has profoundly changed societal discussions about water. Australia’s “big dry” may be …
Continue reading ‘Is desal one lesson of Australia’s “big dry”?’ »
We arid climate types like to think we own water problems, but a new EU report serves as a reminder that they’re universal. People build their infrastructure and societal systems around the water they’ve got and then bump up against limits. From EurActive: The report shows that some member states have begun to suffer “permanent …
Continue reading ‘It’s not just the dry places that are going dry’ »
It is a testament to the nature of rivers in the arid western United States that this is news: The San Joaquin River is flowing from Friant Dam near Fresno to the Delta…. That’s Alex Breitler writing today in the Stockton Record. If you follow the link, he gives a pretty good accounting of why …
The Imperial Valley of southeastern California is a remarkable creation of a modern industrial-hydraulic society. One might argue that the story of the modern western United States begins there. It was ambitious Imperial Valley land speculators shortly after the last turn of the century who, as much as anyone else, drove the development of what …