Cally Carswell has a story in the latest High Country News about domestic groundwater wells in Washington state that nicely illustrates a common problem throughout the western U.S., including here in New Mexico. In Washington (like in New Mexico), you can legally drill a well to serve domestic needs – essentially a single house. Individually, …
Salt River Originally uploaded by Nora Heineman-Fleck. Nora took this Sunday as we were driving out of Phoenix. The road we were on dropped down into the bed of the Salt River, which at this point requires no bridge. I asked her to get a picture for me. As she put it, “Not much river …
From this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req.): The notion of turning the Rio Grande through Albuquerque into a concrete channel like the Los Angeles River, while we drain away the groundwater beneath us and let the bosque die, is probably a nonstarter. But the idea has a way of focusing the discussion, a sort of worst-case …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: On Living Within Our Water Means’ »
It’s only Monday, but I think Tim Brick nails it: If we look to the future, the Colorado River will not be a reliable source of water.
Coal burning and water supplies are integrally linked in the southwestern United States. When the Central Arizona Project was built in the 1960s, planners hoped to build hydroelectric power plants on the main stem of the Colorado River to generate the power to lift the artificial river they were building up a total of nearly …
Lake Pleasant, Arizona Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. It was 95 F (35 C) when I went up to Lake Pleasant Friday afternoon. Remember this is mid-October. You couldn’t see the water evaporating off the lake, but I’m pretty sure it was happening. Located in the hills north of Phoenix, Arizona, Lake Pleasant is the storage …
Petrified Wood Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Like the old tease, “Don’t think about a pink elephant,” it’s hard to not think about water in Holbrook, Ariz., a place that doesn’t have much. It sits along the Little Colorado River, which mostly isn’t what you’d normally think of as a “river” – that is, a thing …
In this morning’s newspaper, on the hard-nosed national security types looking at ecosystem services as a core issue (sub/ad req): Environmental problems, from water shortages, pollution and climate change to disease and food scarcity, are at the core of national security, Passell argues. “They’re all related to the same set of problems,” Passell said in …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Ecology of National Security’ »
There are places in the arid West where the use of greywater is a force multiplier – taking the water you already used to wash your clothes and piping it into the garden rather than “wasting” it by dumping it down the sewer. But it does not always make as much sense as our intuition …
This project is too small to be anything more than intriguing, but intriguing it is. Crop insurance for some of the world’s poorest farmers: A quarter-century after famine killed one million Ethiopians and seared the world’s conscience, peasant farmers there are enduring an ever-faster barrage of droughts. Nearly 14 million people in Ethiopia are going …
Continue reading ‘An Experiment in Crop Insurance for the Poor’ »