What I did on my summer vacation
I got the scratches when I sorta got lost in the woods. Not really lost lost. But that’s a story for another day.
Archive of entries posted on August 2011
Drought, outdoor landscaping, and the benefit of being a bit wasteful
Water conservation poses a dilemma. Let’s say you’re an American city that’s running into a serious drought problem. I don’t know, say for example you’re Galveston, Texas: Authorities have banned outdoor watering in most Galveston County municipalities as Texas continues to grapple with its record drought. In a letter this week, the Texas Commission on …
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Water in the desert, urban agriculture edition
Headed out on my bike ride this morning, I spotted our neighbor, Farmer John, in the front yard working on his food patch, and rolled up on the sidewalk to chat. It’s a lovely little garden – big robust tomatoes, some melons and a couple of rows of big, healthy-looking corn. Lissa and I have …
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Why I’m optimistic about Colorado River water (California? not so much)
When I was a young reporter covering Pasadena City Hall, I wrote a lot about the municipal budget, reasoning that budgets are where governments most explicitly establish and act on their priorities. But it was frustrating, because I just had one budget – no real points of comparison. So I set out one year to …
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The Colorado River and Sacramento Delta limits
Writing this week in the Los Angeles Times, the NRDC’s Doug Obegi makes the central point about the linkage between water problems across the west. Responding to Victor Davis Hanson’s argument in favor of giving farmers more water from the Sacramento Delta, Obegi makes the salient point that there isn’t the water to give: The …
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Federal Money and Rural America
Update: I was just waving my arms here, but a commenter who actually knows what s/he is talking about has stepped in with some valuable assistance. So skip my post below and just read this: The data you’re looking for can be found here, at the county level: http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/ruraldevelopment/developments.htm Like any data set, it’s open …
Declining Colorado
Paul Miller and Tom Piechota have assembled a new set of data suggesting a decline in precipitation in the West, and more particularly in the basin that feeds the Colorado River. For this work, they looked at SNOTEL stations, the network of snow measurement sites run by NRCS that feed data into streamflow forecasts. For …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Why my state is burning down
Richard White’s history of the extension of railroads across the western United States (Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America – great read) has fascinating excerpts from the 1870 diary of H.K. Thomas, the Union Pacific stationmaster in Laramie, Wyoming. The normal fires of summer in the mountains are mentioned twice – “covering …
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Another La Nina?
Shaun McKinnon has some numbers on this year’s Arizona runoff, and they aren’t pretty: La Niña did a number on runoff down the Salt and Verde rivers this year — a low number, according to Salt River Project, which has released the final report on winter’s water yield. For the 2011 runoff season, the two …
Stuff I Said Elsewhere: Forest Health
New Mexico’s forests are seriously messed up. Here’s a video teaser for my Sunday newspaper story: Update: Sorry, didn’t realize the embedded video made noise without asking. If you want to see it, go here.