Seven years ago, as I was finishing my book Water is For Fighting Over, I wrote this kicker: In the end, we need an honest reckoning with the basic problem: there is not enough water for everyone to do everything they want with it, or to use every drop to which they feel legally entitled. …
Continue reading ‘Deadpool Diaries: Defining the “Crisis”’ »
Brad Udall gave a talk in 2013 that became foundational to my thinking about solving the challenge of life with a shrinking Colorado River. Here’s how I described it in my book Water is For Fighting Over: Udall distinguished between the “reality of the public” and the “reality of the water community,” describing a world …
Heather Tanana and Anne Castle will be talking about the Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribal Communities project at today (Feb. 22, 2023 – noon Arizona time) at the University of Arizona’s Water Resources Research Center seminar series – over the Zoom! Signup info here. Access to clean drinking water is a fundamental human …
I was talking to a friend last week about the work Bob Berrens and I are doing for our new book on the origin stories of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District. I’m deep into a chapter on the failed 1920s efforts at tobacco farming (I’ve told that story before here), and we were talking …
Continue reading ‘The peculiar economics of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’ »
First the bad news from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s mid-February forecast – this year’s runoff into Flaming Gorge, which is at record low thanks to Drought Response Operations Agreement releases to prop up Lake Powell, is forecast to be below average this year, at 86 percent of average. At some point we’ve gotta …
Continue reading ‘Deadpool Diaries: The chance of deadpool declines’ »
As we try to adapt to climate change, understanding how our changing hydrology funnels through legal filters will be crucial. That’s why the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center funded this terrific piece of work by UNM Water Resources Program student Annalise Porter: New Mexico’s Greenbelt Law: Disincentivizing Water Conservation Through Agricultural Tax Breaks, just …
Continue reading ‘Tax Breaks and Water Conservation Disincentives in New Mexico’ »
The Feb.1 numbers from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center look good – Lake Powell inflow 1.4 million acre feet above the median. We’ve got a lot of winter left, so definitely too early to make big plans to, for example, cut Colorado River water use deeply to avoid deadpool or, alternatively, decide that we …
Like everyone else of a certain sort (on line and writerly), I’ve been playing with ChatGPT. It’s a “large language model”, trained on a monstrous corpus of text, that basically projects (based on stuff people have said before) what might come next given a sequence of text. It doesn’t really “understand” it in a way …
Continue reading ‘Large language models, Homer (Simpson) and my writer’s brain’ »
John Write a Haiku about conflict in allocating Colorado River water. ChatGPT Colorado River flows, Nations vie for its sweet thirst, Peace in drought, a dream.
Getting ready for an interview this morning with Mark Brodie at KJZZ (waving at my Phoenix friends!) I put together a table to make it easier to compare the six-state proposal submitted Monday to reduce Lower Colorado River Basin water use, and the California proposal submitted yesterday (Tues. 1/31/23). Perhaps worth sharing here? “Elevation” is …
Continue reading ‘Deadpool Diaries: The numbers in the states’ two proposals’ »