I’ve written before about John Van Dyke’s memorable description of the line between a desert river’s ribbon of green and the arid landscape that surrounds it… the line where the one leaves off and the other begins is drawn as with the sharp edge of a knife. This holds true when the knife’s edge is …
Continue reading ‘the sharp edge of a knife between wet and dry’ »
In 1935, the California Supreme Court ruled in the case of Tulare v. Lindsay-Strathmore that drowning gophers was, self-evidently, not a “beneficial use” of the state’s precious water resources. Also squirrels: Another gave it as his reason for irrigating in winter that “every time we irrigate we kill gophers … the best season of the year …
Continue reading ‘Great moments in western water law: drowning gophers’ »
I’ve been addled by influenza for the better part of a week, tortured by feverish dreams of men in dark robes (were there robed women too?) in a great white-fronted building holding solemn rituals to try determine whether I might be healed. But it was like Plato’s cave – you couldn’t see the robed tribal …
Continue reading ‘A fevered first reading of the National Research Council’s Bay-Delta Report’ »
In my continuing effort to milk the not-Twain quote for all it’s worth, there is this – in the mountains north of the well fields of the proposed Cadiz California groundwater project is Whiskey Spring. And of course, one of the big areas of fightin’ in Cadiz is the question of whether the project’s groundwater …
Continue reading ‘Could Whiskey Spring be fer fightin’ over?’ »
Pulled up from the comments on yesterday’s Cadiz post, the Aquafornia Maven shares a marvelous metaphor regarding the costs of coastal desal: I was on a tour through the Lower Colorado River last week, and we stopped at the Gene Pumping Plant and were being briefed on SoCal water issues. Some one asked Bill Hasencamp …
I have a prediction: clarifying the science will not settle the political argument over the proposed Cadiz water project in the deserts of California. Chris Clarke wrote this today about Cadiz, a proposal to pump water from beneath the Mojave Desert and pipe it to coastal Southern California cities: According to an independent hydrologists’ evaluation …
The water model in the western United States has generally involved Party A getting a bunch of water via a dam, canal, pipe, etc., while Party B (usually some broad group of taxpayers, either state or federal) pays for it. Economists will tell you that this tends to lead for building more giant concrete thingies than …
Continue reading ‘Last concrete diaries: someone has to pay for it’ »
In a puzzling decision, the board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California seems to have overridden a board committee and the board’s staff and decided to sit out the argument over HR1837, Rep. Devin Nunes’ legislation to revamp California water distribution. If you’re not into the arcana of California water wars policy discussions, you …
As I write this, California’s being pounded by a particularly impressive storm. According to Mike Dettinger, it’s an “atmospheric river” storm, one of the type he and other climate/water researchers have been studying increasingly closely because of their importance to California’s water supply. As I wrote last year, California has the most highly variable precipitation …
Is the age of big concrete – the dams to store western water and the canals and pipes to move it – really over? Are the projects now underway – perhaps the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s “third straw” into Lake Mead – the last we’ll ever see built? (I’m working on a piece that in part …