From a fun Q & A I did recently with Tara Lohan at The Revelator: One of the biggest difficulties is figuring out who gets to participate — who’s in the room when these deals are negotiated. And it’s just not at all clear what the process is going to look like for renegotiating guidelines. …
Continue reading ‘In the next round of Colorado River negotiations, who will be at the table?’ »
A guest post by historian Sara Porterfield: “May 24, 1869—The good people of Green River City turn out to see us start. We raise our little flag, push the boats from shore, and the swift current carries us down.” Today marks the 150th anniversary of John Wesley Powell’s 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado …
Continue reading ‘John Wesley Powell at 150: How Can We Tell Better Stories?’ »
Correction appended, I was off by 5kaf on the Nevada numbers, also fixed a badly garbled sentence, thanks to the alert reader who brought this to my attention With the backdrop of Hoover Dam, an assembly of Colorado River dignitaries signed the Drought Contingency plan yesterday afternoon. Done really is done. The Colorado River Drought …
Continue reading ‘What the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan means in practice’ »
In the wake of Arizona’s difficulties in coming to terms with the future of central Arizona agriculture as it sorted out its approach to reducing Colorado River water use under the Drought Contingency Plan, the latest Census of Agriculture data is fascinating. The decline continues, but only just barely. The data within this data, broken …
Continue reading ‘Central Arizona ag’s decline continues, but Pinal County is up’ »
From the inbox:
It’s important to be clear of what we mean by “waste” when we talk about “wasting” water. Because it’s always going someplace, and doing something. In Albuquerque, for example, we talk about reusing effluent from our sewage treatment plant. But we currently treat that water and put it back in the Rio Grande, where it …
Continue reading ‘The Ciénega de Santa Clara and the question of “waste”’ »
A cryptic item in the agenda for Thursday’s meeting of the San Diego Water Authority Board suggests the agency may still harbor an interest in having its own canal to the Colorado River, separate from the current system through which it gets its Colorado River water from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. alternative …
Continue reading ‘Is San Diego reviving the idea of building its own Colorado River Aqueduct?’ »
We have a publication date and a web site and an Amazon listing for Science Be Dammed, the new book by Eric Kuhn and myself about the use and misuse of science in the development of the Colorado River. And a cover. The book has a cover:
The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s April 1 forecast is up 1.9 million feet from a month earlier. How to think about how much water that is? A friend who thinks a lot about water and public communication, but who is not from the Colorado River Basin, was commenting recently on our euphemisms – the …
Continue reading ‘A Good Runoff Forecast; The Language We Use’ »
Tuesday was a remarkable day for Colorado River Basin governance. The Good With the kinda sorta now approved Drought Contingency Plan, we have the first formal commitment from the basin states to quantified water use cutbacks of more than a million acre feet per year as Lake Mead drops. With important caveats, this is enough …
Continue reading ‘Imperial, the Salton Sea, and the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan’ »