With my book Water is for Fighting Over: and Other Myths about Water in the West officially releasing Thursday, this week I’m visiting here some of the issues, themes, and back stories. Mostly I’m doing this for fun, but I would also be delighted if you would click here and buy a copy or two for …
California’s epic, headline-grabbing drought has not dented the value of the state’s farm land. According to a new USDA dataset released today, California cropland rose 2.1 percent in value per acre in the last year, and 16 percent since 2012. Despite drought, California cropland remains at $10,900 an acre the second most valuable in the …
Continue reading ‘Despite drought, the value of California farmland is rising’ »
Writing in the latest Nature Geoscience, Reiner Grundmann of the University of Nottingham calls out a problem that I wish I’d understood years ago about our understanding of, and response to, climate change and the family of problems to which it is connected. (I hope that link works, let me know in the comments if it …
This 2010 paper by Peter Gleick and Meena Palaniappan planted the seed, and as I worked on my book I found examples everywhere – geographies and economic communities that are using less water even as they were growing. I blogged about it, as one does, one thing led to another, and when I finished the book …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: The Great Decoupling of the West’s Water’ »
One of my University of New Mexico Water Resources Program colleagues frequently points out what they call “green versus green issues” – environmental tradeoffs that are often under-examined because our environmental discourse focuses on one set of values without sufficiently incorporating other values. Today’s inbox missive: removing dams from the Snake River in the U.S. …
Continue reading ‘Green versus green: removing Snake River dams’ »
It’s a relatively straightforward point: when there is less water to irrigate farmland, there will be less irrigated farmland. For example, OtPR last year: As groundwater sustainability agencies have to bring irrigated acreage in line with the sustainable yield of the groundwater basin, they will be retiring irrigated lands (Dr. Burt: 1-1.5 million acres; Dr. Lund: …
Continue reading ‘The inevitable decline of irrigated acreage in California’s central valley’ »
A new report by a team from the World Bank offers hope for the ability of most of the world to cope with increasing water scarcity associated with climate change. The headlines following the report’s release have been grim: “Global water shortages to deliver ‘severe hit’ to economies, World Bank warns“, to cite one typical …
I’ve been using the word “decoupling” to describe what is happening in the relationship between water use and population/economic growth. The phenomenon is common, and I blog about it a lot – water use going down even as population and agricultural productivity go up. Now comes Robert Stavins, a prominent environmental economist, to argue that …
One of the most important findings of environmental economics in recent decades is what is called the “environmental Kuznets curve”, a finding that as a community’s affluence rises, environmental “bads” – think air and water pollution, for example – decline. Could what has happened in Flint, Michigan, be evidence that this phenomenon is bi-directional – …
Continue reading ‘Is Flint a reverse “environmental Kuznets curve”?’ »
It’s increasingly clear that the lessons we’re learning from California’s drought are not those we expected. Far from the doom of so much of the rhetoric, Californians are adapting to scarcity with remarkable aplomb. The latest data point, from Phillip Reese and Dale Kasler of the Sacramento Bee, may be the most interesting yet: California’s …
Continue reading ‘Despite drought, California agriculture adds 30,000 jobs’ »