There’s a truism in water politics and policy in the western United States that “water flows uphill to money”. But is it correct? I ran across it most recently in an excellent editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune regarding the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s proposal to build a pipeline to rural Nevada, along the Utah …
Continue reading ‘Does water really flow uphill toward money?’ »
Sept. 30 is the end of the “water year”*, and it’s been another dry one at the Heineman-Fleck house. With data back to the 1999-2000 year now, this is the fourth consecutive dry year relative to my personal long term mean here in Albuquerque’s near northeast heights: * Water managers here usually (though not for …
From this week’s Albuquerque Journal, a piece looking at the history and future of the notion of “beneficial use” in western water law: The doctrine’s history is bound up in the ideas of the generation of European immigrants who swept across the region in the 1800s, establishing what became United States law. “The climate is …
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From the morning paper, an attempt to frame and make sense of the questions Congress will face in coming years and the views of New Mexico’s Senate candidates thereon: Nuclear weaponry is big business in New Mexico. More than 20,000 people work at Sandia and Los Alamos labs, two of the nation’s three nuclear weapon …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: politics and the nuclear labs’ »
From the morning paper: With drought draped across all of New Mexico and much of the United States to our east and west, it’s an interesting time to think about the prehistoric Mayan city of Chichén Itzá. Its fate is a reminder that drought isn’t simply something climate does to us. Drought’s effects are defined …
I’ve long thought “drought” is a troublesome word, implying abnormal when we’re really talking about dry part of the normal range of variability. My colleague Rene Romo has a marvelous quote that sidles up to that point in an excellent story today about the problems of southeastern New Mexico farmers and ranchers: Woods Houghton, the …
One of the hidden constituencies for forest health is downstream water users. Western wildfires can really muck up a watershed, creating problems when bad fire happens and therefore significant incentives to try to keep it from happening. Today’s case in point, from my colleague Rene Romo, is the Little Bear fire in southern New Mexico: …
While it’s easy to get caught up in the climate wars rhetoric about the Colorado River, and the effect of anthropogenic warming on the river’s flows, it’s important to remember that’s only one of the variables changing in my region’s water future: With population growth pushing up Colorado River Basin water demand as climate change …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: the Colorado River’s supply-demand problem’ »
I don’t think we’ll recognize this: One upshot will be the emergence of whole new ecologies. The landscape changes brought on by climate change are affecting areas so vast that many previous tenants of the land—ponderosa pines, for instance—cannot be expected to recolonize their former territory. Their seeds don’t normally spread far from the parent …
Continue reading ‘deBuys on the climatology of the New West’ »
Matt Grubs talked to Laura Paskus and I on last night’s In Focus on local public telly. It perhaps goes without saying that we talked about water.