The centennial of the National Park Service

Posted by on
Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Arizona, n.d. Photo by E.O. Beaman, courtesy USGS

Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Arizona, n.d. Photo by E.O. Beaman, courtesy USGS

On its centennial, there is no question in my mind about the central role of the U.S. National Park Service in my life’s trajectory.

I’ve written often about my experience as a young boy, standing on the Grand Canyon’s south rim, wandering the view spots craning my neck for those fragmentary vistas where you can actually see the brown ribbon of the Colorado River at the canyon’s bottom. They were snippets full of mystery and longing, a tiny thing amidst this vastness. One must be careful about the fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc, after this therefore because of this. But those moments spent as a kid on family vacations, repeated so many times, mattered to me completely.

The path between there and my life today is twisted, but the book emerging into the world this month is directly connected to those questions I had as a child – what is that river down there?

Perhaps this experience might have happened absent the creation of the institution of the National Park Service? It is hard to know, but I know that I am now what I am because of those questions planted half a century ago when a little boy stood on a Park Service lookout point peering down in the great unknown.

East Porterville revisited

Posted by on

With a wave of stories in the last few days about the provision of running water to the community of East Porterville, in California’s Central Valley, I wanna re-up this important Citylab story by Laura Bliss. East Porterville has been the poster child for drought in California as national and international media descended to tell the stories of a poor community with its well going dry as farmers around pumped down the aquifer.

Bliss’s story sheds light on an important nuance. East Porterville has always had water problems, which have as much to do with the provision of society’s basic infrastructure to the poorest among us as it does with drought. Drought pushed a problem of justice in governance over the cliff:

[T]hose hit hardest by the drought have been vulnerable for decades. The San Joaquin Valley’s history of Wild West land-use planning, its governance structures, and the political disenfranchisement of an entire class of citizens have created a human-made crisis.

Bliss points to a pattern in which incorporated cities had the infrastructure and financial resources to continue to provide the basic municipal service of water, even in the depth of the drought. But around those cities’ margins, places like East Porterville, where many of the communities’ poorest members lived, were denied annexation, kept outside the boundaries of governance needed to provide basic services.

So yes, it was drought that pushed East Porterville’s residents off the cliff. But it was a failure of governance, rooted in economic injustice, that made the difference between who had water during this drought and who didn’t.

 

The solution to the West’s water problems

Posted by on

If I go out and ride for an hour, my brain function after is definitely better. I like to think up creative water solutions when I’m riding.

That’s John Currier, chief engineer of the Colorado River District in Glenwood Springs, in a fun story on the crazy bicycling habits of Currier and his colleagues Eric Kuhn and Jim Pokrandt.

I always have thought the River District was one of the most interesting, innovative examples of Colorado River Basin water governance. Could this be why? Or am I confusing correlation and causation?

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Posted by on

My embarrassing affliction – obsessively clicking on my book’s Amazon page to try to infer how well it is selling – is apparently common among new authors. But I noticed something the last couple of days that made me clutch.

Amazon screenshot

Amazon screenshot

There are no two books more important as predecessors to Water is For Fighting Over than Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert and Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons.

I’m dyin’ here.

Recycling the beer

Posted by on

We have faculty affiliated with the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program working on public acceptance of wastewater recycling and reuse. We have faculty who make beer. This is a story for us:

Pima County water officials want to organize a statewide brewery competition where beer-makers compete using purified wastewater….

The goal of the “Brew Challenge” is to sway public perception of so-called “potable re-use” and tap an unused water source.

The jokes here really just write themselves. But in my new academic life in the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program, this is one of the interesting projects we’re working on – bringing my communication skills and background to research into questions of public risk perception and acceptance, overcoming the “yuck factor” associated with purifying sewage for direct potable reuse.

The beer idea seems brilliant.

Audubon hiring someone to help save the Salton Sea

Posted by on

Audubon is looking to hire someone to help save the Salton Sea. It’s a great twofer – you get to help the birds, and if you succeed you also get to help save Colorado River manage as a whole, as the two are integrally related. If we fail to get the Salton Sea right, everything else, throughout the entire Colorado River Basin, gets a whole lot harder*. More here.

 

* I hate to keep being a shill for my new book (no I don’t), but I explain the connection between the Salton Sea and broader management challenges, you should read it!

Steven Pinker on the how news misleads

Posted by on

News is a misleading way to understand the world. It’s always about events that happened and not about things that didn’t happen. So when there’s a police officer that has not been shot up or city that has not had a violent demonstration, they don’t make the news. As long as violent events don’t fall to zero, there will be always be headlines to click on.

That’s Steven Pinker, in a great interview with Julia Belluz at Vox.

I came to this insight late in my journalism career,  and it was central to my decision to quit my newspaper job, go off and write a book, and now launch a new career in academia. Journalism no longer seemed well suited to the task at hand. Here’s how I explained it in the opening chapter of Water is for Fighting Over:

Like many who manage, engineer, utilize, plan for, and write about western water today, I grew up with the expectation of catastrophe…. But as drought set in again across the Colorado River Basin in the first decade of the twenty-first century, I was forced to grapple with a contradiction: despite what had Reisner taught me, people’s faucets were still running. Their farms were not drying up. No city was left abandoned….

When people have less water, I realized, they use less water.

In spite of the doomsday scenarios, westerners were coping, getting along with their business in the face of less water…. I have witnessed this resilience time and again as I travel the hydraulic landscape of the western United States. This book chronicles my attempt to understand and explain where that ability to adapt comes from, how it works, and how we can call on it to get us through the hard times ahead.

Writing about people not running out of water proved a challenge. I hope I pulled it off.

La Niña watch

Posted by on

This is your semi-regular, repetitive reminder that El Niño and La Niña don’t matter a hill of beans, in statistical terms, for the Colorado River Basin as a whole.

The Climate Prediction Center has issued a La Niña watch. That means cooler temperatures across the equatorial Pacific, which tends on average to influence the North American storm track, pushing storms, on average and in bulk, sorta north. Sorta. Maybe. That means it tends to be a bit drier across Arizona and New Mexico on average, sorta maybe. But as you get farther north, where most of the Colorado River Basin’s water originates, dunno. Hard to say much in a predictive sense, as one says again and again:

Courtesy CBRFC

Courtesy CBRFC