Water
Posted inGoat
Dry news from the water mines
Mike Conway of the Arizona Geological Survey started getting phone calls from realtors several months ago. With the Phoenix-area real estate market heating back up, they needed to know if their clients are looking at land run through with cracks that might open up and damage their homes, or worse. In 2008, a fissure known […]
Posted inGoat
New Mexico on fire
New Mexico is burning. Again. In June 2011, winds gusting up to 40 miles per hour propelled an aspen into a power line in the Jemez Mountains, near Los Alamos, igniting a 156,593-acre blaze that became known as the Las Conchas Fire. It was the biggest wildfire in the New Mexico’s recorded history, until the […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
Book review: Ground/Water: The Art, Design and Science of a Dry River
Ground/Water: The art, design and science of a dry river, edited by Ellen McMahon, Ander Monson, and Beth Weinstein, 112 pages, hardcover: $48. The University of Arizona Press, 2012. Arizona’s Rillito River runs from the Santa Catalina Mountains through Tucson to join the Santa Cruz River. “Except it doesn’t run,” writes journalist Nathaniel Brodie in […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Another water-short year in the Southwest is taking its toll
On April 14, a Sunday, the Colorado ski resort Vail Mountain celebrated closing day in the invariable way: Skiers and boarders sported neon onesies and mullet wigs. The less modest squeezed into denim short shorts to flaunt calves and quads sculpted over a winter on the slopes. Alcohol was overconsumed and confiscated in lift lines. […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
The Latest: Pumping Arizona’s rivers dry?
BackstoryLast July, Arizona’s state water board approved a large new development in Sierra Vista that would pump 3,300 acre feet of groundwater per year — despite evidence that such pumping could decrease flow in the San Pedro River, one of the West’s healthiest desert rivers. Environmentalists appealed the decision; so did the Bureau of Land […]
Posted inGoat
Boundary water disputes
Imagine discovering that the clear, rushing water of the river in your remote neck-of-the-woods is contaminated with nitrates, sulfates, and selenium — a toxic heavy metal that causes deformities in fish. Then, to complicate things, imagine that the source of the pollution is upstream in another, neighboring country with its own leaders and environmental laws. […]
Posted inGoat
Living on borrowed water
Last June, poor runoff from an abysmal snowpack was turning Colorado’s Yampa River into a hot cesspool, pushing trout and mountain whitefish to the margins of survival. Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the city of Steamboat asked anglers and flotillas of tubing tourists to stay away, to avoid stressing the Yampa’s overheating and oxygen-deprived fish. […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Parched lives in a parched land: A review of the Ordinary Truth
The Ordinary TruthJana Richman375 pages, softcover: $16.95.Torrey House Press, 2012. Traditionally, springs and wells are centers of life around which people gather and sometimes form communities. In Utah author Jana Richman’s second novel, The Ordinary Truth, metropolitan claims to desert waters unsettle a small town and pit one family’s members against each other. Shifting between […]
Posted inRange
Two tales of one river
As Earth Day passed with little fanfare this week, news was mixed for the Colorado River. American Rivers, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy organization, released its annual list of the nation’s most endangered waterways. Half of them are in the West, and the Colorado has the dubious distinction of landing the number one spot. The group […]
Posted inGoat
Pumping the San Pedro dry?
Arizona’s San Pedro River has been called the most studied river in the world, attracting scientists, birders, and anyone wanting to observe the region’s healthiest desert river. But all that research doesn’t seem to have affected an April decision by the Arizona Department of Water Resources to approve groundwater pumping that could deplete the river’s […]
Posted inGoat
The river and the drought
“We’re geniuses!” bellowed my good friend, G, as we embarked on a rafting tour of the San Juan River in southeastern Utah. The temperature was nearing 80 under a cloudless sky, only a slight breeze blew upriver and the water was unusually clear. The ranger had just told us we’d have the place pretty much […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
Downstream depletions
The practices of San Luis Valley farmers also have dramatic consequences for communities downstream (“Farming on the Fringe,” HCN, 2/18/13). The Rio Grande Compact allows the dewatering of the main stem of the Rio Grande through Taos County, N.M. Frequently, because of the heavy irrigation demands of the San Luis Valley farmers, the river is […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
How the amount of fish you eat impacts water quality
Idaho plans to conduct a $300,000 study to learn how much fish its residents eat from state waters. The amount consumed helps determine regulatory limits for pollutant levels in rivers and lakes. Most Western states use the EPA’s default fish-consumption rate, a cracker-sized 17.5 grams per day, to set human health standards for dozens of […]
Posted inGoat
Uncertain science in CA’s Bay Delta
In 2009, a reporter for CBS’s 60 Minutes asked the then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger a hard question about California’s water. The state had been battling over the fate of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta for decades, and, with the Governator’s encouragement, work was progressing on the new Bay Delta Conservation Plan. The plan was supposed to […]
Posted inMarch 18, 2013: Second annual travel issue
It’s time to get real
The San Luis Valley is a wonderful place that needs to be preserved (“Farming on the Fringe,” HCN, 2/18/13). The water issues will only get worse as the climate goes into this hotter drier spell — one that could last thousands of years. I’m glad the local people are working on a solution to their […]
Posted inMarch 18, 2013: Second annual travel issue
Trouble for more than one Arizona river
Thanks for spreading the news of growing threats to the San Pedro (“Standoff on the San Pedro,” HCN, 2/18/13). However, the San Pedro is not “the Southwest’s last free-flowing major desert river.” In fact, the Verde River is the longest surviving living river in Arizona. A much larger river, it supports a healthy riparian habitat […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2013: Farming on the Fringe
Farmers agree to tax those who deplete groundwater
Amid drought and climate change in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, farmers vote for a new approach to rein in their overpumping of groundwater.