SIERRA VISTA, ARIZONA “For sale: Prime Office/Retail,” proclaims the sign on a mesquite flat on the outskirts of this affluent city of 47,000 people, about an hour south of Tucson near the Huachuca Mountains. It’s announcing a 2,000-acre project known as Tribute, proposed by California developer Castle and Cooke and approved by city leaders six […]
Water
Posted inGoat
Managing Western water from space
Over the last 40 years, images from space have shown us a lot about the changing West. Data beamed down from NASA’s Landsat satellites have revealed how cities like Las Vegas are oozing into the desert, how bark beetles are spreading through and killing Colorado’s forests and how ecosystems recover from wildfires. Besides wowing us […]
Posted inGoat
The life of brine
Here in Paonia, Colo., late on January 23rd, I was lying in bed when my house started to tremble. It felt like the whole structure was perched on a pad of Jell-O. There was one short round of shaking, and then another. But before I could become anything more than startled, it stopped. Local news […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
In the Northwest, innovative projects use trees to cool streams
The wastewater treatment plant in Medford, Ore., removes organic solids, oils and other pollutants from sewer and storm runoff before dumping the water into the Rogue River. Even though the process cleans the water, it’s still polluted with heat. Warm waters hold less oxygen and can provide a dangerous advantage to invasive species. The state […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
Water is (still) for fightin’: A review of Durango
DurangoGary Hart246 pages, softcover: $15.95.Fulcrum, 2012. Former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart’s seventh novel, Durango, is timely, as many Westerners agonize over drought and the energy industry’s use and abuse of water. Hart’s novel, however, takes us to another front in the water wars, the decades-long dispute over damming southern Colorado’s Animas and La Plata rivers […]
Posted inGoat
Who is writing New Mexico’s water regulations?
Updated on 5/22/13. New Mexico environmental regulators under Republican governor Susana Martinez are overseeing attempts to roll back a suite of groundwater regulations. While the administration’s argument for loosening rules on dairies, mines and oil and gas marches to the drumbeat of jobs, jobs, jobs, all they have to do is look in their own […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2013: Special issue: Natural resources education
Miguel Luna gives young Los Angelenos a beaker and a job
When Miguel Luna was an 8-year-old in the city of Cúcuta, Colombia, his family sometimes went days without water. The municipality would just shut it off, he recalls. “Nothing would come out of the faucets.” When the water returned, his grandmother, Hercilia, would ceremoniously drink a glass before bedtime. “She’d say to us, ‘Water is […]
Posted inGoat
Pipeline safety after the Yellowstone spill
The night of July 1, 2011 “was a usual night, not too busy and not overly slow” at ExxonMobil’s pipeline control facility in Houston, Texas. A controller at the Houston facility was operating pipeline controls at his new workstation, known as “console 2.” This controller had recently been trained on this console, and had been […]
Posted inWotr
Big water projects should make Westerners nervous
Across maps of the arid West, expensive water pipelines are being plotted to meet the region’s profound need for water. Among those under serious consideration are a 263-mile pipeline to bring eastern Nevada water to Las Vegas, southwestern Utah’s 139-mile Lake Powell pipeline, and the 500-mile Flaming Gorge pipeline from Wyoming to Colorado. Each would cost […]
Posted inGoat
BLM okays controversial Nevada water pipeline
Maybe the Bureau of Land Management thought they could dodge two decades of Nevada water controversy by releasing a crucial decision just two days after Christmas. Last week’s approval of a water pipeline “right of way” puts the Southern Nevada Water Authority — who hailed the decision as a “milestone” — one step closer to […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
Fighting development in floodplains
HAMILTON, WASHINGTON Karin Vail’s modest white house near Washington’s Skagit River seemed like a perfect choice when she bought it 22 years ago. She looked forward to raising her family on its spacious one-and-a-half acres. Now, however, she just wants out. Vail, a resolute woman in her mid- 40s with long, curly red hair, stands […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
Western water, in poetry and policy: A review of Dam Nation
Dam Nation: How Water Shaped the West and WillDetermine its FutureStephen Grace360 pages, hardcover: $24.95.Globe Pequot, 2012. To snatch a moment from the wild and capture it in words that pulse with life is quite a feat. Stephen Grace, author of the 2004 novel Under Cottonwoods, makes it seem effortless. When he describes sandhill cranes […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
A review of Last Water on the Devil’s Highway: A cultural and natural history of Tinajas Altas
Last Water on the Devil’s Highway: A cultural and natural history of Tinajas Altas Bill Broyles, Gayle Harrison Hartmann, Thomas E. Sheridan, Gary Paul Nabhan, Mary Charlotte Thurtle 240 pages, hardcover: $49.95. The University of Arizona Press, 2012. Last Water on the Devil’s Highway is the story of a waterhole that, for centuries, has kept […]
Posted inGoat
The End is nigh (or at least it’s really dry)
This won’t be news to most of you fair readers, but just in case you’ve been paying attention to real problems and have missed it: The End is nigh! That’s right, the world’s end is just weeks away. After all, what else could it mean that the Mayan calendar ends on that day? Nothing, except […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2012: The Evolution of Wildlife Tech
Producing more power means using more water
Locked up inside the 6 million years of sediment that makes up the Green River Formation, which extends across mostly public lands in Colorado and Utah, may be the equivalent of a few trillion barrels of oil. Even if only half of it is recoverable, the oil shale of the Mountain West could one day […]
Posted inGoat
Of water and dust
In all the hullabaloo of the Thanksgiving holiday, you might have missed a couple of important developments concerning water use while you were brining a bird or chopping cranberries. Here’s a summary, describing a deal on the Colorado River, and a ruling about California’s Owens Lake. In 2006, the seven states that share water from […]
Posted inGoat
Water wins
Water agencies in three Western states will soon be trading money for water with Mexico, after officials signed a pact Tuesday updating the terms of the 1944 agreement that dictates what portion of Colorado River water our southern neighbor receives each year. At a cost of $10 million, regional agencies in the thirsty states of […]
Posted inRange
The war on New Mexico’s water
As residents of the West, each of us keeps, either consciously or not, a checklist of those things that make our lives here worthwhile. Some of those things add to our quality of life, like cultural diversity and breathtaking landscapes. Others, like clean water, fall more into the necessities of life category. Without clean water, […]