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 […]
Water
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 […]
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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 […]
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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
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 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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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The water project that wouldn’t die
Driving down a highway, somewhere this side of the New Mexico line, I see a house surrounded by rusted out farm implements. I see a field, churned up and parched under another bright blue October sky. I see a dam being built. A dam!? Yes, a dam. The era of huge Western water projects has […]
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Is the future of Western water in jeopardy?
Updated 10/22/2012, 12:14 p.m., MDT “Supreme Court decision could lead to ‘water anarchy’ in the West““U.S. on the verge of water anarchy““Utah’s water future in court”“Ruling key to Colorado water future““Upcoming ruling key to New Mexico’s water future“ These headlines, splashed across major Western newspapers in recent weeks, and in the influential website Politico and […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
The true believer and the skeptic: A review of River Republic and A Ditch in Time
Two optimistic new books exhort Americans to embrace the challenges of their aging water infrastructure, but they provide sharply opposing views. In River Republic: The Fall and Rise of America’s Rivers, political scientist Daniel McCool calls on citizens to undo the damage done to the country’s waterways by the engineers of yore. In contrast, in […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
Only more water will help the Bay Delta
Emily Green’s story, “Tunneling under California’s water wars,” reads as if it were written by Governor Jerry Brown’s office (HCN, 8/20/12). Those who extract water from the Bay Delta want a reliable supply. Unfortunately, that is not possible. We must adapt to a future with less water, not continue to demand more. Merely moving the […]