By David Hasemyer, InsideClimate News The debate over whether oil sands mining should be allowed in Utah inched forward this week when an environmental group and the company that wants to open the mine both filed papers responding to a judge’s recent ruling on whether water resources will be adequately protected. Administrative Law Judge Sandra Allen ruled […]
Water
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
A way out of California’s water morass?
This well-written piece accurately portrays the problems and solutions facing California’s beleaguered Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (HCN, 8/20/12, ‘Tunneling under California’s water wars‘). Current operations in the Delta have failed to provide water to family farmers and 25 million Californians, and failed to protect the region’s ecosystem. Doing nothing to improve this situation means more of […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Money trumps prudence
The picture here is one of common sense and ethical behavior being given up and replaced with an attitude of do whatever it takes to make money (HCN, 8/6/12, ‘The Bakken’s shadow boom‘). Where do they think billions of gallons of polluted water are going to go when reinjected into the very same rock formations […]
Posted inGoat
Chinook salmon come home to Elwha River
Five months ago contractors ripped down the final remnants of the Elwha Dam, which along with its upstream counterpart, Glines Canyon Dam, has for a century been blocking the paths of salmon up the Elwha River, which winds through Washington State’s Olympic National Park and empties into the Pacific at the Strait of Juan de […]
Posted inGoat
New podcast, all about drought
The latest edition of HCN‘s monthly podcast, West of 100, is now available for your listening pleasure, and it covers something that’s on everyone’s mind this summer: drought. As of August, more than half of the country was experiencing at least moderate drought — and in many places it was worse than that, with drought conditions that are […]
Posted inArticles
West of 100: Droughts past, present and future
Of course, drought has always been a fact of Western life. But with the specter of climate change hanging over every extreme weather event these days, this year’s drought, and the dry years that have preceded it, have people wondering: Is this normal? Is this the new normal? So for this edition of West of […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2012: Troubled Taos
Slip-slidin’ away
Thank you for the excellent story “The great runoff runaround” in the July 23, 2012, edition. The article focuses on logging roads, but landslides are another important source of sediment pollution. Landslides are natural in the young, steep, unstable mountains of the American West, but clear-cutting and logging roads increase their rates by one or […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2012: Troubled Taos
Tunneling under California’s Bay Delta water wars
On July 25, California Gov. Jerry Brown announced to an expectant press corps that the state plans to construct a pair of multibillion-dollar tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta in order to modernize and possibly expand the export of Northern California’s water, mostly south to farms and cities. After decades of rancor over what […]
Posted inGoat
When Robert Redford speaks, I listen
A dignified Eastern lady who enjoys spending days at Boston’s Museum of Fine Art and nights at the theater, my grandmother doesn’t know, or care, very much about water issues in the West. But when the phone rings in her apartment, she often shoots me a sly look and remarks, “that must be Robert Redford, […]
Posted inRange
Desert solitaire: Las Vegas bets big on rural water
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House A water mining project that’s been a quarter-century in the making took a major step forward last week, when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recommended approval of a plan for diverting groundwater from three counties in eastern Nevada to Sin City. In its final environmental impact statement (FEIS), the […]
Posted inGoat
Pipe conflict
For over 20 years the vision of a nearly 300-mile long pipeline that would pump groundwater from rural valleys in eastern Nevada to the city of Las Vegas has floated, mirage-like, over the arid state. For the Southern Nevada Water Authority and its powerful general manager, Pat Mulroy, the project is a way to moisturize […]
Posted inGoat
The cloud seeding believers
They might not know it, but golfers in Los Angeles, farmers in the Imperial Valley and retirees in Phoenix are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on cloud seeding in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah. Until I attended the Colorado Water Workshop in Gunnison, Colo. this past July, I had no idea either. Making rain may […]
Posted inAugust 6, 2012: Of Birds and Men
The Bakken oil play spurs a booming business — in water
The first thing you notice in North Dakota’s oil patch are trucks. They dominate a landscape defined not long ago by cattle and wheat, and not long before that by bison and grass. Trucks groan through Watford City all night. They pile up traffic on highways designed for the occasional car or combine and whip […]
Posted inAugust 6, 2012: Of Birds and Men
A ride with a Bakken water trucker
Reporter Nicholas Kusnetz spent a day riding with Mike Reynolds, who left his logging business in eastern Washington state in order to earn money as a water trucker in the Bakken. Reynolds is pleased with the job, but eager to return to the work — and the home — he loves.
Posted inJuly 23, 2012: The Hardest Climb
Oregon ignores logging road runoff, to the peril of native fish
Tillamook State Forest, OregonChris Winter stands by a dirt road along the South Fork of the Trask River. The scattered clouds pass for a clear spring day in coastal Oregon, where annual precipitation tops 100 inches. Moss-draped red alder and Douglas fir frame the wide channel, where rocks gleam beneath crystalline water. It’s idyllic, and […]
Posted inGoat
West Coast trawlers spare the little fish
Last year, fishermen on the West Coast who trawl for groundfish — species like cod and sole that live on or close to the sea floor — started fishing by a new set of rules. The National Marine Fisheries Service introduced a system that, to date has succeeded in reducing the number of discarded fish […]
Posted inGoat
Mutualism on the Colorado River
Cross posted from the Last Word on Nothing. This story, I promise, will end with giant deep-sea tubeworms like the beauties above. Please bear with me while I get there via the Colorado River. I’m one of the nearly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado for water, and for most of my adult […]
Posted inGoat
Documenting drought from the ground up
While her neighbors in Nebraska water their lawns, Denise Gutzmer pages through thousands of online articles about crop loss, wild fires and water shortages. As a climate scientist specializing in drought impacts, the waste bugs her. “I have a different sense of the importance of water than my neighbors do,” she said. But aside from […]
Posted inGoat
Getting serious about fresh water with Jay Famiglietti
Editor’s note: High Country News will occasionally cross post items from Chance of Rain, a blog by Emily Green, who writes frequently on water in California and the West. Her latest story for High Country News covered Los Angeles County Flood Control District’s bulldozing of old-growth oak forests. Unfortunately, Jay Famiglietti isn’t running for office, unfortunate because […]