Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, “The myth trafficker,” in a special issue about community media in the West. If you’re a paper-and-staples kind of person, several magazines and newsletters provide good independent commentary on water, including the Water Education Foundation’s Western Water magazine, the University of Arizona’s […]
Water
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
Running on empty in Sin City
The Colorado River states pin thirsty hopes on Las Vegas’ lust for Great Basin groundwater
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
The anatomy of an energy lease
How a city’s watershed was opened for natural gas development
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Underworld
It was August 1997, and I stood beside a manhole cover at Ninth Avenue and F Street in the border town of Douglas, Ariz., with a small gathering of police detectives, firefighters, and city workers. Cones diverted traffic around us. Frank Garcia, a hazardous-materials technician, knelt and ran a tube through one of the silver-dollar-sized […]
Posted inAugust 21, 2006: The Lure of the Lawn
For the love of a river
“Welcome to a way of life”: With these words, Christa Sadler invites readers to sit down by her literary campfire on the banks of the Colorado River. There’s This River is a gathering of rambunctious tattletales: often-hilarious accounts of river guides’ (mis)adventures herding tourists through the Grand Canyon. The anthology includes a glossary of river […]
Posted inAugust 21, 2006: The Lure of the Lawn
Nine reasons why a river is good for the soul
SILT. Healthy particles of silt are suspended in the river, buffed off eons of Wingate sandstone and the debris of flash floods fire-hosing through twisted arroyos. These tiny particles of soil, mud, stone, trees and bones scour our skin as we float in the slow, warm current of the river. We drift in silence, particles […]
Posted inAugust 21, 2006: The Lure of the Lawn
The Lure of the Lawn
Can Westerners get over their romance with turf?
Posted inAugust 21, 2006: The Lure of the Lawn
Have golf’s glory days gone by?
The game that brought grass to the desert appears to be drying up
Posted inAugust 21, 2006: The Lure of the Lawn
What is Xeriscaping?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “The Lure of the Lawn.” Twenty-five years ago, Ken Ball and his Denver Water colleagues developed the seven basic principles of Xeriscaping. Those commandments are still in use today. Plan and design the landscape for water conservation and beauty from the start. Create practical […]
Posted inAugust 21, 2006: The Lure of the Lawn
Xeric Families of the West
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “The Lure of the Lawn.” Harold and Joan Leinbach First, it was floods, which left 10 inches of water standing in Harold and Joan Leinbach’s Boulder yard — and seeping under their foundation — in the spring of 1995. Then it was drought, which […]
Posted inWotr
Lake Powell gets an A for boating and a D for water storage
It’s fun in the sun as usual at Lake Powell, as this summer follows another in a pattern of drought in the 21st century. But though the reservoir has plenty of water for boating, its primary purpose is to store water for the American Southwest. By that criterion, Lake Powell is a bust at 52 […]
Posted inJuly 24, 2006: Taking Liberties
Watch the river flow
After 18 years of wallowing in court, farmers and conservationists have reached a settlement that allows water to run again in California’s second-longest river. The Friant Dam, built in the 1940s, irrigates 1 million acres of rich agricultural land in the Central Valley. It also has dried up sections of the San Joaquin River for […]
Posted inJuly 24, 2006: Taking Liberties
A world built on groundwater
The entire West is headed for a much drier future. Ogallala Blue provides a good sense of the bleak realities of a life of scarcity. Author William Ashworth focuses on the Great Plains states, which have for decades thwarted a notorious lack of rain by reaching into the massive Ogallala Aquifer. Today, those states grow […]
Posted inWotr
The Supreme Court takes pot shots at each other over wetlands
In one of the most anxiously awaited decisions this session, the Supreme Court recently struck a blow against environmental protection by ruling for a couple of commercial developers. The issue in play in Rapanos v. United States: Can federal protection be extended to small tributaries and wetlands near, but not directly abutting, navigable waters? A […]
Posted inJune 26, 2006: The Tamarisk Hunter
The Tamarisk Hunter
In the desert Southwest of 2030 Big Daddy Drought runs the show, California claims all the water, and a water tick named Lolo ekes out a rugged living removing tamarisk.
Posted inJune 12, 2006: The Perpetual Growth Machine
The Perpetual Growth Machine
Arizona sets out to disprove the notion that someday the West will run out of water
Posted inMay 29, 2006: 'Clinging Hopelessly to the Past'
Montana court acknowledges water linkage
An April decision by Montana’s Supreme Court legally established something that the scientific community has long agreed upon: that groundwater is connected to surface water. In 1993, Montana state legislators ordered a moratorium on new water-rights applications for surface water in the over-allocated Upper Missouri River Basin — along with all groundwater “immediately or directly […]
Posted inMay 29, 2006: 'Clinging Hopelessly to the Past'
Saving water from the sky
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands should come with a warning: Read it only at home, with tools handy, because what’s inside inspires action. Tucson author Brad Lancaster explores strategies to “plant” rainwater where it falls. He should know: Lancaster harvests more than 100,000 gallons of rainwater a year, transforming his one-eighth acre of urban desert into […]
Posted inApril 17, 2006: The War on Wildfire
City makes desperate bid for watershed
Note: this article is a sidebar to a news article, “Citizens unite against gas field chaos.” “This is your first time, isn’t it?” whispered a kindly Bureau of Land Management matron to an apprehensive Greg Trainor at a recent oil and gas lease auction in Denver, Colo. Trainor, who manages the water supply for Grand […]
Posted inApril 3, 2006: Land of Disenchantment
Pipeline and dam dreams
A new dam for Utah’s urban Wasatch Front and a pipeline for the fast-growing city of St. George got a boost in February, when the state Legislature approved a bill directing about $8 million a year to “preconstruction” work on the projects. The money, from state sales and use tax, will fund environmental studies and […]