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Breaking the Brazos
February 14th, 2023
Courtesy of Inside Climate News, an article on how development is threatening the “River of the Arms of God” from end to end: Few rivers can claim as strong a connection to Texas’ natural and cultural history—and its very identity—as the Brazos. It drains the second-largest river basin in Texas, meandering for 840 miles from […]
Read more »Drifting Toward Disaster: The (Second) Rio Grande
February 14th, 2023
Via Inside Climate News, commentary on how a century of enterprise brought the Rio Grande to its brink and now authorities are “praying for a hurricane” as reservoirs dwindle and populations boom on both sides of the Mexico-Texas border: This summer, the Rio Grande dried up in places that it never had before. For more than 100 […]
Read more »Water-Trading Deals Are the New Normal. Trade Law Isn’t Keeping Up
February 14th, 2023
Via World Politics Review, commentary on water trading: Five years ago, in April 2018, headlines around the world called attention to South Africa’s impending “Day Zero”—the day when water levels in the dams supplying Cape Town were projected to fall below the minimum capacity required to keep water running across the city. The hydraulic apocalypse never arrived, due […]
Read more »Restoring An Ancient Lake From Rubble of Unfinished Airport in Mexico City
February 14th, 2023
Via MIT Technology Review, a report on how plans for Mexico’s $1 billion Lake Texcoco Ecological Park reflect a new paradigm in urban design: REUTERS/CARLOS JASSO VIA ALAMY When the Mexica people left their ancestral land of Aztlán in search of a new home, they were following orders from the sun god Huitzilopochtli. In 1325, the […]
Read more »‘We’re All Headed To A Very Dark Place’: Emails Reveal Tense Colorado River Talks
February 14th, 2023
Via Fortune, a look at the tense Colorado River talks amid the southwest’s megadrought: Competing priorities, outsized demands and the federal government’s retreat from a threatened deadline stymied a deal last summer on how to drastically reduce water use from the parched Colorado River, emails obtained by The Associated Press show. The documents span the June-to-August […]
Read more »Re-Engineering Glen Canyon Dam
February 14th, 2023
Via Land Desk, an interesting look at options for Glen Canyon Dam: For the last two years or so, federal Bureau of Reclamation officials have been fretting publicly about what might happen to Glen Canyon Dam as water levels continue to drop. Currently the surface of Lake Powell is perilously close to the penstocks, or the […]
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