BLOG
Joliet, Illinois, Plans to Source Its Future Drinking Water From Lake Michigan. Will Other Cities Follow?
September 30th, 2024
Via Inside Climate News, a report that – as aquifers dry up – some Midwest communities are looking to the region’s greatest natural resources for a solution. A 2008 law governs access to it—with an exemption for Illinois. The aquifer from which Joliet, Illinois, sources its drinking water is likely going to run too dry […]
Read more »Millions Depend On The Mississippi—But The Mighty River Is Running Dry
September 27th, 2024
Tons of grains and crops are shipped down the Mississippi River every year. This National Geographic article examines what will happen if increasingly persistent droughts shrink America’s longest river? About eighty miles south of St. Louis, Brian Ragsdale’s boat, the Dredge Potter, has been deployed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to carve a […]
Read more »Navajo Nation: America’s Water-Inequality Capital. It Might Be About to Change
September 23rd, 2024
Via Time Magazine, an article on Navajo Nation and water challenges facing America’s First Nations: In the Navajo Nation—a sweeping landscape of red-rock canyons and desert that takes in the Four Corners—water is not taken for granted. Here, more than 1 in 3 Diné, as Navajo people call themselves, must haul water to their homes, […]
Read more »The Key to Fix California’s Inadequate Water Storage? Put Water Underground, Scientists Say
September 22nd, 2024
Via Inside Climate News, a report on a new study that finds Calfornia should replenish groundwater aquifers to sustain agriculture: A new University of California Riverside study on California agriculture and climate proposes a plan for new water capture, storage and distribution systems throughout California that will sustain agriculture and keep up with climate trajectories. Available water […]
Read more »The North American Water and Power Alliance: The Forgotten Project That Could Have Saved America From Drought
September 20th, 2024
Via the now discontinued BuzzFeed (but saved with web archive), a look at the North American Water and Power Alliance – an audacious proposal to divert water to parched western states that would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars and pissed off Canada. But what if it had worked? When the fire started on a […]
Read more »Western Water: Where Values, Math, and the “Law of the River” Collide
September 14th, 2024
Via The Land Desk, an essay on water in the U.S. West – where values, math, and the “Law of the River” collide: This spring, I had the pleasure to sit on a panel on water in the West with Paolo Bacigalupi and Heather Hansman, two writers I’ve long admired. During the question & answer period, […]
Read more »