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Where The River Runs Dry: Southwestern America’s Water Crisis
May 29th, 2015
Courtesy of The New Yorker, a detailed look at the US southwest’s water crisis: Our pilot, David Kunkel, asked me to retrieve his oxygen bottle from under my seat, and when I handed it to him he gripped the plastic breathing tube with his teeth and opened the valve. We had taken off from Boulder […]
Read more »Federal Dollars Financing The Water Crisis In The American West
May 28th, 2015
Via Pro Public, an interesting detailed look at how federal dollars are financing the water crisis in the West: STATE ROUTE 87, the thin band of pavement that approaches the mostly shuttered town of Coolidge, Ariz., cuts through some of the least hospitable land in the country. The valley of red and brown sand is interrupted […]
Read more »The End Of California?
May 3rd, 2015
Courtesy of the New York Times, commentary on California’s drought: A buoy stuck on the bottom of a bone-dry Lake McSwain. IN a normal year, no one in California looks twice at a neighbor’s lawn, that mane of bluegrass thriving in a sun-blasted desert. Or casts a scornful gaze at a fresh-planted almond grove, saplings […]
Read more »How The U.S. West Was Lost
August 6th, 2014
Via National Geographic, a report on the drought gripping the U.S. west: The Colorado River at it delta Just as the settling and development of the arid American West was fueled by harnessing its available fresh water, the growing lack of water availability may well be its undoing. California’s epic drought is just the latest […]
Read more »Last Straw: How The Fortunes Of Las Vegas Will Rise Or Fall With Lake Mead
June 15th, 2014
Via Popular Science, a detailed look at the massive, expensive, and politically fraught project to build a new tunnel under Lake Mead to deliver water to Las Vegas: The bathtub ring can be seen for miles. The 120-foot-high band of rock, bleached nearly white by mineral-rich water, circles the shoreline of Lake Mead. Water levels […]
Read more »U.S. Southwest: High And Dry
April 28th, 2014
Via RAND Corporation, a detailed look at implications of climate change on water supplies & management in the United States’ southwest: Droughts across the western United States have left water managers worried like never before. The Colorado River and its reservoirs, upon which seven states rely, are being depleted by 14 years of drought nearly […]
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