The article mentions the Salton Sea in passing, but left out the story of how this sea was created: the Colorado River flowed into the Salton Basin for two years after a bungled engineering job on the river in 1905.<p><a href="http://www.inventionandtech.com/content/lake-mistake-0" rel="nofollow">http://www.inventionandtech.com/content/lake-mistake-0</a> - Click the printer friendly link for a one-page view - and I wish this had the pictures that were in the original print version.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea</a>
Excellent write up - the newyorker has been knocking it out of the park lately. I particularly like this nuance:<p><i>Growing food in a desert may seem nutty, but there are advantages. Frost, hail, and damaging rainstorms are far less common than they are in other parts of the country, and the growing season is year-round, as are the jobs. Last year, Brawley received a little over half its average annual rainfall on a single stormy day, August 21st, and other than that got just the odd sprinkle. Total reliance on irrigation is a drawback in one way, because the water has to come from somewhere, but the absence of rain is what makes precise planning possible: farmers in the Midwest don’t know to the day when they will harvest the corn they hope to plant next month (weather permitting).</i><p>As well - the fact that conservation, can actually be <i>negative</i> - this article is full of all sorts of nuance you can get when you let a writer actually spend time, and do the research:<p><i>Cox drove me past a field in which one of his employees was planting lettuce, and parked by another ditch. “This is some of our citrus, here,” he said. “It’s grapefruit. It’s been flood-irrigated in the past, but we’re switching it all to micro-sprinkler.” Doing that will reduce Cox’s water need, but it will also have the perverse efficiency effect that Bradley Udall described, by turning a non-consumptive use (irrigation runoff) into a consumptive one (more grapefruit). That’s an especially complicated issue in the Imperial Valley, because runoff from farms like Cox’s is the only source of water, other than modest amounts of rainfall and mountain runoff, for the Salton Sea, an immense but shrinking and increasingly threatened lake at the northern end of the valley.</i>
Damn that was a long read. Lots of facts and history but sprinkled will lots of extra too. The last paragraph for example is pure fluff. If you want to write a book then by all means write one, but these super-long articles are getting out of hand. Just because your "magazine" is on the internet doesn't mean people have all day to read one article.
There was a similar piece in the NYTimes just over a month ago regarding the Rio Grande: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9368374" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9368374</a>
Watch Delta Dawn, its a great video on paddle boarding the Colorado.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot3059iwiWo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot3059iwiWo</a>
I just watched an incredibly moving video about traveling down the Colorado river: <a href="https://vimeo.com/126544483" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/126544483</a>
I saw a great short film called Delta Dawn at the Banff Mountain Film Festival. Unfortunately, all I can find is a short clip. Even the filmmaker's website doesn't seem to have it (or the page won't load properly).<p>The article author's comment about driving the Colorado reminded me of the filmmaker riding a paddleboard all the way to Mexico on the river.<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/112762616" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/112762616</a>
Just yesterday I watched this episode[1] about the Dead Sea. The same thing is happening - everyone is pulling water out of the Jordan River upstream and there's barely any left once it reaches the Dead Sea... There it's complicated by the fact that multiple countries are involved.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/22/travel/dead-sea-bill-weir-twl/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/22/travel/dead-sea-bill-weir-twl/...</a>
If you're interested in the topic and in the mood for a fiction book, this one is an enjoyable read which gives a great description of the Colorado and all the various dams along it. Its set piece is domestic terrorism/unlikely hero saves the day stuff.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wet-Desert-Novel-Gary-Hansen/dp/097935210X" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Wet-Desert-Novel-Gary-Hansen/dp/097935...</a>
CA gets a ridiculously oversize portion of the river. The 'Colorado' river is mostly an Arizona watershed. Yet the rules are basically 'Arizona gets what's left after CA is done.'<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_v._California" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_v._California</a>
Yet nobody wants to talk about overpopulation. It's the herd of elephants in the room. USA is poised to be a net food importer next decade, at least in dollar terms. How absurd is that?