An arid region 180 miles south of Tijuana is the crossroads where strawberries, economics, and groundwater meet. Continue readingStrawberry Fields Forever? Thirsty Baja Turning to Seawater to Grow Lucrative Crop
Author: Felicity Barringer
In the federal government, wildfires have a lesser claim on disaster funds. As fires burn with greater magnitude and frequency, the cost of fighting them is increasingly borne by money earmarked for prevention.Continue readingAre Forest Managers Robbing the Future to Pay for Present-Day Fires?
The power gained by harnessing the Columbia River paved the way for industrial development and widespread farmland irrigation. But what if, instead of public utilities, that power had been sold by private firms seeking profits? Continue readingChanging Currents: Picturing a Northwest Without Cheap, Public Hydropower
The fraught statewide conditions that led to passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in 2014? They afflicted Ventura decades earlier. Continue readingPainful Experience Helps to Chart the Future of Groundwater in Ventura County
Welcome to the world of community health workers. The job, part medical aide and part social worker, is a tradition in poor and rural communities around New Mexico and well established in similar places around the country. But institutional recognition has been slow to come.Continue readingBy Treating Obstacles to Health, Community Health Workers Also Treat a Troubled System
Lake Mead on the Colorado River has become an hourglass of shrinking water supplies. Can lower-basin states turn back the clock?Continue readingLower Basin States Work to Keep Lake Mead Afloat
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In Other Words, Water
From multiple tongues came multiple terms for how water flows, and how it works in the West.Continue readingIn Other Words, Water
Like the topsoil, structures built 40 years ago to contain floodwaters are cracking, too.Continue readingTo Save Crops, Farmers Took Groundwater. Then the Land Sank
A new paper suggests that “mineral easements” might provide a tool to block hydraulic fracking and the oil and gas wells that have been sources of fear and opposition from New York to California.Continue readingConservation Underground: Researchers Propose a Way to Block Subsurface Exploitation
The fungal species that causes the illness known as Valley Fever is known as cocciodiodes. Two strains have been found around the North American Southwest. Researchers have found that the fungal spores have made their home – the scientific term is “endemic” – in areas characterized by low rainfall, temperatures that are high in summer…Continue readingThe Southwest’s Orphan Disease Thrives on Ignorance