Do groundwater rights retirement programs work? There is certainly demand for them in Nevada. For KNPR and the Daily Yonder, I talked to irrigators about their experiences with a pilot program in areas where aquifers are being depleted faster than they are replenished. knpr.org/desert-compa...

Exactly a year ago, Ellen Wohl, @parriblue.bsky.social and I spent two days in Providence thinking about #rivers and how we conceptualize them & live with them. Here’s the result of history and fluvial geomorphology teaming up. #envhist doi.org/10.1371/jour...

“Regardless of what sort of offsetting or replenishment you do, it doesn’t necessarily nullify the water footprints of your own operations." Amazon strategised about keeping its datacentres’ full water use secret, leaked document shows www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Wrote a bit about the mining and (ground)water nexus in the Western U.S., with the rush for critical minerals and gold surpassing $4,000/ounce. invisiblewaters.substack.com/p/where-ther...

Melanie Winter, who dedicated much of her life to reimagining the Los Angeles River as a natural asset, has died. I feel fortunate to have known Melanie and learned about her vision for a living river. She inspired many others, who will carry her vision with them. www.latimes.com/environment/...

California condor range expanding into the Bay Area and Santa Cruz Mountains, further south into Santa Barbara County too. 🪶 www.mercurynews.com/2025/10/20/f...

Check out (and subscribe!) to @sammyroth.bsky.social's new Substack focused on climate solutions in entertainment and pop culture. "...what I’ve realized — what drove me to start this newsletter — is that the climate crisis is in large part a cultural problem."

Its official! Today, the US Corps Of Engineers is announcing that it signed into effect a Water Control Manual update for Lake Mendocino on the Russian River that implements FIRO* there! 1/7 www.sfchronicle.com/california/a... * Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations

“The Monday filing outlines where 2,050 positions would be eliminated; the U.S. Geological Survey, the Bureau of Land Management, and the main Interior office would be especially hard hit. Regional offices with the National Park Service are also targeted for significant cuts.”

Salmon reach headwaters for first time in a century after California dam removal www.sfchronicle.com/california/a...

“We’ve seen so many impacts from groundwater pumping. There’s a lot of areas that are dewatered, that are dried up.” Indigenous leaders raise concerns about groundwater pumping in Owens Valley and call for negotiations with L.A. @ianjames.bsky.social has more. www.latimes.com/environment/...

You'd think the Colorado River Basin dispute amounts to conflict between the upper and lower basin states based on most coverage, but Tribes and Mexico also have a big role here. We talked with Cora Tso and Sam Sandoval about these issues on Water Talk www.watertalkpodcast.com/episodes/epi...

Important report out from the Initiative on Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribal Communities (UACW): The FY 2026 federal budget includes a 70% reduction in funding for Tribal Access to Clean, Reliable and Accessible Drinking Water. tribalcleanwater.org/wp-content/u...

NOAA has just issued a La Niña Watch for late 2025/early 2026. So far this century, we've had 12 La Niña winters versus just 8 El Niño winters. What does this portend for Southwest US drought? There's some unsettling new science out on that. yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/08/why-...

Photographs from Mono Lake and the Mono Basin, a landscape of deep silence and immense space. (And overdue for implementation of the full protections guaranteed by decades-old legal decisions.) #monolake #monobasin #lake #nature #landscape #california #basinandrange #photography

In today’s @latimes.com: ‘It needs more water’: Calls grow for boosting Mono Lake www.latimes.com/environment/... @myungchun.bsky.social

We do not talk enough about groundwater, the quiet water crisis playing out across the globe. “Groundwater is the most precious natural resource in the dry parts of the world," said ASU's Jay Famiglietti. “And it is probably the least protected.” www.westernwaternotes.com/p/q-and-a-gr...

As housing costs soar, running water has become a luxury in Portland, Phoenix and other wealthy US cities. Latest for @bloomberg.com with Klara Auerbach, gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

What makes heat so hard to cover? Thoughtful reporting from my friends and colleagues, Meg Bernhard and Bridget Bennett, on the invisibility and difficulties of telling stories about extreme heat, a crisis that so often "turns us inward." www.cjr.org/feature-2/wh...

As a public service, people will find the original pdf files of all the U.S. National Climate Assessments, 2001-2023, publicly available at: www.patrickgonzalez.net#us_national_...

“Many people still expect the Colorado River to bounce back,” Shanahan said. “But our findings suggest it may not. Water managers need to start planning for the possibility that this drought isn’t just a rough patch — it could be the new reality.”

This downward spiral of the number of working journalists in communities across the country has been happening for years. At my former shop for example, the newsroom was systematically reduced from nine reporters and three editors to just a single reporter over the course of four years. 1/

"In the United States, which prefers to measure its losses in dollars [rather than lives], the damage from major storms was more than $180 billion last year, nearly 10 times the average annual toll during the 1980s, after accounting for inflation" #climate www.propublica.org/article/texa...

‘Water brings life’: Plans to revive Tulare Lake take shape in the San Joaquin Valley www.latimes.com/environment/...

While majority of Americans see climate change as risk almost nobody talks about it with others. This is a major reason for lack of action. climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications...

Smart piece on the future of publishing in a world after Google Zero. Written about the journalism industry, but it applies to science communication and many forms of publishing. mattdpearce.substack.com/p/ai-could-c...

From @internetarchive.eu: "Internet Archive Europe proudly announces the launch of Our Future Memory, a global campaign dedicated to safeguarding the digital rights of libraries, archives, and museums worldwide." www.internetarchive.eu/protecting-t...

High Sierra meets the Great Basin.

My first #artwork in months - I wanted to try a geological "field" sketch - submarine fan deposits in the Cretaceous Point Loma Formation at Point Loma, San Diego, and overlying Pleistocene deposits. Locally, the PLF consists of repetitive sandstone/mudstone couplets. #watercolor #geology

💯 “These resources are more interconnected than our laws lead us to think, and as a result of that, we need to be finding ways to more explicitly consider them in seven-state negotiations,” Koebele said.

A data center boom is happening in the nation’s driest state. AI is accelerating it. An excellent and well-reported piece by @jtemple.bsky.social on a topic that deserves way more scrutiny. www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1...

Hey look it's @kbdobbin.bsky.social, Justin McBride's and my work on Water System Consolidation in California on the cover of the June 2025 edition of Journal American Water Works Association. Another @luskininnovation.bsky.social @ucanrwater.bsky.social @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social collab.

"All water discharged by wells is balanced by a loss of water somewhere." - Hydrogeologist C.V. Theis writing in 1940, nearly a century ago. From "The Source of Water Derived From Wells." water.usgs.gov/ogw/pubs/The...

And just to reiterate, a lot of that subsidence is also being outsourced to rural areas via groundwater extraction and transfer

New research finds that nearly all of the 28 largest population centers in the U.S. are sinking — and a major cause is groundwater depletion. Another indicator of how important groundwater is, even if it is often invisible to us. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

"...the so-called war over California’s water is a dangerous, flawed trope that reduces certain water uses to right or wrong, and turns the Delta into a place with no local stakes." www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/o...

From the National Integrated Drought Information System: "Abysmal" snowpack in Arizona and New Mexico www.drought.gov/drought-stat...

A grim but vital inversion of the federal birth of modern oral history under the FWP. Federal and historian friends, please participate!

NASA: FARMing with data: OpenET launches new tool for farmers and ranchers #cawater #OpenET mavensnotebook.com/2025/03/05/n...

New bill would give Utah’s ‘water agent’ more ‘behind-the-scenes’ power to negotiate outside the state www.sltrib.com/news/environ...

This table details the state-by-state impact a 65% cut at EPA would have on state safe drinking water and clean water grants, as well as EPA Regional staff, including enforcement staff, emergency response staff, and clean water staff. docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

"It's going to significantly impact our operations." Trump administration dramatically cuts staff at water agency in California. From @ianjames.bsky.social www.latimes.com/environment/...

What Josh says x 100. Some of the most impressive marvels of the modern world are not physical constructions but the system-level infrastructure that makes everyday life work, infrastructure that works so well it is often invisible.

Are urban water systems able to put out wildfires? A question @gregspierce.bsky.social and I got A LOT during the recent LA fires. This set of FAQs is our attempt to answer that and many other questions related to water supply infrastructure and wildfire innovation.luskin.ucla.edu/wp-content/u...

I have written a short statement responding to mass firings today of #NOAA / National Weather Service (#NWS) staff (which were concentrated among recent hires as well as highly experienced staff who had recently been promoted). Please see below screenshot & below for full text.

≈Sixty Seconds of Streamside Serenity for Self-Care

Very nice. Thank you. From the first Cadiz EIR fight onwards Simeon's understanding of groundwater systems of the Mojave and Great Basin commanded respect from politically unlikely bedfellows, from ranchers to environmentalists. I never saw him chose a legal ploy that wasn't supported by the science

Wrote about the passing of Simeon Herskovits, who pushed Nevada courts to consider communities and the environment in water law, playing pivotal roles in the Walker Lake Public Trust Doctrine case, opposing the Las Vegas pipeline and more. www.westernwaternotes.com/p/rememberin...

California water allocations announced: _State Water Project to deliver 35% of requested supplies, up from 20%; _Central Valley Project projected to deliver 35% to agricultural districts south of the Delta, more than double last year's initial allocation. www.latimes.com/environment/... #CAwater

I’ve spent the last 8 years working on a book about forever chemicals, or #PFAS, and the chemical industry’s decades-long campaign to cover up their dangers. What I discovered along the way is deeply disturbing, and yet the journey has left me hopeful. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/554198...