
The Disappearing Colorado River - sasvari
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-disappearing-river
======
Stratoscope
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.

[http://www.inventionandtech.com/content/lake-
mistake-0](http://www.inventionandtech.com/content/lake-mistake-0) \- Click
the printer friendly link for a one-page view - and I wish this had the
pictures that were in the original print version.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea)

~~~
Loughla
One of the better documentaries I've seen is Plagues and Pleasures on the
Salton Sea. It goes into the history, adds the best type of humans to the mix
(the kind that live near the Salton Sea), and is narrated by John Waters; I
would really suggest you check it out.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagues_%26_Pleasures_on_the_Sa...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagues_%26_Pleasures_on_the_Salton_Sea)

~~~
sehr
> the kind that live near the Salton Sea

The Slab City folks?

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ghshephard
Excellent write up - the newyorker has been knocking it out of the park
lately. I particularly like this nuance:

 _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)._

As well - the fact that conservation, can actually be _negative_ \- this
article is full of all sorts of nuance you can get when you let a writer
actually spend time, and do the research:

 _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._

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phkahler
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.

~~~
bane
Welcome to long-form articles.

If leisurely reading is too much of a strain, might I suggest the following?:

[http://www.tools4noobs.com/summarize/](http://www.tools4noobs.com/summarize/)

[http://freesummarizer.com/](http://freesummarizer.com/)

[http://helpfulpapers.com/summarizer-
tool/](http://helpfulpapers.com/summarizer-tool/)

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pimlottc
There was a similar piece in the NYTimes just over a month ago regarding the
Rio Grande:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9368374](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9368374)

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kat
Watch Delta Dawn, its a great video on paddle boarding the Colorado.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot3059iwiWo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot3059iwiWo)

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bennesvig
I just watched an incredibly moving video about traveling down the Colorado
river: [https://vimeo.com/126544483](https://vimeo.com/126544483)

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rconti
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).

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.

[https://vimeo.com/112762616](https://vimeo.com/112762616)

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jonah
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.

[1] [http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/22/travel/dead-sea-bill-weir-
twl/...](http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/22/travel/dead-sea-bill-weir-
twl/index.html)

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brc
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.

[http://www.amazon.com/Wet-Desert-Novel-Gary-
Hansen/dp/097935...](http://www.amazon.com/Wet-Desert-Novel-Gary-
Hansen/dp/097935210X)

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johngalt
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.'

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_v._California](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_v._California)

~~~
meatysnapper
Which makes no sense, because how hard would it be to convert some of the
seawater to drinking water?

~~~
fooey
desalination is very hard

and even harder to get rid of the waste brine

~~~
jcranmer
Not so much hard as it is extremely energy-intensive and therefore expensive.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
Very true. But why not put up a few square miles of solar arrays in the
Southern California desert to power it?

Desalination is an activity well suited to an intermittent power source. Need
more water? Just build another plant and a few more square miles of solar
cells.

It might be expensive, but it would certainly be a lot more useful than
Governor Moonbeam's high speed train from nowhere to nowhere.

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afarrell
I believe this is true of a few rivers. It was of the Indus last I checked
google maps.

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a8da6b0c91d
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?

~~~
vinceguidry
US population is growing, but only because of immigration. The birth rate was
at 1.88 per woman and falling, well below replenishment. We're growing at .7%
per year, somewhat below the world average.

Domestic food production is rising much faster than population is, causing
rising exports. Imports are going up as well, due to increased appetite for
variance in our diets.

You must've missed the memo. What's going to be the big problem in the medium
term is de-population, not overpopulation. We're going to find our workforce
resembling Japan's in 30 or so years unless we overcome our political
resistance to immigration. We should be begging Mexico to send their best and
brightest over here.

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
Without the 1965 immigration act U.S. population was on a course to
permanently level out at a quite sustainable ~230 million level. Immigration
levels of recent decades clearly play a roll in suppressing native fertility
to below replacement levels. If the problem really was not enough population,
it is actually not very difficult to pursue policies that increase native
fertility.

Japan is way over-populated. There is a myth that they face some sort of
crisis as they deliberately pursue policies that bring population to
sustainable levels. This is actually mostly immigration lobbyists in the west
shrieking. Japan is being sensible and will be fine. Certain elements hate the
Japanese example.

