Sibley’s Rivers of Words | the Blog

There continues to be no new information from the ongoing negotiations among the protagonists for the seven states trying to work out a new two-basin management plan for the Colorado River. The Bureau of Reclamation, however, is pressing ahead; it recently went public with its ‘Draft Environmental Impact Statement’ (DEIS) for ‘Post-2026 Operational Guidelines and…

‘Dancing with Deadpool’ – Doesn’t that sound like something a romantic like me would concoct? I was intending for this post to be a follow-up on the last post, laying out my rationale for believing that we have all been ‘romancing the Colorado River’ for a century and a half, with three distinct epochs. But…

A vein of romance runs through every form of human endeavor. – C.J. Blanchard Negotiations among the Magnificent Seven representing the seven states of the Colorado River region begin to resemble the ongoing negotiations between the military and diplomatic representatives for North and South Korea, where negotiations for something beyond an armistice have been going…

The Bureau of Reclamation’s November 11 deadline for the seven states to present a plan for the management of the Colorado River has passed with no white smoke from the chimney – no smoke at all in fact, black or white; the meetings have been so secretive that one wonders if the Magnificent Seven have…

Wonk warning: I’ll be explicating the chart above. If this sort of thing bores you, or just gets you more, not less confused about what’s going on with the river today as the negotiators for post-2026 system management continue to negotiate with a November 11 deadline, then I’d say take a break until next post,…

Hard times in the Colorado River region. A near-average snowpack dissipated into an inflow into Powell Reservoir of only 40 percent of average; dry soils in the headwaters and high deserts, and increased evaporation and plant transpiration in a warming world are taking big tolls. And the negotiators for the seven Basin states, trying to…

We left the Colorado River a couple months ago to explore the Trumpsters’ effort to use the public lands in the river basin to ‘unleash American energy’ and return us to the glorious age of cheap petroleum – and why it’s not happening. At that time, the seven states in the river’s basin were in…

We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. – Journalist Ron Suskind quoting   unnamed George W. Bush advisor in   a 2004 New Yorker essay. Get used to it: I’m probably going to be using that quote at the head of every post here for the near future…

We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.’ That is indeed the way things seem to be sorting out today, in imperial…

Humpty-Dumpty just sat on a wall, But Trumpty-Mumpty started a brawl; And fallout from the brawl Like the fall from the wall Might never go back together at all. I was chastised by a couple readers after the last post: you’re just giving the Trumpty-Mumpty dynamic duo what it wants by focusing on what it…

The old world is dying and a new one is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters. – English translation of a French   paraphrase of a statement by   Italian anarchist Antonio Gramsci Fiddling while Rome burns – that’s what it felt like, thinking about the next blog post on the…

Well, with the fate of constitution democracy in the courts where we know the mills grind slowly (as opposed to the grinders who break things quickly); and with the money frozen for farmers doing well by doing good in water conservation; and neither white smoke nor black smoke arising from the chimneys of the enclaves…