Cup and Trade

Author: Ben Grumbles Smart market-based strategies aren’t just for carbon pollution and climate change–they can make a big difference in protecting water supplies and ecosystems. With the right sidebars and safeguards, water quality trading can improve watershed protection, particularly when excess nutrients, sediments, and temperature problems among multiple parties are to blame. Efficient exchanges of [...]

Openly Materialistic

When it comes to water sustainability, materials matter and so does the process of selecting the best, brightest, and greenest of products and services. Take pipes, for instance. Different shapes, sizes, and materials with different strengths and weaknesses are available in the marketplace. My own view is that a “pipes of all types” approach makes [...]

Upstream Winning

Improving and sustaining watersheds and communities always needs some upstream thinking and doing. This year’s 3 winners of the U.S. Water Prize are succeeding in different ways and contexts but all share a willingness to think outside the “box”– whether the box is a county line, a factory fence, or a bureau boundary. The Freshwater [...]

“Cut and Dry”

Federal water budgets have never been as robust as water boosters would like, even during the brief and heady days of 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulation, but things are about to get leaner and meaner. Looming sequestration cuts, fiscal cliffs, and agency “food” fights over scarce federal dollars add up to a bleak, [...]

“One Water” Resolution

I’m not keen on New Year’s Resolutions (especially the ephemeral ones that come and go faster than desert rain, which I happen to love) but 2013 deserves at least one good and lasting Resolution. Here’s mine:  I resolve to partner with individuals and organizations like never before to help advance “One Water” – the concept [...]

Noel Net Loss

As friends and family gather for the holidays, I’m reminded of certain water policy rituals that once played out, like clockwork in December in the nation’s capital, and I’m asking myself this question: Whatever happened to the “no net loss” of wetlands policy? I have clear memories of policy battles waged in December 2002, 2003, [...]

Weatherizing Water

Hurricane (turned Superstorm, turned painful lesson) Sandy underscores some of the basic challenges in the ever-swirling world of water, weather, and climate change. Through it all, water managers must find practical ways to cope with evolving conditions and increasing energy costs, while politicians and policy makers mud wrestle over climate causation, carbon taxes, and cap [...]

Scare City

Water stress can strike fear into the hearts of communities, businesses, and ecosystems but a publicly-supported, scientifically-defended reuse movement can ease the anxiety and pave the way for sustainability even in the face of scarcity. On October 23, 2012, GE released the results of a survey on public attitudes and knowledge levels in the U.S., [...]

Hippie Infrastructure

The greening of gray and the softening of hard has come a long way in the last 40 years, but this “nature-based,” green infrastructure movement still has a ways to go.  It got a boost, though, in September in Washington DC and it’s going to get another big bump in October in Cincinnati Ohio. In [...]

Food for Thought

There’s no better time than now for the American public to appreciate the “water-energy-food nexus,” or as I like to call it, the “liquid triangle of life”. To farmers across the U.S., particularly the Midwest, it’s painfully obvious: The historic drought, sweeping across the land like a silent tsunami, is wreaking economic, environmental, and emotional [...]