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 [...]

Meeting the Demand of the CO River Basin by Tapping into the Missouri River

The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) announced this week the release of a four-year study, authorized by Congress and jointly developed by DOI and the seven Colorado River Basin states, that projects water supply and demand imbalances throughout the Colorado River Basin and adjacent areas over the next 50 years. The study also develops [...]

March Madness and the Sweet Six

This busy time of year means more than just the beginning of Spring and the madness of NCAA basketball: It’s a time to commemorate water and its champions locally and globally, including our very own six winners of the U.S. Water Prize. The U.S. Water Alliance (Alliance) created and launched the U.S. Water Prize in [...]

A Call to Farms

As we celebrate the bounty of the season, pitchforks and storm clouds are gathering throughout the country and the nation’s capital over agriculture and water policy and the potential collisions between the two. On the water quantity side, some of the fresh wrangling is over subsidies that distort the real cost of water, ground water [...]

Blue Waves of Cooperation

What’s the proper balance of power between federal and state water agencies? It seems to ebb and flow over time. The U.S. Water Alliance hasn’t taken a position on recent House-passed legislation amending the federal Clean Water Act (CWA), but here’s my personal take on the controversy, as well as suggestions for meaningful progress on [...]

Muddy Waters of the United States

Seekers of regulatory certainty are still singing the blues after the Supreme Court muddied the waters of jurisdiction under the federal Clean Water Act in 2001 and 2006 but don’t blame the Supremes and don’t expect a harmonious solution any time soon. Sometimes we forget but wetlands are at the heart of our country’s natural [...]

Drill, Maybe, Drill!

The friction over “fracking” (specifically hydraulic fracturing for natural gas) underscores the growing need for energy security and environmental sustainability to be in balance rather than in battle and to keep water in mind through it all. Most agree natural gas has a bright future as a “bridge” fuel to cleaner, renewable energy. It makes [...]

Green Chips and Blue Jeans

Water is embedded in just about every product and practice on the blue planet. Professor John Anthony Allan, winner of the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize, and pioneer in “virtual water,” boosted global efforts to see, or at least appreciate, the invisible water running through every day goods and services–from hamburgers to power lines. Two of [...]

Whirled Water Day

March 22 marks another World Water Day, the special day designated by the United Nations General Assembly in 1992 as a time to underscore the value and vulnerability of clean and safe water locally and globally. The heart-wrenching disaster in Japan is a painful reminder of the power of water to flatten neighborhoods. The collapse [...]