“Plans to siphon billions of gallons of groundwater from rural Nevada were tossed out today by the Nevada Supreme Court.” Nevada Supreme Court Rules Against Vegas Water Claim. LasVegasNow.com
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Nevada water pipeline: In jeopardy? Greenspace: Environmental news from California and beyond. LA Times.
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Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He was a Western Watersheds Project Board Member off and on for many years, and was also its President for several years. For a long time he produced Ralph Maughan’s Wolf Report. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He and Jackie Johnson Maughan wrote three editions of “Hiking Idaho.” He also wrote “Beyond the Tetons” and “Backpacking Wyoming’s Teton and Washakie Wilderness.” He created and is the administrator of The Wildlife News.
Comments
Yes, this is great news!
But the evil duo of Pat Mulroy, and Harry Reid bear watching. How much has Mulroy squandered on this? Rather than being a positive force for controlling sprawl and limiting water use?
The Vegas sprawl that has caused the need for so much more water – comes in part from ANOTHER Reid Bill – SNPLMA that put BLM land by Vegas up for sale. These are the land sale funds that are being used by Ely BLM to kill trees and sagebrush that Mulroy considers “competition” for water.
Vegas may re-apply. Hopefully, Reid and his progeny will not be in office to do some twisted new move to aid this water theft.
Remember, too, that it was Harry Reid’s water pipeline corridors, hitched onto one of those hokey Campaign for America’s Wilderness (CAW/PEW) type Wilderness Bills – that mandated the corridors across BLM lands so the Mulroy aquifer mining could happen.
I drove through Las Vegas twice today on my way to Red Rock Canyon and back. It is a strange city. A few blocks from the glitzy strip, it resembles a third world country, both in physical appearance and by the looks of people on the sidewalks. A lot of the people I saw today looked like they just slipped across the border. Plant nurseries had lots of Latino men standing around on the sidewalks hoping for someone to pick them up and offer them a few hours of work. There were people on the street carrying all of their personal belongings in black plastic bags.
In the more recent additions, there are hundreds and hundreds of new expensive homes in gated and walled communities as if the residents are afraid that the people that work in the casinos and in their yards are going to come at night to harm them.
When I drove past the bankrupt Lake Las Vegas Development with it’s brown(can’t afford to water the grass when you can’t pay your bills) golf courses and huge obscene lake, here in the desert, I thought of the water they were going to take from the rest of the state to keep this monstrosity alive. This ruling is great news!
Larry,
It is kind of like Edward Abbey’s predictions come true. Next up Phoenix and Tucson.
kt
After reading your post, I did a little reading about the SNPLMA. It seems that 10% of the money that comes from the sale of these BLM public lands around Las Vegas, goes to fund Pat Mulroy and her Southern Nevada Water Authority. All of us are paying her to steal our public water.
Larry: And support what appears to be a feudal City-State Overlord vision.
Where the hinterlands are sucked dry, plants killed on BLM and Forest lands using those SNPLMA funds or tax dollar “Haz Fuels” funds because they use water – to sustain the wonderful Vegas city-state. And wind farms built in the middle of nowhere – like Spring Valley – in the most biologically rich areas -to provide “green” power for Mulroy to pump water.
The horrific big wind farms are all jostling to get stimulus funds (our tax dollars) as part of the mega-renewables energy scam.
Ed was a wise old coot, a body of contradictions, but loved the land and the wild places. He, Stegner, and Terry Tempest Williams are my favorite writers about the West. but hard to pick these amongst so many others.
Robert Glennon (UofA professor and water expert) latest book, “Unquenchable” deals with Vegas in small degree in the beginning of the book, but moves on to cover water issues across the country. Worth adding to your shelves, along with his earlier book “Water Follies…” which deals with groundwater pumping.
There was a very interesting story in the High Country News several months ago on Phoenix and water, Ralph. I don’t know if you read it ,but it had to do with some archeological diggings exposing some Hohokam irrigation canals that exactly paralleled the current open irrigation canals of Phoenix. The Hohokam disappeared mostly because of water waste, drought and population, and the article wonders if Phoenix is headed the same way.
Water still remains the number one issue in the West; nothing is a close second. And yet, it still plays in this murky world of water districts and courts and ancient laws which make little sense to the general public..or to folks dealing professionally with water issues either, for that matter. There are surely conflicts between water availability and the drive for solar, but there are, as I understand it, two ways to cool the solar arrays, and one of them uses and re-uses water, making it preferrable from that standpoint, but it is also less efficient and costs the utility companies more. How much more…who knows? You think they will open up their books to the PUC or the public? States and the Feds should mandate the use of the water saving technology, and the PUCs should cap the costs that can be passed along to consumers.
An interesting Water Wired. Reporting that Pat Mulroy was at a conference in DC or somewhere – promoting diverting the Mississippi or something – when the SNWA news broke!
And more and more, Mulroy and NAWAPA are being mentioned together.
NAWAPA is the rosetta stone to understanding, at least in part, all theses corridors, xmission lines, gas lines, remote-sited Carlyle Group wind farms, the RES wind farms at China Mountain with its “water storage battery” – and now likely LNG for EXPORT to other continents, too. But back to water:
http://aquadoc.typepad.com/waterwired/2010/01/how-dry-i-am-nevada-supreme-court-rules-against-snwa.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2FFdoQ+%28WaterWired%29