Unsettled Waters: A blog on water rights in the American West

Just a quick announcement of a "blog break" because of upcoming travel to Japan. It's an academic trip focused on "Nature & Environment in Japan" so I'll likely have some good comparative (water) materials to share when I return to writing. It's a whirlwind trip, too, starting from Tokyo, to Kyoto, to Hiroshima, and we end up in Minamata (as in Minamata Bay, yes), before returning to Tokyo for two final days. I hope to check out the irrigation systems and get some cursory understanding in person about their management institutions. More later, and thanks for your understanding.   Soredawa, mata!

OK folks - for anyone even stumbling on to this blog, I need your opinion on an appropriate book title should this set of interests on adjudication, acequias, water governance be turned into a larger volume. So the titles to the right are the "main" portion of the title, probably followed by some combination of water, democracy, governance, adjudication, etc... but in New Mexico. What do you think?

This post takes its inspiration from my good colleague and fellow geographer Tim Forsyth. His book, Critical Political Ecologies (2003, Routledge) is an under-utilized resource in most natural and social science disciplines, probably because it attempts to address and bridge both big groups. But a number of recent stories, in the press and across the blogosphere, have prompted me to use his 2003 concept of "environmental orthodoxy," to address stories about water. Basically, the concept is simple: an environmental orthodoxy (EO) represents the 'dominant conventional wisdom' on a process we think we understand. So, as one example, how about the term " desertification ." Does this mean the spread of sand dunes, or generally the decline of vegetative life-forms from larger tree-like species to scrubbier shrubs? It depends on the user and the point of the author or document, but its range of use is, let's just say, generously wide and flexible. So here go...

Feliz dia de San Isidro! Get ready for a lot of links and tenuous ties -- A series of stories and posts for those of you tracking the future of water use, consumption, and pricing schemes. Many of my fellow aquabloggers make a big deal about whether water is either a commodity or a human right; depending on how "Chicago-school" you are, your own reaction probably varies from "of course you pay for it" to "of course everyone should have access to water as a right." I won't critique positions (yet) but will offer this set of narratives and resources. Try this paper ( link ) for a perspective on this right to water language; alternatively you can find a number of posts on this issue from the Hayekian perspective at Aguanomics , a recent post is  here . The problem with this kind of rhetoric (price it or "make it a right") is that it stays at the binary level (yes/no, black/white, right/commodity). Are there really only two choices to make here?...

Please see Aquadoc's recent post about groundwater law, marketing, and water use and the problems of jurisprudence when dealing with water below the surface. Is this our equivalent of a hydrologic derivative? Read on...