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

This post has much to do with an upcoming visitor to the Colorado College. In September, our so-called block 1 at the college, we'll have William (Bill) deBuys on campus, to discuss his latest book " A Great Aridness " (2011, Oxford U Press). The point of the book, as I read it and re-read it this summer, is to survey how different parts of the larger region we call the Southwest will cope under forecasted (or actually-occurring) climate changes. Surface water, forest fires, endangered species, are all grist for the mill in A Great Aridness, as Bill travels parts of the Southwest and talks to scientists working closely on these topics. The relevance in the first two classes I'll teach this year, Political Ecology of the Southwest (block 1), and Introduction to Global Climate Change (block 2), is fairly obvious. The first block, the political ecology class, is really a thematically-rotating focused seminar on various regional issues. Apart from a core text on polit...