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

For those of you who track water adjudications, one of the more interesting ones has been in Idaho . That state has nearly completed the Snake River adjudications much to everyone else's surprise. These are handled a bit differently, obviously, from the New Mexican cases I'm more familiar with, but still - there are lessons to be learned from this approach, I think. What could NM do to speed things up? Certainly the use of geotechnologies has picked up the pace of doing the technical work - but adjudication is not just a mapping problem, it's a legal challenge, and a political morass. More on this matter later, for now, here's the full story link.

A few days ago, I compared the interesting parallels (and differences) between New Mexico and the country of Spain. This time around, it's New Mexico and Bolivia ; here I want to create an opening for analyzing how both entities (again, a state, and a State respectively) have recognized local, customary water traditions. As you will see and appreciate, there are strong material parallels between how irrigators in Bolivia operate and how acequias in New Mexico handle water management and governance. The differences, however, are just as fascinating and have largely to do with how the claims to water are wrapped around cultural identity. My good colleague, Tom Perreault (Syracuse - Geography), wrote about the recent recognition in Bolivia of local "usos y costumbres" with special focus on the national irrigators' movement. Granted, that country has pursued an arguably anti-neoliberal path on water goverance in recent years, as Tom has suggested. But both Bolivia an...

As I hinted a few days ago, there are some remarkable parallels between the historical geographies of water in the country (" S tate") of Spain and the s tate of New Mexico. I credit the information on Spain to a colleague in anthropology at McGill University (call him Ismael ; no, really). See back a couple of posts but Ismael's "Modernizing mountain water" appears in the co-edited volume Water, Place, and Equity (MIT Press, 2008)*, and is focused on the transformation of Pyrenean water use and its governance, largely on the Spanish side. I have put in a coarse table to outline the parallels between Spain's legal history on water and those of New Mexico. Table - NM by author, Spain from Vaccaro 2008 (230) TIME LINE                     New Mexico                        ...

At the last meetings of the New Mexico Acequia Commission (in November), I was asked by several of the Board Members to inquire about the knowledge and background of water judges in my home state of Colorado. I wrote the following e-mail to the water court contact person, who then forwarded this to Judge Kuenhold who presides in the San Luis Valley (Water division 3, based in Alamosa, CO). Basically, this translates to the upper Rio Grande Basin in Colorado ( see the map ).   I attach below the questions I sent on to the " Dividing the Waters " project, which focuses on training and uniting water judges/attorneys to discuss interstate water issues, then I include the Judge's response. If New Mexicans are rightly concerned about "who rules" on water regulations, adjudication, and rules, it's no less disconcerting that there are no statutory requirements for actual water knowledge to be a Colorado water judge. Many have legal background related to water iss...