"Joe McCue thought he had found a desert paradise when he bought one of the new stucco houses sprouting in the granite foothills of Rio Verde, Ariz. There were good schools, mountain views and cactus-spangled hiking trails out the back door. Then the water got cut off."
Water has always been a precious commodity in the western states. Now, with rapid population growth and a drying climate, the way this resource is shared and distributed is becoming more contentious across the region. Freelance journalist Jennifer Oldham talks about the tensions between supply and demand and how to drill down into water rights laws and policies.
"A U.S. judge serving as special master in the legal battle over management of the Rio Grande, one of North America’s longest rivers, has cleared the way for a proposed settlement to be made public."
"In the increasingly dry Southwest, drought and climate change pose a challenge for developers, who need to find creative ways to provide water supply to new communities."
"The Arizona Department of Water Resources this week put a limit on the amount of land that can be watered, designating the Hualapai Valley as an irrigation non-expansion area. That means anyone who hasn’t farmed more than 2 acres there during the past five years can’t."
"[New Mexico] officials on Tuesday released a draft permit that includes tougher provisions for the U.S. government to meet if it wants to continue dumping radioactive waste from decades of nuclear research and bomb-making in the New Mexico desert."
"An environmental group on Monday petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help reintroduce the jaguar to the Southwest, where it roamed for hundreds of thousands of years before being whittled down to just one of the big cats known to survive in the region."
When U.S. communities become unlivable due to climate change impacts, can residents count on government relocation assistance — and are those most in need of help actually getting it? Those questions kickstarted a year-long investigation led by three high-powered journalism organizations. Now they’re sharing their reporting resources toolkit and inviting other journalists to widen the coverage with more local stories.
"Most Hopi grow corn with only the precipitation that falls on their fields, but two decades of drought have some of them testing the waters of irrigation and hoping they can preserve other customs with their harvests."
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