January Bird List: the Bewick’s Wren
I think of our backyard as a little ecosystem, but like most such ecosystems in our 21st century world, it’s impossible to think about them without understanding the effects of human interventions, both accidental and intentional. We’ve got a pond, a metal stock tank Lissa gave me for my 40th birthday. Cattails found their way [...]
Is Desal the Answer?
In addition to New Mexico’s nascent efforts at desalinating brackish groundwater to provide municipal and industrial supplies, there’s serious conversation right now in Arizona. I’ve had this story about recent sitting in my “think about this issue” pile for the last week. It’s an account of recent state legislative testimony from Karen Smith of the [...]
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Drying of the Southwest
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, a story (sub/ad req.) about new research suggesting that, in the past, the jet stream moved north and what is now the southwestern U.S. dried out when the world was warmer: For 45,000 years, the drips built stalactites and stalagmites in Fort Stanton Cave. The minerals in the rocky deposits [...]
Desal Project Moving Forward
Officials in Sandoval County, the suburban-rural region to the north of Albuquerque’s metro area, are moving ahead with plans to build a plant to desalinate brackish groundwater, my ABQJournal colleague Rosalie Rayburn reports (sub/ad req?): Sandoval County officials are forging ahead with plans for a desalination plant despite engineering, waste disposal and funding challenges. County [...]
Inkstain FAQ: What’s With the Easy-Do Parties Lady?
I’ve always wanted it to be a “frequently asked question” here on Inkstain, but to be honest, no one’s ever expressed any curiosity whatsoever about the Easy-Do Parties Lady who has graced my blog lo these many years. But you should have asked, right? She’s the cover gal on “Easy-Do Parties Electrically,” a 36-page recipe [...]
Test Post
Doing maintenance on the blog. This is a test post. Nothing to see here. Move along. Doing maintenance on the blog. This is a test post. Nothing to see here. Move along. Doing maintenance on the blog. This is a test post. Nothing to see here. Move along. Doing maintenance on the blog. This is [...]
On Moving Water
Earlier this month, Henry Brean described Pat Mulroy’s bold proposal: The general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority said now may be the time to take a serious look at a decades-old idea of capturing floodwater from the Mississippi River and using it to recharge the massive groundwater aquifer beneath the Central Plains. In [...]
Vegas Water Rights Invalidated
One of the problems with courts deciding important political or policy questions on procedural grounds is that the substantive issues remain unresolved. Instead, we get more process. Such, it seems, is the case with today’s decision by the Nevada Supreme Court to invalidate Las Vegas’s applications for rights to fill its urban pipeline with rural [...]
Colorado’s “80/20 Rule”
Reading slides from a presentation by Colorado River Water Conservation District general counsel Peter Fleming, I ran across a rule of thumb governing water politics there, the “80/20 rule”: 80 percent of the water is west of the continental divide, and 20 percent is east. For population, the numbers are reversed. This seems a useful [...]
Cue Mulholland Reference: Trash-Talking Water on the Upper Colorado
You know you’ve reached a milestone in a western water war of words when the aggrieved party invokes the name of William Mulholland. Such is the case today in discussions over a proposal to pipe a gobzillion acre feet of water across the continental divide to the growing cities in Colorado’s front range. And it’s [...]
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