Cracks in the Upper Colorado River Basin wall

Posted by on

People are finally starting to say the quiet parts, the parts so many Upper Basin people have been grumbling about in private, out loud. Via an incredibly important Heather Sackett story:

Colorado Sen. Dylan Roberts, a District 8 Democrat who represents several Western Slope counties, including Eagle, Grand, Garfield, Routt and Summit, asked Colorado’s lead negotiator, Becky Mitchell, whether the people of Colorado should have confidence that negotiations among the seven states that share the Colorado River have put the state in the best possible position. The states have been at an impasse for more than two years without a deal for future management as reservoirs continue to decline to record-low levels.

“My constituents just see fighting and intransigence,” Roberts said. “And it’s concerning to me, especially as a Western Slope lawmaker … that the strategy is just ‘Let’s hire more lawyers; we’re going to court no matter what.’ That doesn’t give me confidence, because I don’t think Colorado fares well when we go to court against Arizona and California and Nevada, throwing our fate to the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Recent Albuquerque monsoon history: dry

Posted by on

While pulling together some data today for our latest Water Matters podcast, I was surprised by the dry streak we’ve been in. The last above average monsoon here was 2018. (Episode posts tomorrow – 6/23 – I’ll try to remember to update the post with a link. Update: the episode)

Also, I’ve been trying to up my data visualization game. For years I’ve had an R->ggplot work flow, doing the analysis in R and using it to generate most of the graphs I post on Inkstain as static image files. New LLM-based tools (I used Claude Code for this one) dramatically reduce the friction and make it possible (I originally wrote “make it easy,” but I’m still getting the hang of the form) to make them pointy-clicky.

Feds stop paying to monitor Santa Fe drinking water source for Los Alamos contaminants

Posted by on

Via Alicia Inez Guzmán at Source New Mexico, we learn that the federal government is no longer paying the cost of monitoring Rio Grande flows at the intake to Santa Fe communities’ Buckman Direct Diversion as part of a joint effort to ensure that contamination from nuclear weapons work at Los Alamos National Laboratory doesn’t get into Santa Fe’s drinking water:

the provision to pay for water sampling was “the stickiest point” of negotiating the MOU’s fifth renewal, said Justin Greene, a Santa Fe County commissioner and former Buckman board chair. The negotiations began the year before, he added, but the Energy Department’s rebuff hardened in 2025, the year the MOU expired. It was also the beginning of the second Trump presidency. 

With the expiration, the rolling $96,000 that once funded annual stormwater sampling by an outside contractor was officially cut off and a new MOU was signed, effective in 2026, without it.

For the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons program, with a budget of something like $4b this year at Los Alamos, the $96k monitoring cost is change in among the couch cushions. I’d even characterize it as couch cushion change in the ~$300m DOE-lab budget for environmental cleanup of all the old messes left over from eight decades of nuclear weapons development.

As friend of Inkstain Kyle Harwood noted, Santa Fe’s drinking water is safe:

There is no risk to the drinking water quality, according to the Buckman’s consulting attorney Kyle Harwood, and the early notification system has continuously operated, even when the MOU expired. But until it can find another source of funding, the Buckman’s three partners plan to cover the costs of sampling for the lab’s contaminants through an ongoing cost-sharing agreement.

It just means that the Santa Fe/Buckman ratepayers will have to come up with the money themselves, rather than the party responsible for the risk picking up the cost.

Quoting Charles Brackett

Posted by on
Shirley MacLaine hands a deck of cards to Jack Lemmon. In black and white.

Shut up and deal.

August 1: Dull day. Spent a good deal of the morning in Howard’s office, interviewing Barbara Stanwyck, a pleasant, heavy-faced girl, very wrong for Sugarpuss…

Screenwriter Charles Brackett, Aug. 1, 1941 diary entry, from SLIDE, A. (Ed.). (2015). “It’s the Pictures That Got Small”: Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood’s Golden Age. Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/slid16708

Of course Stanwyck got the role of the singing, dancing, mobster’s girl Katherine “Sugarpuss” O’Shea in the 1941 screwball comedy Ball of Fire, written by Brackett and Billy Wilder, a role for which she was nominated for an Oscar. Stanwyck’s O’Shea is smart and lovable and very funny. Stanwyck very much made Ball of Fire her movie. Gary Cooper is frankly meh, the seven old guys are priceless, and Stanwyck owns the screen.

Lissa and I have been binge-watching Billy Wilder movies, of which there are many. Wilder cuts across so many interesting categories for us:

  • the intellectual ferment of inter-war Vienna
  • the Central European Jewish immigrant diaspora, and the very American-ness of the outsider take on and contribution to America
  • journalism (Wilder cut his writerly teeth as a young tabloid reporter in Berlin, as I did for a brief stint in L.A.)
  • deep narrative structure (Wilder and his collaborators, including Brackett, were masters)
  • classic era Hollywood cinema

Mostly they’re just fun movies – even at his worst Wilder (and his screenwriting collaborators Charles Brackett and I.A.L. Diamond, along with directors they worked with in the early years, notably Ernst Lubitsch) is a reliable movie night choice. But one of the occupational realities of my life as a writer is the nagging “How did they do that?” The genius of team Wilder deeply rewards attention to this question.

One of the fun bits of the puzzle is the way Wilder himself is an unreliable narrator. Wilder was a talented creator of characters (compare and contrast Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea and her Phyllis Dietrichson, the femme fatale of Double Indemnity), and as Cameron Crowe puts it in the introduction to his book Conversations with Wilder, “Perhaps the greatest character creation of young Billie Wilder … is Billy Wilder himself.”

As a friend who’s been turning me on to the literary form points out, we should always view a memoir’s main character as a literary creation. Wilder never wrote a memoir, but he was never shy about granting interviews, he told great stories and gave great quotes. So plenty of Wilder material to draw on.

That’s why I ended up with Brackett’s diaries on the stack of Wilder books from various libraries currently taking up the corner of my reading chair table. You get a lot of the Wilder-Brackett bickering, and the struggles of life in the studio system, which during the early years involved teams of contract screenwriters, and the loss of control as the writers’ scripts were handed over to producers and directors, and some Byzantine Screen Writers Guild politics. But the most interesting bits are the glimpses of the struggle to figure out how to make the stories work – the driving around trying to find the right derelict mansion for Sunset Boulevard, the casting of Sugarpuss (Lucille Ball was Brackett’s first choice), tailoring of the script once the actors had been signed, the struggles to route around the obstacles posed by the Hays Code, the endless writing and rewriting to create the big story lines and then get them to connect, and then the small pieces of which each big story line must be built to also work.

It’s the delightful messiness of the process that intrigues me, compared to the movie as we know it, frozen in permanence, the difference between the chaos of creation and the picture-perfect final product. The original idea for Sunset Boulevard – a comedy with Mae West? The epic closing scene of the Wilder-Diamond masterpiece The Apartment. Should C.C. Baxter watch out the window as Miss Kubelick runs up the stairs? Should he throw open the door and she kisses him? They pondered all of those before ending up at a game of gin rummy:

C.C. Baxter: I love you, Miss Kubelik.

Fran Kubelik: Three… queen.

C.C. Baxter: You hear what I said, Miss Kubelik? I absolutely adore you.

Fran Kubelik: Shut up and deal…

Of course Brackett couldn’t see Stanwyck as Sugarpuss O’Shea, standing as he was in the midst of the act of creation. Lucille Ball? Things might have turned out very differently. But they didn’t.

Some good Colorado River news, some bad news, and a request for help

Posted by on

A grab bag from my friends and colleagues working on Colorado River issues….

The good news

From friend of Inkstain Karl Flessa (the guy who helped get me started thinking about the Colorado River Delta), a new analysis concluding that despite the terrible hydrology and political difficulties, environmental restoration work in the delta is working:

The Pulse Flow of 2014 demonstrated the feasibility of the restoration effort. Subsequent creation, irrigation and maintenance of 559 hectares (1,381 acres) of riparian vegetation attracted birds and other wildlife. Deliveries to the river channel raised water tables, supported existing vegetation and increased the length of the flowing river. Local communities have benefitted from
recreational, educational and job opportunities.

The bad news

From my Wilbury’s colleagues, based on Jack Schmidt’s indefatiguable work on Colorado River reservoir storage:

In 2026 and for only the third time in the 21st century, there was no accumulation, and no recovery, of total Basin live storage during the snowmelt season. Nor was there any accumulation or recovery of total live storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead during the 2026 snowmelt season.

A request for help

And from friends of Inkstain Jason Robison, Matt McKinney, and Doug Kenney, a request for your input on a survey of folks attitudes toward the Colorado River Post-2026 management process.

“big messy community conversations”

Posted by on
Bicycle leaning against a concrete-lined irrigation canal with sand hills in the background.

Arenal Canal, Atrisco in Albuquerque’s near South Valley. June 2026. By John Fleck

I made a brief stop at a dry Rio Grande main channel this morning, around the Central Avenue Bridge, before I pointed the Space Ghost southwest into the South Valley. The Arenal Canal, which hugs the sand hills on the valley’s western edge, was flowing, but just 25 cubic feet per second. 100 cfs is typical in the Arenal at this time of year, according to the MRGCD-USBR dataset.

I had intended to ride down Foothill, a “comfort food” ride that mostly hugs the Arenal, which mostly hugs the sandhills, but it turned into a “What happens if I turn here?” kind of day instead.

I am obsessed with green these days, the vegetation kind of green, as the river and the ditches go dry in a year that, by one measure (current flow into New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley at Otowi) is the driest since we started measuring the river’s flow in 1895.*

One of the best questions I got at Tuesday’s book launch talk at Bookworks (did I mention Bob Berrens and I have a new book out this week) was from a guy who asked what climate change would mean to the future of our community. My answer was annoyingly simple: Our community will be less green.

Map of Albuquerque with satellite data showing strip of green along the river corridor.

The distribution of Albuquerque’s green. (color represents evapotranspiration on heavily vegetated pixels). Map by me.

That’s what we do with water. Our indoor water is largely recycled, put back into the Rio Grande to support a riparian ecosystem and downstream users. The consumptive share of our water use is applied to landscapes to make our city green.

The map is one of my experiments in using satellite data to get a better handle on how we’re actually using water. I’m increasingly frustrated by a discourse focused on water agencies. As I put it in a thing I’m writing with some colleagues, agencies don’t use water, people do. Many Albuquerque neighborhoods on the valley floor get water from multiple sources – municipal pipes, domestic wells, and ditches. Lots of homes have access to all three.

This particular map uses data from the OpenET project, focusing on heavily vegetated pixels and calculating how much water they use. The details of the numbers are less important than the overall story it suggests: some parts of our community are a lot greener than others.

The near South Valley, the neighborhood I rode this morning, is an interesting example. Home values and median household income (US Census data yada yada) are lower than the county average. And compared to the much more affluent neighborhoods to the north (Los Ranchos de Albuquerque and the rest of Albuquerque’s North Valley), this part of the South Valley is a lot less green. But there was a lot of shade for me to ride beneath as I drained the two water bottles I carried. Lots of tree-lined ditches to ride to beat the heat.

The map tells this story. This part of the South Valley is one of the greener parts of the metro area.

big messy community conversations

Sarena Ulibarri, one of my UNM Press peeps, captured this in the quote she shared on Mastodon after the Bookworks event (sorry, I can’t figure out how to link directly to a Mastodon post, I’m not good at Internet):

Happy Book Birthday to RIBBONS OF GREEN by @jfleck, which should be essential reading for anyone interested in the complex relationships between cities and nature, the ways that collective action can help us adapt to climate change, and the “big messy community conversations” we need to have to create policies that actually work.

The quote – “big messy community conversations” – is the key bit here. There’s a bunch of regulatory apparatus and political and legal tools that needs to come into play – well metering orders, (“Please,” he pleaded to his friends at the Office of State Engineer, “domestic wells, OK?”), potential constraints on municipal pumping, AWRM (“Active Water Resource Management,” we actually say it “A-worm”), that sort of thing. Whatever we do will be driven in large part by our Rio Grande Compact obligation to our downstream neighbors, either by proactive measures before we end up in court, or by reactive measures after we get sued for stiffing our neighbors in southern New Mexico and Texas for the water we owe them. Either way, the result will be that we use less water, and stuff is less green. The question is where?

What I’m interested in, what I was thinking about and trying to talk about as I sat before that delightful audience Tuesday night at Bookworks, is the big messy community conversation we need to have about what we desire for our community’s future, how we get beyond the legal formalisms of the whole thing and find a way to talk about our desired future conditions for our community, and how we go about sharing the water.

* n.b. By another measure – total flow to date past Otowi – it’s the third driest year in history, behind 1904 and 1977.

Colorado River Basin – new report from my colleagues on the implications of running on empty

Posted by on

I’ve been on a “Colorado River sabbatical” of late, but I took a peek last week at Reclamation’s latest 24-month study. Holy moly things have gotten bad since the last time I looked!

Those not on sabbatical already know all of this, but to keep Lake Powell above a surface elevation of 3,500 feet, Reclamation is:

  • increasing releases out of Flaming Gorge on the Wyoming-Utah border
  • dropping releases out of Lake Powell to 6 million acre feet this year

Even with those two “hail Mary” moves, Lake Mead is projected in the “most probable” scenario to drop to elevation 1,020 by summer 2027. Under the “minimum probable” forecast, Mead drops all the way to elevation 1,008 in 2027.

We are on the brink, as a group of my colleagues explains in a new analysis out this morning (Monday June 1, 2026), of a system crash:

If the Colorado River Basin (Basin) experiences another dry year, similar to Water Year 2025, it is likely that reasonably accessible storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead would be mostly depleted, even if consumptive uses and losses are at or near historic lows. Run-of-the-river operations would shortly ensue. This would be an outcome with devastating consequences.

That’s from the latest report from the team of Castle-Schmidt-Kuhn-Sorensen-Tara, the Traveling Wilburys of the Colorado River. I’ve been on “sabbatical”, so I didn’t work on this one with my friends. (The joke is that I’m busy catching up on old movies, which is at least partly true, did you know Billy Wilder made, like, 50 movies?)

Even a wet year, my friends conclude, would only provide a short reprieve from the need to significantly reduce consumptive use.

Building on a similar analysis done last September (I was a co-author on that one), the authors attempt to overcome one of the shortcomings of the traditional Colorado River accounting systems, which is to treat any water above “dead pool” as usable storage. This is not the case, with clear do-not-cross lines in the reservoirs that are maintained for technical reasons well above the bottom, defined by my colleagues as…

“realistically accessible storage” (hereafter, “RAS”) in the major reservoirs. RAS is the water available above protected elevations determined by Reclamation. These levels are 3500 feet in Lake Powell, and 975 feet in Lake Mead. “Active storage” is a term widely used in water resource engineering and refers to all the stored water that is above “dead pool” that could theoretically be released. This is the metric of storage reported by Reclamation in the 24-Month Study. Forecasts of active storage may not be fully illuminating, however, because Reclamation currently intends to protect higher levels in the reservoirs.

One of the reasons for my “sabbatical” is, frankly, an agonized frustration with the abject failure of Colorado River governance at the basin scale, and a desire to turn my attention to the local level, which is where the problem solving responsibility seems to rest right now. Each community needs to be having a serious conversation right now about the specifics of its Colorado River water supply, and how it intends to go about using less. Blaming other people for using too much isn’t particularly useful at this point, we seem to have chosen to hand that set of questions (the rule-based part of “who is entitled to how much”) over to the courts, and who knows what that process holds. We know the answer for everyone is “use less water”, and each community needs to be getting on with that conversation.

The full report is here.

Bob and I got our pictures in the paper!

Posted by on
Newspaper article entitled "A River Runs Through it," sitting on top of a map of Albuquerque

I made the hometown paper. Bob, too.

Going through our chaotic collection of old maps at the H-F house, I found a treasure: 2003 BLM map of Albuquerque and vicinity that I’d used to mark a bunch of bike rides with highlighter. Pre-GPS era. I’ve been at this for a long time.

My favorite social media response to the announcement of our new book’s release came from old Internet pal Kim Hannula:

This sounds like the jfleckiest book possible. (Or it would if there are recommended bike rides at the end of each chapter.)

My response:

The bike rides are there, but kinda hiding out, you have to know where to look. 🙂

Ribbons of Green: the Rio Grande and the Making of Modern Albuquerque is about a river and a city, the endless interplay between the two. (To learn more, join us Tuesday at Bookworks!) It’s not a bike riding book. Except it sorta is?

I gotta be honest, I’m nervous! Writing a book is an act of tremendous hubris – thinking one has something sufficiently worthwhile to say that people should spend their money and time with one’s ideas.

To calm my nerves, I met up this morning with my trusty bike riding and book research field work buddy at Albuquerque’s Old Town Plaza. Book or not, our Sunday bike rides anchor my week. We rode west to Gabaldon Drive, one of the first places where we began the “bike riding as book research field work” schtick – maybe 2019? I had an old aerial photo from the 1929 floods, and we were trying place the river’s un-leveed 1929 path on the modern landscape. Today, Gabaldon is half a mile from the river channel. Back in 1929, it was at the river’s edge.

Thus began a practice that has served me well. First, moving back and forth between old maps and modern urban structures, and doing it on bikes, has been central to my understanding of the landscape I’m trying to write about. I can feel the subtle ups and downs of a valley floor shaped by the river long before we built stuff on top of the sediments the Rio Grande laid down. I can feel the old twisty streets of village life, and the overlay of grids as sequential waves of urbanity swept over the landscape.

Second, it’s a blast. At age 67, riding bikes still triggers little kid “let’s go on an adventure!” feels.

We rode up through Duranes and picked up the Duranes Lateral, one of the old community acequias dating to olden times that still thread the valley floor. The Duranes is today a suburban ditch, and it’s slow going, often slowing down to walking pace so as not to alarm the locals out for their Sunday walk. The ditch network is the best way to ride bikes through Albuquerque, but it’s a shared space, and we try to respect the locals.

Stopped for lunch under one of the big old cottonwoods up on the north side of Dietz Farm, a branch fell down and didn’t hit us. (We’ve got some fun cottonwood business in the book, set just down the ditch from our lunch stop. The Duranes is in the book!) A mom and her young son walked past, headed for one of the flowing ditches with their fishing poles. Thick places.

As we turned to head back south, it was starting to heat up, so we switched onto roads – faster for the trip home to beat the heat. Until we saw the open gate. It was on the Griegos Lateral, but a stretch we’d not ridden because the gate was always closed. A talk with one of the ditch walkers confirmed that we could get out on the downstream end – they explained that we wanted the bigger of the two holes in the fence. Local knowledge. Place. That’s the practice.

2026-05-19: Federal managers increase release for the silvery minnow

Posted by on
Daily streamflow at the Rio Grande at Albuquerque USGS gage, comparing 2026 flows with historical percentiles and medians from 1965 to present. The 2026 flow line stays below the historical median throughout spring and drops sharply in May, approaching zero by late May, while typical historical flows rise toward a May–June snowmelt peak of several thousand cubic feet per second.

Dropping when it should be rising: Flow at Albuquerque’s Central Avenue Bridge, May 2026

Federal water managers yesterday (May 18, 2026) began pushing a pulse of water through New Mexico’s rapidly drying Middle Rio Grande to try to encourage the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow to spawn.

From a note sent ’round to the Bureau’s water management list yesterday by Carolyn Donnelly, water operations supervisor for the bureau’s Albuquerque Operations Office:

Due to the record low snowpack and well above normal temperatures in March, the Rio Grande did not have a typical spring flow increase. That type of spring flow increase is what triggers the Rio Grande silvery minnow to spawn, and without it, the silvery minnow spawn has been minimal this year. Because 2026 is the third poor hydrologic year in a row, silvery minnow numbers are concerningly low.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service therefore asked the Bureau of Reclamation to use its leased San Juan – Chama water to create a brief higher flow through Albuquerque, hoping to trigger a more robust silvery minnow spawn. Crews will be out in the river this week collecting silvery minnow eggs to provide to hatcheries for later augmentation and broodstock.

Flows at Albuquerque’s Central Avenue Bridge have been hovering around 10 cubic feet per second. The river’s managers bumped the release out of Cochiti Dam at the head of the valley by 250 cfs yesterday. (The increase actually started upstream at Abiquiu Reservoir Sunday.) The water being released was imported from the Colorado River Basin via the San Juan-Chama diversions in the mountains of southern Colorado, then leased by the USBR from San Juan-Chama contractors not using their full allotment.

The inordinate mental cost of writing the preceding paragraph at 5:37 a.m. reminded me of the complexity. “The Bureau increased”? “The Army Corps of Engineers increase”? USFWS? SJC? And what happens as the water passes through the system? It’s passing a bunch of Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (a local agency) diversions, which will have to be managed to keep water in the main channel for the fish. Stunningly polycentric, this system.

Or maybe I just need to finish my second cup of coffee. The 2026 water year is testing a lot of our mental and emotional faculties, and the chemicals we use to manage them. It’s a good thing weed is now legal in New Mexico.

Why our ribbons are still green, but with a dry river at their heart

Posted by on
Tree-lined drainage ditch, with dirt roads on either side, and rusty well head labeled "City #3"

City Well #3, monitoring groundwater in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque.

I’ve been riding the last few weeks down around the Rio Grande and Central Avenue in Albuquerque. I’m trying to make sense of Albuquerque’s relationship with a drying Rio Grande.

One of the rides followed some twisting single-track trail between the river and Tingley Beach, a city park built in the 1930s. Tingley Beach replaced the old swimming holes lost when Albuquerque first built the levees and drains that today line the river through the city.

I walked the trails’ twistiest parts, to better enjoy the cool of the woods and not alarm the dog walkers and bird walkers. Collective action at the scale of community requires owning the differences among the relationships we all have with these public spaces. Our values sometimes compete and conflict, and an old man zooming on a gravel bike didn’t really mix with the others’ peaceful pace.

The bosque is green, with the sounds of birds I could not name. (One of the walkers, a birder, humored me when I asked by naming the bird making each call, but her demeanor suggested she would prefer I let her bird in peace).

When I cut through thickets on the little footpaths out to the river, mostly made by the unhoused seeking shelter, I saw a Rio Grande nearly dry. Flow through Albuquerque right now is the driest at this point in the year since 1972.

institutions and community values

We, as a community, have done a remarkable job of preserving the riparian corridor between the levees as a public, quasi-natural, widely accessible urban park. It has a paved multi-use trail the length of the city, 15 miles of grade-separated loveliness, with access points to the woods and the river along most of that length. A little zigging and zagging adds another 10 miles to that. It’s glorious. Levee riding is the best.

Motivated by my co-author Bob Berrens’ thinking about the nature and role of institutions, with our lodestars Elinor Ostrom and Daniel Bromley as methodological guides, we tried in Ribbons of Green to piece together the evolution of the institutions by which we have managed Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande, in the process enabling the very existence of the thing today we know as “Albuquerque.” Lots of chicken-and-egg going on in this book.

The result is a historical narrative that gives me the breathing room to make sense of the contradiction at the heart of last week’s bike ride – a beloved, well tended bosque, and a river in its heart going dry. How can such a contradiction exist?

the Oxbow and the creation of Rio Grande state park

Our chapter on the evolution of Albuquerque’s rising environmental consciousness is anchored on the 1970s political fight over an old stranded river meander known today as “the Oxbow,” located on the west side of the river at the base of the bluffs just upstream from St. Pius High School.

Pinned between levees built in the 1930s to eliminate the river’s “menace,” the Rio Grande was largely forgotten by the community save those occasions when the river rose up and breached the levees.

By the 1970s, a rising environmental consciousness, a shift in community values, began to change the relationship. There were calls for park-like river access, and efforts to treat the emerging riverside bosque as a thing of value to the people who lived around it and of value for its own sake. The storytelling political crisis, the moment we use in our narrative, is a battle over the Oxbow, as water managers tried to drain an “inefficient” use of scarce water and community members called for a more expansive value that included the birds and the fish and the frogs and the cattails dependent on that water as an efficiency of a different sort.

By 1983, the politics had crystallized around state legislation designating the land between the levees as Rio Grande state park. The process through which the institution emerged is crucial to understand. Shifting community values were codified in legislative actions involving state and local governments.

Local values, reified through local institutions.

The resulting structure of governance we created has become a framework for the management of the bosque. We have delightfully engaged public conversations about trails and tree thinning and fire prevention, with roles under the legal institutional structure for the city and the county and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District and more. It’s not that the framework compels answers. We argue, and disagree! It’s that it provides a structure for our arguments over competing and conflicting values and desired future conditions. It is ours.

the Endangered Species Act and the Rio Grande silvery minnow

Compare that framework with the framework for flows in the river itself. There, the institutional framework is the Endangered Species Act, a federal law passed in 1973.

In August 1994, the federal government declared the Rio Grande silvery minnow “endangered,” triggering a process that continues today to guide management decisions about keeping water in the river to keep this specific species of fish alive. This is the institutional framework that governs flows in the Rio Grande through Albuquerque – not a product of local values and deliberation, but instead those values offloaded onto a federal law for their pursuit and protection. From our book:

The legal and policy framework around the Endangered Species Act meant that community values were not the issue. It didn’t matter whether the people of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley cared about the minnow. Unlike saving the Oxbow or creating Rio Grande State Park, preserving the minnow did not require building public support and political coalitions. Once the Endangered Species Act listing elevated the minnow into the public consciousness, scholars looking for it found evidence that the public valued the minnow and a flowing river to keep it alive. Still, it was not public support that drove the resulting management process; instead, the legal ins and outs of the Endangered Species Act and the web of federal funding and authorities became the arena of action.

The footnote behind that “scholars looking for it found evidence” is a link to an amazing body of work by Robert P. Berrens, my Ribbons of Green co-author. His research showed clear evidence that community values did, in fact, support efforts to save the minnow and maintain a flowing river. The problem was that the arena of action was the bizarrely bureaucratic and litigious Endangered Species Act process rather than the sort of robust community discussion that led the creation of Rio Grande State Park.

That difference echoes today, with a lovely maintained bosque for my bike ride, and a main river channel going dry because the Endangered Species Act by itself has proven insufficient to keep water in the river’s main channel.

the time shift of ushering a book into the world

The time shift imposed by the gap between writing a book and the book’s emergence into the world is weird. Bob Berrens and I crept into the decision to write what became Ribbons of Green nearly six years ago, sitting on Bob’s porch, and my porch, and walking our neighborhood during those awful pandemic months of 2020. (Walking and yakking is central to our practice.) We did the bulk of the writing in 2023, with significant rewriting/polishing in 2024 and ’25, though the underlying research and conversation is an ongoing process.

With the book about to emerge into the world (June 2 at Bookworks in Albuquerque, y’all, come join us!), I’ve been thinking with a sharp new focus on Albuquerque and its relationship with the Rio Grande. The river is raising very different questions in 2026 than it did in 2023, when we did the bulk of the writing. It was a wet year. We wrote about overbanking and “flood ops”. But the central questions are unchanged: what is the institutional mix we’ve inherited, why does it have the shape it has, and is it sufficient to meet the challenges of the future?

Watching as the river again goes dry through the New Mexico’s largest city while the communities that flank it continue to pull water out of the river to maintain the green spaces that many of us so clearly value puts a sharp focus on those questions.

That’s the tradeoff that I’m focused on these days. We have less water, there will be less green – less water diverted into irrigation ditches, pumped from the poorly counted and completely unquantified domestic wells on the valley floor, hoovered up from Albuquerque’s deep aquifer and piped to my house to keep the little larkspur meadow beside my driveway green (tiny, it’s tiny!). Do we have the right institutional mix to make good choices not simply about which agency uses less water, but what we value, what we would like to keep, and what we must give up?