From the newspaper this morning a column (sub/ad req) on my frustration with the disconnect between the Obama administration’s soaring rhetoric about public information and transparency and the gritty reality faced by those in the trenches trying to get public information: With the arrogance of a federal agency that has become accustomed to a lack …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The FOIA’s in the Mail’ »
I love this picture of what I can only assume are three rascals defying their mothers and swimming in the New River, in the Imperial Valley of Southern California in 1905. The New River, in the incarnation seen here, was formed when the Colorado River ate through a poorly built intake structure and chewed up …
On the Public Record, the California water blogger, is his/her usual pithy self in response to a truly awful Sacramento Bee editorial about the cost of cleaning up its sewage. The problem is ammonia in Sacramento’s sewage, which causes havoc downstream. The Bee’s argument (really, I am not making this up) is that if people …
On my regular drive home, there’s a Red Roof Inn (and Suites!) by the freeway with a big sign advertising its price. It’s typically $49.99 (often $59.99 weekends) for a room. But during our annual Balloon Fiesta in October, when the town fills up with tourists, the price typically goes up to $89.99 or $99.99. …
Out here in the inland arid western United States, water management is complicated by the convoluted question of what happens to the water after we “use” it. Sometimes it’s used up. Sometimes we put it back, in a way that allows others to use it. Regular Inkstain readers, all three of you, will recognize this …
I’ve got the sad honor today of writing an obituary for Cliff Crawford, the retired University of New Mexico biologist for whom the word “beloved” carries only a fraction of the baggage that it should. Cliff’s the dean of the dean of the bosque biologists, a group who study and love the riparian strip along …
In search of the juniper titmouse and random desert wrens, I headed up the Domingo Baca trail in the foothills above Albuquerque this morning. As is the case with most of the little canyons on the west face of the Sandias, there’s a spring near the bottom of Domingo Baca Canyon. The tilt of the …
Continue reading ‘Water in the Desert: Domingo Baca Canyon’ »
Without pack animals and before fueled machinery, the ability of a human to carry food placed a fundamental constraint on economic integration across large distances. Over any significant distances, a human would have to eat all the food they could carry, leaving none left for trade. Trade of small, high value items could go on …
In an interview over at Grist, Brad Udall reminds us that, as we think about the effect of climate change on the West, it’s not just the thorny question of whether precipitation rises or falls that matters. Despite the uncertainties surrounding that question, as temperatures rise (a projection about which there is considerably less uncertainty), …
From the New York Times, Sept. 13, 2003: An obituary of the nuclear physicist Edward Teller on Thursday misstated the number of hydrogen atoms that join to make helium in the fusion process. It is four, not two.