The Super Chief in Albuquerque, circa 1943
There’s a fun Twitter meme called “Throwback Thursday”, abbreviated #tbt. It looks something like this:
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
On building journalistic pirate ships
In the waning days of my career as a newspaper reporter, my colleagues and I talked a lot about pirate ships. The notion came from a piece David Carr wrote shortly before the death of Ben Bradlee, in which Carr described Bradlee as a pirate, and the Washington Post as his ship. I think it was Jeff Proctor …
More California state money for the Salton Sea
California Gov. Jerry Brown has requested $80 in his new budget for dust mitigation and habitat restoration at the Salton Sea, Jesse Marx and Sammy Roth report: That’s less than the $150 million local officials wanted, but still far more than the state has ever allocated for restoration projects at the dying lake. The money …
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Note to self: invest my next $31.8 million in Palo Verde real estate
All the cool kids seem to be buying up real estate in the Palo Verde Irrigation District. First it was the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which has upped its stake in the Colorado River farming valley to 22,000 acres. Now comes news that Almarai, a dairy company, bought 1,790 acres to grow food …
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Good start to the water year for California and the West
The social media team at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California tweeted a couple of nice pictures this evening:
Low-flush at the Home Depot: bending the water use curve down
Every toilet currently in stock at my local Home Depot has the EPA WaterSense label, even the cheapest ones, meaning they uses 1.28 gallons per flush or less. This is a big part of why we see water use – on a per capita basis, but also in some cases on an absolute basis – …
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New Mexico’s population history, now with added sheeply goodness
In response to my cattle v. people post earlier today, Tom Swetnam asked if I had data for sheep: @jfleck I have been looking for a graph like that! Do you have sheep numbers? Multiple times cows in early decades, I think. — Tom Swetnam (@Tom_Swetnam) January 10, 2016 USDA’s data only go back …
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New Mexico population (cattle v. people) through history
Lauren Villagran’s story in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal about the impact of the Boxing Day blizzard on New Mexico dairies is a reminder of the single most important trend in New Mexico agriculture in the last few decades – the remarkable growth of the state’s dairy industry. Some numbers on that below, but it reminded me …
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Global hunger, declining
In Iraq, a problem like the Sacramento Delta, except with actual war
In this week’s Science, Andrew Lawler reports from Basra (paywalled) on problems strikingly similar to the risks in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, as upstream water use shuts down a delta river discharge, allowing saltwater intrusion: The Persian Gulf is creeping relentlessly up rivers and canals shrunken by water diversions upstream and by years of drought. …
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