Arizona cotton acreage this year is the lowest it has been in nearly a century. Cotton is incredibly important in the evolution of western water policy, in Arizona in particular and therefore in the Colorado River Basin in general. In Arizona, it was one of the “Three C’s” that dominated the state’s economy – cattle, …
With fall semester over yesterday, I called “faculty prerogative” and went out with Lissa for a weekday afternoon walk by the Rio Grande. I’m just an adjunct, but I’m trying to model the behaviors of my more distinguished university colleagues, and one of them is the rhythm of the academic calendar. Finals week is still …
Continue reading ‘The institutional hydrograph: New Mexico’s Rio Grande in December’ »
Just give ’em Rain. I don’t mean the stuff falling from the sky. I mean Cynthia Barnett’s natural and cultural history of the stuff falling from the sky. Terrific book, just made the list of finalists being considered for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Even if they’re not a water nerd, they’ll love it. …
I tend to enthusiastically and often uncritically embrace every new water conservation number, as if using less water is an unqualified good. I generally believe that, and you’re going to have a hard time pushing me off that intellectual turf. But there’s a flip side I’m trying to think through. It’s what economists might call …
Michael Doyle reports in the Sacramento Bee on the apparent death of California drought legislation: A California water bill that skeptics say has been cloaked in excessive secrecy will probably miss its Capitol Hill train this year. Facing criticism from fellow Democrats, and with key details still unresolved, Sen. Dianne Feinstein conceded Friday that the …
Continue reading ‘Federal California drought legislation looking increasingly dead’ »
For the first time since Nov. 30, 2010, New Mexico has been categorized as entirely free of “drought” in this morning’s federal Drought Monitor. 26 percent of the state remains “abnormally dry”, but none of the state is in any of the monitor’s formally designated drought categories. This does not mean that we are free …
The Tamarisk Coalition’s latest survey maps for work done over the summer of 2015 show that the beetle has now spread along the entire Rio Grande in New Mexico. The light blue dots are areas where the beetle showed up this year: The beetle was originally introduced in Colorado and Utah as an experiment in …
Continue reading ‘Tamarisk beetle now entrenched on New Mexico Rio Grande’ »
Nicholas Pinter at UC Davis points to one of the benefits of drought as we head into an El Niño winter: With California reservoirs at record lows, most regulated rivers in the state are unlikely to see major flooding downstream of their dams.
New Mexico has always seemed the least borderlandish of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands states. Unlike Texas, Arizona, and California, we don’t really have a large twin city spanning the border (think Laredo-Nuevo Laredo, El Paso-Juárez, the Nogales’s, San Diego-Tijuana). My former Albuquerque Journal colleague Lauren Villagran in a poignant column this morning on the scars left …
A colleague notes an interesting bit of business in Dan Boyd’s story in this morning’s newspaper about the state of New Mexico’s “closing fund”, a state government goody bag to help fund economic development: The most recent project to be allocated closing fund dollars is the expansion of a Southwest Cheese Co. factory in Clovis. …
Continue reading ‘I should have written a book about pizza cheese’ »