We took the 27 the way you take a local bus when you are not trying to “get somewhere” so much as trying to be somewhere. The bus as method. The bus as ritual. Travel defined by attention rather than distance. – Ben Yeoh I used to love riding Albuquerque’s blue buses. Not so much …
I added the year to the title of this blog post for the search engines. Because what’s going on right now applies to a lot of years since I’ve been writing about this stuff at Inkstain. I’m gathering string today for the first Water Matters podcast of 2026 (available on Buzzsprout and wherever fine podcasts …
Continue reading ‘Expect another dry year (2026) on New Mexico’s Rio Grande’ »
When I think back, it’s no wonder I’d become a songwriter. I saw everything as being connected. Movies, dreams, imagination . . . It was all one thing. It was all one circus tent. It took me a long time to find out it wasn’t that way with other people. They went to the circus—once. …
We need a tl;dr here, because I’ve got three or four different versions of this post on my hard drive half written, or in my head, half written. Actual publication as a physical object you can hold in your hands is still five-plus months away, but our new book is now available for pre-order (click …
Continue reading ‘Ribbons of Green, now available for pre-order’ »
If you distill down what my six partners just said, I believe there’s three common things: Here’s all the great things my state has done. Here’s how hard/impossible it is to do any more. And here are all the reasons why other people should have to do more. As long as we keep polishing those …
When you got to the table you couldn’t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn’t really anything the matter with them,—that is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and …
A guest post by Friend of Inkstain Michael Cohen…. By Michael Cohen, Senior Fellow, Pacific Institute December 15, 2025 Key Takeaways Missing Deadlines Way back at the end of the last century, at the annual Colorado River conference in Vegas, Marc Reisner repeated the Margaret Thatcher quote that consensus is the absence of leadership. On …
I don’t envy Secretary Burgum the position that he’s in, but we do need federal leadership. Secretary Burgum already reached out to convene a meeting. He invited the governors and the chief negotiators to DC earlier [last] week. That meeting didn’t happen because three of the four Upper Basin governors weren’t willing to go. [Nevada …
Continue reading ‘Quoting Katie Hobbs on Colorado River Negotiations’ »
Ten years after I handed in the manuscript for my book Water is For Fighting Over, about the governance past, present, and future of the Colorado River, my Utton Center colleague Rin Tara and I took a look back at the book on our Water Matters podcast. Writing it changed my life, reading it changed …
Continue reading ‘Water is For Fighting Over, ten years on’ »