This guy paddled past today as I was standing with friends on the bank of the Rio Grande, watching the high flows of this week’s environmental pulse flow through central New Mexico. If you look closely, you can see a bicycle in the front of his canoe. As he rode by, he explained that when …
Experimenting with plot.ly as a platform for posting graphs. Nothing here you haven’t already seen:
I had work to do this morning, but this happened and I couldn’t very well not go watch: It’s an environmental pulse flow on the Rio Grande through Albuquerque, creeping down a channel built in 2008 to provide spawning habitat for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow. This is the fourth consecutive very dry year …
Sandra Postel has some interesting insights regarding the proposed Colorado River System Conservation Program: $11 million is a drop in the bucket of what is needed to achieve meaningful conservation savings in the Colorado River Basin. And each of the four cities has substantially more conservation they can do within their own borders. But what is …
Continue reading ‘Sandra Postel on new Colorado River initiative’ »
From the morning paper: New Mexico’s current drought, with dwindling water supplies and increasing wildfire risk, is a taste of our future under climate change, according to a sweeping new federal report released Tuesday. While climate’s natural ups and downs are playing a major role in our current drought, rising greenhouse gases increase the odds …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the National Climate Assessment’ »
It’s lacking the drama of the March Minute 319 pulse flow on the Colorado River, but I’m getting my own little pulse flow on the Rio Grande here in Albuquerque beginning later this week: Beginning Wednesday, central New Mexico will get its river back – for a week. The anemic Rio Grande, parched by drought, …
I like my friend JR’s attitude toward gardening in the desert: I water almost nothing here. I do throw yesterday’s left over water from Cooper’s bowl on the autumn sage. It keeps the red blossoms coming and the hummingbirds like that. Some days the birds get the left over water. The New Mexico locust gets …
Imperial County in the desert of southeastern California is the nation’s leading producer of Brussels sprouts. According to the newly released U.S. Department of Agriculture Census of Agriculture, there were 2,237 acres of Brussels sprouts in Imperial in 2012, growing on 6 farms. For reasons unknown to me (c’mon, you’ve tried ’em, right?) Brussels sprouts are …
Continue reading ‘With Colorado River water, growing Brussels sprouts’ »
The University of Colorado’s Charles Wilkinson: One of the best developments for the environment in the West has been the quiet but deep revolution in federal water policy. Over the course of the past quarter century, we have moved from a dam-and-reservoir, build-at-any-cost mentality to a multifaceted approach that respects all that we need from, …
Continue reading ‘Wilkinson on the environmental shift in western water policy’ »