Stuff I wrote elsewhere: “an insatiable greed for water”

From the morning paper, a look at the U.S. government’s filing in the case of Texas v. New Mexico (and Colorado*) over water-sharing (or lack thereof) on the Rio Grande: In a brief filed Thursday, U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli alleged that excess groundwater pumping in New Mexico is intercepting water in the shallow aquifer …

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Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the giant rubber duck risk

OK, this was just fun: Absent a really giant floating rubber ducky, the Rail Runner bridge across Albuquerque’s main flood control channel appears to be safe. “The thing about water that people don’t understand is that it is so powerful,” said Adrienne Martinez as she stood over water rushing beneath a scale model of the …

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On drought and spreading risk

The anthropologist William Abruzzi wrote a fascinating essay some years ago explaining the success of early Mormon agriculture in the Little Colorado River Basin, one of the more bad-assed desert environments in which one might want to do one’s 19th century, pre-federal-irrigation-subsidy farming. Holbrook, which spans the Little Colorado, averages a bit more than 8 …

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“No water, no guns”

During World War II, Philadelphia a major industrial center for war production, according to historian Herbert Ershkowitz. The work was accompanied by a public relations blitz to encourage conservation in support of the war effort.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: New Mexico drought, Billy the Kid edition

  From the morning paper: The last time New Mexico was (by at least one measure) this dry, Billy the Kid was shooting up the state and pueblo crops in the Rio Grande Valley were wilting. The “one measure” in this case is consecutive dry years on the Rio Grande: From 1873 to 1883, the …

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