With drought gripping California, there’s a renewed push for spending on ag water conservation measures. Brett Walton explains why not every gallon saved is really a gallon saved: “Farmers are several times smarter than politicians, and they have done a good job convincing the government to help pay for more efficient irrigation systems. Politicians actually …
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 …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: “an insatiable greed for water”’ »
I watched the superstructure of this go up from the levee path a hundred yards or so to the west. Had no idea. Imagined all manner of strangeness.
I live in Albuquerque, as does my wife, my sister and my daughter. At dinner recently, we realized that none of us watched “Breaking Bad”, which is a television program filmed in Albuquerque starring people who would be famous to us if we watched said television program. This leaves us all left out of some …
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 …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the giant rubber duck 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 …
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.
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 …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: New Mexico drought, Billy the Kid edition’ »