I had a couple of pieces in the newspaper last week about New Mexico’s long term water usage trends. I wrote the stories because the data, a time series I assembled by reviewing state water use reports, surprised me: Water for household use peaked in 1995 and has been declining ever since, according to state …
Last spring, I wrote a half-hearted defense of the New York Times decision to shitcan its Green Blog and related decisions: A Green blog is a place where environmenty people go to look for environmenty news. If we’re doing it right, that sort of news is embedded in all sorts of stories rather than a …
Continue reading ‘New York Times green shift: the verdict’ »
In Scottsdale, AZ, there’s a business called Desert Cadillac. It sells cars, apparently without irony.
James May explains why you can’t use tree rings to date the age of a Las Vegas casino (and some other dendro science): Learn more: The Tree Rings’ Tale: Understanding Our Changing Climate (Worlds of Wonder)
tl;dr – In 1960, U.S. Supreme Court Special Master Simon Rifkind made a fundamental mistake in calculating how much water was then available in the Colorado River Basin, and how much might be available in the future. The court, in its ruling in the case of Arizona v. California, accepted Rifkind’s math. The consequence is …
Continue reading ‘Simon Rifkind’s great mistake and the shortfall on the Colorado River’ »
Does this simply represent hardening of demand – the result of low-hanging conservation fruit being mostly all plucked? Or does this suggest arid Arizona is not headed toward the big water-driven economic collapse some people fear?
I’m looking forward to Requiem for the Santa Cruz: An Environmental History of an Arizona River, a forthcoming University of Arizona Press book by Robert Webb, Julio Betancourt and colleagues. While we spend a lot of time talking about how to return water to rivers in the arid southwestern United States, this group of authors …
Continue reading ‘River restoration – it’s all about the groundwater’ »
A couple of summers ago, I saw the Google Street View car coming down the Interstate 40 onramp at Carlisle Boulevard, parallel to my bike trail, as I was coming home from a ride. I looked a few times, hoping they’d captured my endorphin smile, then forgot about it. This evening I remembered to check:
Yesterday my sister and I busted Mom out of the nursing home for lunch and a drive down by the river to see the tail end of the fall colors. Down by Tingley Beach, an Albuquerque municipal park adjacent to the Rio Grande, the cottonwoods were still putting on a show, but they’re clearly tiring, …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert: the winter palette’ »
[T]he traditional wooden fences of earlier American frontiers were simply not feasible in a landscape whose most distinctive feature was its lack of trees. Ranchers could of course get any amount of wood they needed from lumber merchants in Chicago and the Mississippi Valley – if they could afford it. Earlier fencing styles were so …
Continue reading ‘The importance of technology, barbed wire edition’ »