I’ve been keeping rainfall records as a volunteer National Weather Service observer since 1999. 2012 is the 13th calendar year for which I have complete records for my house, in Albuquerque’s near northeast heights, about a mile northeast of the University of New Mexico. It was my driest on record, at 5.08 inches (12.9 cm). …
From this morning’s newspaper, an attempt to frame (in my own mind) the coming “gnarly struggle over the federal Endangered Species Act’s requirement that we try to keep the Rio Grande silvery minnow alive“: The reason for the river’s November-December surge was a small stockpile of water the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had stashed during …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: more on plumbing and nature’ »
I first met Christy George a couple of years back on the edge of a lovely lake outside Stockholm, where we spent two glorious days kicking around the joys and struggles of environmental storytelling. Christy is the former president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, a public broadcasting news veteran and a clever teller of …
Continue reading ‘“My Vanishing Hometowns,” a climate change storytelling project’ »
Antoine Abou-Diwan had a story in the Imperial Valley Press (apologies if the link goes away, I think IVP sunsets their stories after a time) capturing the nervous twitches in California’s Imperial Valley over the future allocation of the Colorado River’s water. Through Friday (source in pdf), IID had diverted 2.9 million acre feet of water, …
Riding my bike this morning, I came across a man with a hawk. I stopped to ask. (How many times do you see a man out taking his hawk for a walk?) It was a Harris’s hawk, bred in captivity, a native of the southern deserts a little far north of its normal range. He …
American cities became much healthier in the early twentieth century because they were spending as much on water as the federal government spent on everything except the military and the postal service. Edward Glaeser, writing in Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
Albuquerque is not a city, even as its metropolitan-area population approaches one million. That is, it cannot imagine itself a city because to do so would negate its reason for being, its biggest draw for tourists and refugees from Los Angeles and other large cities. Despite the sprawl, it thinks of itself as a town, …
Most read this year: 736 gallons per person per day: Re Palm Springs water use, got linked on Reddit, wherein people rightly mocked my sloppy discussion of central tendencies, also exhibited poor understanding of the core issues of human water use geek humor: A 2006 joke that got a stumbledupon link of some sort chemistry …
Over at Goodreads, Dave gave Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” three stars (out of a possible five): The depth of his research is incredible. Jen was not so kind: I was amazed at how much Darwin simply wanted to believe in the evolutionary process.
Given the findings of the recent federal-state Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study, it’s useful to look back at what other efforts at sussing out the region’s water problems and solutions have found. It’s especially interesting given the (to me) striking assertion in the Basin Study that building a pipeline from the Missouri, or …