Stranded on an island? The perfect book…
Dave Foreman (pdf): I was once asked in a radio interview what book I would want with me if I were stranded alone on an island. “The bird field guide for the area,” said I.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: politics and the nuclear labs
From the morning paper, an attempt to frame and make sense of the questions Congress will face in coming years and the views of New Mexico’s Senate candidates thereon: Nuclear weaponry is big business in New Mexico. More than 20,000 people work at Sandia and Los Alamos labs, two of the nation’s three nuclear weapon …
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Why science?
From the New York Times’ obituary of the great science journalist Malcolm Browne: “After a time, a news writer may begin to sense a kind of sameness in most of the events that pass as news,” he wrote. “When that happens a lucky few of us discover that in science, almost alone among human endeavors, …
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Maya drought
From the morning paper: With drought draped across all of New Mexico and much of the United States to our east and west, it’s an interesting time to think about the prehistoric Mayan city of Chichén Itzá. Its fate is a reminder that drought isn’t simply something climate does to us. Drought’s effects are defined …
Thinking about California headwaters
Cynthia Koehler, writing in the Sacramento Bee last week, offers another example California water’s wicked problem. While all the attention is focused on the Sacramento Delta, are the critical headwaters of the state’s great river systems being given short shrift? California’s farms, commerce, industry and 38 million residents rely in large part on water that …
don’t call it “drought”
I’ve long thought “drought” is a troublesome word, implying abnormal when we’re really talking about dry part of the normal range of variability. My colleague Rene Romo has a marvelous quote that sidles up to that point in an excellent story today about the problems of southeastern New Mexico farmers and ranchers: Woods Houghton, the …
Coming clean
It would be wrong to say I harbored a dark secret lo these many years. Because it was only yesterday afternoon that I realized, “Wait, I’m just like Lance Armstrong! I was a doping cyclist!” At least, it appears I might have been. OK, not entirely just like Armstrong. Like Armstrong, I’m maybe a bit …
MWD and the case for optimism in western water
The folks at Montgomery and Associates recently took a look at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California as an example of why water management problems, once a region actually confronts shortage, are manageable: MWD’s response demonstrates that supply-demand imbalances can be resolved through active management. In practice, active water management generally means acquiring more …
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making water conservation tougher than we need to
In the Dallas suburb of Highland Park (media household income $172k), efforts to conserve water by not planting lawns have run into a hiccup, as Melissa Repko reports: A new ordinance, passed on Monday, outlaws artificial turf on front yards. With a town permit, the turf is allowed on side yards and back yards, so …
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A clever argument for reduced flows in the Murray Darling
There’s a pitched battle underway in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin over how much water humans can take from the system for their own use, and how much should be left for the river-fed ecosystem. One of the corollary arguments here in the states involves the human economic value of instream flows for recreation – river …
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