From Steven Solomon’s Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization: So closely correlated was river management and governing power that the very Chinese character for “politics” is derived from root words meaning flood control.
I’m all for a serious discussion about the costs and benefits of desalination as a source of water supply in the arid southwestern United States. But I find this argument, from Ted Owen of the Carlsbad, Calif., Chamber of Commerce, less than helpful: Jobs. Everyone in business and government is talking about the need to …
If our carny rides are reflections of our deepest cultural impulses*, what does the “Badlands Express” ride at the New Mexico State Fair tell us about the modern West? Are these kids standing in for our lost Hayduke? *Note: I don’t think our carny rides are reflections of our deepest cultural impulses. I just thought …
While I’ve been writing about fire history in the southwest, the issue is coming up all over. As in this last week, from Texas A&M, on using tree rings to tease out fire history in the Appalachians: By piecing together the fire-scar record from numerous trees, he and his students and collaborators learned that fires …
Continue reading ‘Tree rings and fire history in the Appalachians’ »
Wayne Bossert, who manages the Northwest Kansas Groundwater Management District No. 4 on the famed Ogallala Aquifer, raised the interesting issue recently in testimony at a Senate field hearing of the effect of federal agricultural policy on water: Historically the farm bill has been blamed for promoting fencerow-to-fencerow corn production due to it’s design and …
From yesterday’s newspaper, a reminder that not all the area within the boundaries of this year’s big New Mexico forest fires is burned to an ugly, indecipherable ecological cinder (sub/ad req): There is good reason to visit the moonscape, and to talk about what happens next to the ecosystem there — the subject of a …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: It didn’t all burn like that’ »
In a hard-hitting exposé, the Desert Sun earlier this month seems to have conclusively cleared the Salton Sea of charges that it smells really bad: The smell seemed to be everywhere — except the place where people usually think it comes from. A pungent, sewer-like odor in the air was noted Friday morning by people …
Continue reading ‘Newspaper exonerates Salton Sea of charges it stinks. Or does it?’ »
I am a weather nerd. So it was with great excitement that I unpacked my new official CoCoRaHS RG202 4″ Rain Gauge this evening. It replaces an identical old one that I put up in the back yard in September 1999 when I joined the local National Weather Service office’s CityNet group of volunteer observers. …
The question of how much water we’ll need in the Southwest going forward is dominated by uncertainty over what future population growth will look like. And I confess that I’ve got no earthly idea how to think well about this question. Consider Phoenix. In his new ebook The Gated City, Ryan Avent argues that Phoenix …
Once this resource was provided*, those who failed to pay for it (such as me, drifting through Albuquerque’s Old Town plaza at the end of a long Saturday bike ride) could not be excluded from enjoying its benefits. In addition, my consumption of the resource (sitting in the shade listening to the music) did not, …
Continue reading ‘My education in economics: Public Goods’ »