In this epic dry year, we’ve heard a lot of “worst since the Dust Bowl” comparisons. I’ve been arguing that it’s a bogus comparison – one horribly dry year against a decadal scale phenomenon. But there’s a second reason, nicely captured by Kevin Welch today in the Amarillo Globe-News: Farming practices imported from the Midwest …
I get that Frank Lloyd Wright is one of America’s great artists. His works are magnificent, a thing to behold. But to count as one of America’s great architects, too, don’t his buildings have to actually work as buildings? Like, to not fall down and stuff? At more than 6,000 square feet, Wright’s Mayan-influenced design …
In honor of today’s Los Angeles Carmageddon, my new favorite giant scissors: Pat Brown and friends dedicate a section of the Santa Monica Freeway, courtesy KCET’s LA As Subject
Clearly the gulls are drawn by Take Me Out To The Ballgame. Or do they play YMCA? It is San Francisco, after all: Some gulls have an uncanny way of showing up at AT&T Park during the eighth or ninth inning of a ballgame. Day game or night game, the gulls bizarrely seem to know …
My current water policy hammer is the “not fer fightin’ over” meme – the idea that the apocryphal Mark Twain quote is wrong, not because he didn’t say it, but because much of what is most interesting about western water policy involves the places where people find solve water problems with negotiated compromise rather than …
Over at the work blog today, I shared some comments from Julio Betancourt, a USGS ecologist who knows his way around arid climate, about our recent fires and their connection to climate change. It’s something he wrote a month ago, before Las Conchas, but seems relevant, and I share here with his permission: I think …
It’s New Mexico: From the awesome Fuck Yeah NM Roadrunner
In watching New Mexico’s fires the past few weeks and talking to my forest ecosystem brain trust, I’ve been repeatedly struck by the set of questions Emma Marris raises in her new book Rambunctious Garden (great, recommended) about what baseline we’re thinking about when we talk about restoring natural systems that are currently badly out of …
A piece in the Las Vegas Review-Journal makes this odd point about its namesake city: Water is the reason most cities are where they are, and Las Vegas is no exception. I’ve been to Las Vegas. And while it might once have been true that the nucleus of that desert town once formed around a …
From the Sunday paper (sub/ad req.*), my attempt to make sense of the issues I was fumbling around about yesterday: The factors that set up trouble in the Southwest’s forests are complex – a warming climate and forest management practices over the 20th century that allowed a terrifying buildup of fuel. There was simply too …
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