Is the drought over?
It’s New Mexico: From the awesome Fuck Yeah NM Roadrunner
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
What do we mean by “natural”?
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 …
I was misinformed
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 …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: the big dry, newspaper edition
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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What I did with my week, social media edition
Up early this morning to watch the team time trial at Le Tour, I flipped on the computer to check what was going on with the Los Alamos fire. (I was hoping to take a few minutes during a commercial break to post an updated fire map.) It was a little before 8 a.m., and …
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Thinking about the big dry
It rained this afternoon at my house. The physics of raindrops, I once learned, means that the largest raindrops falling out the bottom of a thunderhead hit first, and I was sitting in my office at the back of the house writing when I heard them banging onto the metal roof. I went out to …
“Dams move water in time”
Hey smart water tweeps, here’s a lazyweb question the Google has been unable to assist me with. Somewhere, sometime, I heart a great truism from some smart water person whose name is lost to the mists: Ditches (canals, etc.) move water in space. Dams move water in time. Have you heard this before? Source?
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Weather, Climate, Forest Management, Fire, Drought
Been a busy week (what with New Mexico burning down) with little to show for it other than an overactive Twitter feed, but I caught my breath this morning and threw together some thoughts on weather, climate, forest management, drought, and the unnerving fact that I had to cut my morning bike ride short because …
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Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: the California-NM connection
From the morning paper, some thoughts (sub/ad req) from my recent trip on the west-wide linkages, and the institutional problems those linkages have created: “We’ve got a system that is not sustainable,” said Curt Schmutte, Met’s top official working on the Delta problem. Given the political rancor that surrounds California’s Delta discussions, it is unclear …
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The End of Abundance
Excited to get my copy of The End of Abundance in the mail today!