A friend just pointed me (thanks E!) to a provocative column by Bill deBuys last month published via High Country News last month on the loss of societal resiliency that accompanies water conservation efforts. DeBuys (author/editor of two of my favorite western water books – Salt Dreams and Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley …
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There’s something endearingly goofy about hot air balloons. Which is what makes the Dark Lord, sort of puffed up and laying on his side in at dawn in an Albuquerque park, so charmingly counter-intuitive. It is the season of our city’s annual hot air ballon fiesta, nine days of a gobzillions (OK, hundreds, but literally …
Major water project development in the western US has always depended on federal subsidies. One can view those subsidies in a number of different ways – a boondoggle propping up rich ag interests, a foolish lack of clarity about what it really means to build a society in the arid lands, or a reasonable federal …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Will Utah Project be Scuttled?’ »
I’ve written before about the possibility that we could view Australia’s struggles with long term drought, especially in the Murray-Darling Basin, as a model for how to deal with things here in the arid southwest. This version of the model is perhaps not quite so hopeful. From Australian Broadcasting: A guide for water allocations in …
I’m guessing folks at “Californians for Population Stabilization” didn’t start with a worry about water supplies and then decide, “Wow, limiting immigration would be a great way of dealing with this problem!” Over the last thirty years, population has grown by one million in San Diego and population levels are projected to grow by another …
The Rio Grande at Albuquerque’s Central Avenue bridge dropped to 200 cubic feet per second overnight, perfect timing for this morning’s newspaper piece about low flows on the river (sub/ad req). For those not versed in our obscure ways of water measurement, “200 cfs” translates roughly as “awful damn low”: Water agencies are scrambling to …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Parched Rio Grande’ »
Saw the strangest thing this morning in the pond outside my office at home. The pond’s a round metal stock tank Lissa got me for my 40th birthday. It’s popular with the birds, but never like what I saw this morning – swimming white-winged doves. The picture’s not great. I watched ’em for a while, …
I used to write a lot about the Santa Fe Institute and the fascinating trans-disciplinary research that goes on there, but in recent years I sorta lost touch. I went up last week for a visit to reconnect, and, among other things, have tea (sub/ad req): SANTA FE — To understand the Santa Fe Institute, …
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Re Dan Sarewitz’s Nature column of last April about the value of “Pentagon pull” to drive energy innovation, here’s Elisabeth Rosenthal in the New York Times: Even as Congress has struggled unsuccessfully to pass an energy bill and many states have put renewable energy on hold because of the recession, the military this year has …
Southwestern environmental journalist Laura Paskus has a new web site. Lots of great work linked there, check it out.